Interview With Ex JW Howie Tran - Assistant To The Govering Body
Vložit
- čas přidán 5. 09. 2024
- Listen to the absolutely fascinating interview with Howie Rutledge Tran, who served as a Personal Assistant to several members of the Governing Body at Brooklyn Bethel for 11 years.
As well as personal insights about the behaviour and perculiarities of members of the Governing Body and the Bethel family, Howie relates how 'new light' was created.
Howie also relates his own heartbreaking personal journey, and how he fought for over a decade to deny who he was, before finding freedom, at a great cost.
If you don't listen to any other JWPodcast, listen to this one.
Thank you all for the kind and supportive words. I sincerely hope that my experience will be encouraging for others. Most of us here who were once associated with the Jehovah's Witnesses religion understand all to well the pain and loss that comes from being in and leaving the cult. Hopefully though, some who feel disconnected by the loss or are hurting now, will better understand from my experiences that leaving was the right choice. And in a healthy way we can go on living life. You never know how it will all turn out. I would never have imagined when I left in 2006, that there was so much beauty out there. I would never have seen it, if I had chosen to remain where I was. Life is worth the struggle.
I wish you all the best. Cheers!
Your story is absolutely amazing. Thank you for it.
Growing up as a JW I was especially hurting for the LGBT people, homophobia and transphobia were the first things that rang wrong to me. It felt just wrong. I couldn't understand why would anyone stop people from being themselves if it's not against someone's will. Forcing people go against their will and their nature - THAT is a sin. When I left organization I left with thoughts: "let it be the truth, let Jehovah be the real god and all what JW teach comes true, I don't want any part of it. I don't want any part of paradise of a misogynistic homophobic transphobic deity."
Feel bad for all you went through, but love that your struggle had a happy ending! Much love to you and your family!
Hi Howard. Thank you so much for sharing your story! I was baptized in 1981, resigned as an elder in 2005 and finally left the faith in 2007. Since leaving I've read a couple of Richard Dawkins books -- The God Delusion and The Greatest Show On Earth. I was also able to hear in speak when he came to Phoenix. Congratulations to you and John and your growing family. I love the message that life beyond the faith can be an initial struggle but is worth the best we can put into. I'm 52 and in college for the first time in life!
Thank you so much for sharing your story. 🤗
Howard Tran thank you very much for sharing your story of life at bethel. I enjoyed it.
Much love, please be happy, you're a great person.
Broke me to tears, it just destroyed me when he mentioned "I don't want to hurt my family". Thank you for this, thank you so much. Hopefully one day I can leave, hopefully the fallout won't be as bad for my family. Much love to you "brother," congratulations on your life. Thank you for your inspiration.
Howie. You're a good man. If only every JW would take the time to listen to your interview they would be blessed. I'm so glad you're free. Thank-you for sharing. God Bless you.
What a fantastic interview! It's powerful to hear someone like Howie's experience who was so deeply devoted and so much so he was at Bethel for 11 years! It's easy to hear the sincerity and integrity in his voice and how he relays his life. I'm so glad his life did have a happy ending!
I can just imagine the Governing Body sitting around, placing bets on whether the rank and file will or will not swallow their latest "new light", no matter how ridiculous it is!
Absolutely outstanding interview. Thanks you for sharing your story Howard.
Howie I loved your interview. My wife and I have been local to a Bethel branch all of our lives, and the stuff we’ve seen, malicious and otherwise, is just heartrending. One funny example that comes to mind, in line with the older ones getting away with a bit more, is a much older brother coming down to the Bethel table once a year on the anniversary of his birth (note, not a birthday 🙂) with a cake that he shared with the table. The older ones were unafraid to voice their opinions, whether they agreed with the party line or not. Those days of at least a measure of free thought are long gone.
So glad Howell got out and has been able to be his authentic self, much happiness to you.
excellent interview thank you howard for giving us this information all the best
mind blowing interview. I would have thought that at the very least, the Governing Body would have been exemplary.
I used to attend when young with my mom. I always doubted them; the internet, especially CZcams woke me up completely
Thank you so much for sharing your story of courage. I left over 20 years ago for a myriad of reasons but one important one was the treatment of our GLBT friends. A friend of mine in the congregation at 15 came out and his family put him on the street and he ended up commiting suicide. This evil satanic cult has harmed countless families and needs to be held accountable. Tell you're story to the world so that a light maybe shined on the evil known as the governing body
eye opening...
Awesome interview!
Awesome interview! Wow what a story
Best brother barr imitation I have EVER heard EVER!!! I almost fell off the couch laughing hahahahahahaha
Dude. Your the man. 😀😀😀
great insight
"You will not see or hear anything", OMG. Thank you for the expose!!! I remember I heard in a video that, when they changed the policy of no more charging 25 cents for a magazine they did it cause a church was sued and lost their tax-free status so they only did it cause they wanted to keep their status and keep the money. This just confirms it.
This is such a great video....PLEASE PLEASE keep posting updates about this cult!!
I wonder if Howie can tell us WHY they decided to change again from no blood to using blood fractions? Did he ever hear or read WHY they decided to make that change..Because with every change,there has to be a REASON as to why
Well he did mention that many of the decisions the GB made were because of legal reasons.. so I always assumed that perhaps at some point, they had gotten too many lawsuits over blood transfusions from disgruntled JWs.. and once the complaints became too much to handle, they decided to allow Witnesses to take blood fractions to save face.. and of course they had to publish an article in the kingdom ministry explaining why it was okay, and TRY to throw some scriptural justifications in there to make it digestible to the rank and file
The GB painted themselves into a corner with the blood policy. Thousands have died adhering to it. They may secretly realize it is in error, but they can't overtly pull the plug on it. It would make the 1975 fiasco look mild in comparison. Legal ramifications play a role as well. BTW, since 1945, they've changed the blood policy four times.
Hi Deb, since the minutes of Governing Body meetings are not published we might never know exactly what has gone into these decisions. At the end of the cold war JWs in Russia and eastern Europe began to seek legal recognition. jwfacts.com has some of the published details on how this related to blood and the country of Bulgaria. Legal concerns are without a doubt a large input. A series of successful wrongful death lawsuits could be very costly.
Thus we could see at the congregation level directives such as, no-blood-card (aka "Advanced Medical Directive") should not be signed right after the meeting, but instead taken home and signed later. Although not specified, this seemed clear to me design to ward off any claim group pressure was in play.
It is also true the blood transfusions are not completely safe. The HIV tainted blood supply in Canada was tragedy. Thus the leadership may have thought that eventually a synthetic alternative to blood would be invented and their views would be vindicated.
Nonetheless blood fractions create a rather large logic problem. Blood fractions are not possible without blood donations, which JWs are forbidden to give.
If you're not one of Jehovah's Witnesses, you must keep in mind almost all mention of the medical use of blood in The Watchtower and Awake! will either highlight the dangers of blood transfusions or the advantages of non-blood alternatives. Not a few, JWs, I'm sure, believe there is a conspiracy afoot to hide the dangers of blood transfusions.
My father has been a Jehovah Witness for around 50 years he felt that they changed blood isssue because it would not allow any of the brothers would be able to travel to foreign lands because of the vaccinations that have blood fractions in them. The special pioneers and others could not preach in thise lands
Is that you Girl. Loved your Cat poo story. Howi Glad you have moved on. Much love all
I can't hear anything 😞😞😞
yeah just let a drunk get away with it but DF everyone else who likes to drink...oh the humanity!!!!!!!
My sister-in-law's mother was an alcoholic however that wasn't a problem but smoking was??????????? I guess if you focus really hard on the mundane no one will ask about the spiritual deception.
Hi Howie, how normal you sound after such struggle!....Great interview btw....
How utterly sad how Rosie & Husband felt so...(betrayed?) in the end! I hope he family out there to look after him after he was cast out? Basically, if I heard it correctly, they allowed the drinking to go on for years, yes? but when the disease and the depression was magnified, they couldn't/wouldn't spring for proper medical care to get him in a better place before dumping him off on someone else to clean up behind them.... Shameful! I'm sure there were many with similar disappointments though.
Yes, you are right, when people discover the truth about the Truth, they are essentially trapped & usually lost. Maybe you can shed a little "Old Light" on something for us.... What do they do as far as infiltrating Apostates & their computers? I've heard they are actively trying to learn who they are, how they fit into the Org and try to hack their machines and even crash them...Is there any truth to any of this?
I just did a search on Richard Dawkins "evolution of the eye" and I personally thought it was ridiculous. I guess it's a different perspective. I used to be an Atheist though so maybe it's because I'm coming from a different perspective. I didn't admit it then but I can tell you that atheism is a belief system. Our doctrine, evolution, was constantly changing too and we had apologist just like religions do also. We also sought to bring people to our way of thinking. This is why you have the Richard Dawkinses of the world out there. They want to convert people to Atheism.
Just be careful and do honest research. I left Atheism because I decided to do my own research without anyone leading me. I multiple books from both perspectives.
Hi Naida, I self-identify as an atheist, but I would also say, this doesn't say much. It just tells you what I don't believe. What I do believe may be the same or different than other atheists. In my case, I'm religious (Unitarian Universalist) and I remain a Bible reader and quote often from it (which I readily admit comes from my JW heritage). As to eyes, I believe, like any other organ these come from parent forms and over time would be subject to evolutionary selective pressures like anything else.
Randy do you have any proof of any evolution "adding" DNA to a species? For example evolution says we came from single cell organism. Where is the evidence that single cell organisms start to become more complex. They are actually pretty complex themselves but we will ignore that for now.
So a single cell would somehow start to develop the cells for receiving light. I've found no evidence for that.
Someone can make a computer program come up with all kinds of variables that you put into the program but there is no proof at all of any "creature" adding data. We lose data (DNA) and every once in awhile we'll have errors like Down's syndrome which has a copy of the 21st chromosome but that is not a beneficial genetic error.
I could go on but there is so much.
I would like to encourage you to read books from both sides. When I was an atheist I realized I just believed what I was told and I hadn't looked at the situation critically. I read the atheist websites and interpreted the Bible to find fault with it instead of looking to see what was really there.
Hi Naida, Perhaps surprising to hear, but the theory of evolution does not depend on knowledge regarding DNA. On the Origin of Species was written in 1859. The structure of DNA was only understood since the 1950s, via the work of James Watson and Francis Crick. The point is evidence available to Charles Darwin was enough to postulate that species were not immutable creations but instead originated from a common ancestor types. The discovery of DNA could have been fatal to the theory of evolution, if it showed that species are immutable. Imagine if sexual reproduction showed that offspring were absolute perfect clones. That it was impossible for things to change (i.e. "immutable"). Or if that were true during cell division, wherein each copy was a perfect clone with absolutely no possible way for the clone to be different than the parent.
Consider if the opposite were true. Every time a living thing made a DNA-based copy it resulted in replication errors everywhere.
Perfect copying of DNA - no evolution possible
Highly error prone DNA replication - no evolution possible - living things would fall into immediate chaos and die
Instead what we see is nearly perfect copying with gene selection, but some copying errors.
Is there any proof of this? Yes. The most obvious being long sequences of DNA that are codon-for-codon the same between all living things. As we compare closely related species (i.e. species that had a common ancestor not too long ago) the more of the DNA is comparable. This is exactly what we would expect since there would be less time for copying errors to express the differences.
Although I'm sure you're thinking about single cell life forms like bacteria when you mention single cell organisms becoming more complex, do pause and think for a moment that all humans began as single cell systems and grew in complexity without any apparent supernatural influence. At the moment though it might be fair to say we don't know how single celled life made the leap to multi-celled organisms. Gaps in our knowledge is not uncommon, but that does not mean we'll never know or that it demands that we call upon some supernatural force to provide an answer. A Google search on this subject landed me on a Wired article about the work of Nicole King that has details about current research in this area.
The argument that life is too complex to just have happened, so God must be the answer is flawed in a couple ways. The most obvious is trying to solve the problem of complexity by postulating a super being who would be even more complex just leads to infinite regression. Second is general pattern we see is complexity building over time. The further we look back in time, the less complex things are, i.e. Earth, but only single-cell life, back further no life, back further, no Earth, no stars, etc. Looking far forward we see this trend returning. The second law of thermodynamics seems to demand this -- an inevitable fall into randomness but passing through periods of highly organized states for us lucky few.
Cheers,
-Randy
Hi Naida, I must apologize, my last paragraph is poorly worded. I should have stressed not just "complexity" but "complexity as we know it." As per the book I'm reading now "The Big Picture" by Sean Carroll, the early universe had low entropy and via the 2nd law of thermodynamics is moving toward a state of high entropy (randomness). But as he points out it is the movement from low-to-high that generates the few places where we see order and complexity. Since this movement takes time and evolutionary complexity takes time to build up, as we look backwards in time, we see fewer and fewer of these pockets of high order complex things like life.
His book also just reminded me of the Richard Lenski E.coli experiments. These experiments give direct proof for evolution of E.coli within the artificial environments he placed them in. In real life, I'm a Software Engineer and only have an interest in the theory of evolution due to my JW background. Folks like us tend to talk about this subject in terms of how it relates to philosophy and theology. But there is of course a serious side to how small biological systems evolve, given how it impacts medicine and food production in the here and now.
Ezekiel 26:1-14: A Proof Text For Inerrancy or Fallibility of The Old Testament?
Really disgusting
The Go-vering body?
how did u get the twins Howard?
loved hearing from you, excellent video
what about the bibles direction on these subjects ....are they also false?
such as?
Masturbation calendar? WTF? LOL!!!!!
Were samples taken from you?
Bum Rush no. That's a suggestion in a publication