Love is an emotion; the highest and most intense emotion.
Emotions follow our values. The more we value something; the stronger our emotional reaction to the thing valued.
Since love is the highest value we can have; it is the strongest emotion we can experience.
So far so good, eh?
However, we can have CONFLICTING values. Most of us do.
Humans often desire things which aren't good for them while owning values which point that out all too clearly!
The man who values his monogamous relationship with his wife can also possess a high valuation on sexual excitement with strange women!! Conflicting values!
We know all this. I'm just refreshing your memory to say the following.
The people or person who wrote the scriptures you've referenced ALSO had conflicting values because of his humanity. Anytime a human speaks in "absolute" terms he is kidding himself and idealizing. His conceptual vocabulary barges into fantasy and magic-thinking.
There is an utter inconsistancy with scripture, dogma and religion as a result of all these clashes between two elements over and over.
1.The absolute and ideal world inside the mind of the person who values the mystical and supernatural world view.
2.The actual and very real world of human values as experienced in everyday life.
The usual result of this clash between actual and ideal is a form of conflict which takes the following forms:
1.Guilt
2.Fear
3.Anger
4.Dissonance
5.Phobic neurosis
Anybody reading these words who has belonged to a religion knows this is a fact. You cannot pretend to hold ideal and absolute values while living in a real world with reality crashing in like tidal waves. The disconnect is too awesomely huge to ignore.
Consequently, to cope with this disjunction between values the only way around is to split your mind into comparments and live a double life.
Jehovah's Witnesses have learned how to do this. They have their idealized life at the Kingdom Hall and in conversation with other JW's; but, they have a secret life as well.
The organization of Jehovah's Witnesses (including the very top rung of governing body members) is compsed of human beings in full conflict with absolute thinking and real world consequences.
This makes the act of shunning and disfellowshipping an IDEAL FORM OF COMPULSION. Why? Because it rids them of the EVIDENCE of their own conflicting values.
It is a form of denial.
Closing your eyes to your problems is not new.
Shunning is that very solution. It is cruel and it is destructive but it works!
The sacrificial goat is just another form of the sacrificial human.
Disfellowshipping and shunning is the latest form of sacrificial ritual to rid the GROUP of its SIN.
It is a deeply emotional form of sneezing or vomiting or wrenching the irritation out of the body.
NOT FACING the unreality of your own values is common.
But, Jehovah's Witnessess MUST DO IT because their form of religion is so legalistic it cannot live with the results of the harm these absolutes create.
Mainstream Christianity forgives the sinner or marginalizes them. JW's have to sneeze them out of their body.
It is a question of control and maintaining the status quo of compartmentalized sanity/insanity.
Cognitive dissonance should be the real name of the membership of Jehovah's Witnesses.
Terry
