Um, what's the deal with this? I'm speaking with a witness and he keeps talking about the resurrection and the way it's explained sounds like it's really a re-creation of all of our memories in God's mind then put back on Earth in a re-created body. So in essence a clone of me with my memories and personality will live forever in paradise, how exactly is that a resurrection. Just because someone has my memories and my personality does not make them me. That's a pretty wierd one. Any suggestions on how to explain no matter how much you say an apple is an orange it isn't an orange. Resurrection isn't really a re-creation. How does this make any sense?
Resurrection vs. Re-Creation...
by Tuesday 28 Replies latest jw friends
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reneeisorym
Yes it makes perfect sense what you are saying. I am afraid that there is no explaining that one to them. Its really like telling me that an apple is really called an orange and no matter how much someone tells me this, I still don't think "orange" when I see an apple. I say that that's going to have to be one of the last things a former JW will ever get -- not the first.
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IsaacJS2
When I first started studying, I asked all sorts of questions. This was one. My study conductor (an Elder) told me: "I don't know. But if Jehovah can do anything, he can do this somehow."
Not much substance there, but it's the only answer I ever got.
IsaacJ
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VM44
One wonders if the Witnesses actually understand they that they teach others.
The Resurrection Hope, as taught and explained by them, is not a hope at all.
As you point out, why should a person hope and find comfort in the belief that in the future a body will be created with a brain imprinted with the person's memories? This future being will be a creature that thinks it is the person that lived before, but what it actually will be is simply a replica of the original.
Why should anyone "hope" that that will happen?
Here is an example. Suppose I had a Ming vase and took detailed photos of it. The vase is smashed into a million pieces. Years go by and then I decide to recreate the vase. I give the photos that I have carefully stored in my archives to a skilled craftsman who is given instructions to to produce a replica vase based upon those photos. A new vase is produced that is exact in every detail as to the one destroyed years ago.
Can one truly say that the replica vase is the same as the original? No, in fact, if I made the claim that the replica vase was the original and tried to sell it, I would be arrested for attempting to commit fraud!
What would make things even more complicated is if I told the craftsman to make several vases instead of one! If I were to insist on calling one vase a "recreation" of the original, which one would it be?
Likewise, the Watch Tower has committed fraud for over 100 years by teaching the people a false conception of the resurrection that turns out to not to be a resurrection at all.
The Watchtower is evil!
--VM44
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VM44
BTW, the Watchtower's explanation of the "resurrection" isn't Biblical!
--VM44
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VM44
My study conductor (an Elder) told me: "I don't know. But if Jehovah can do anything, he can do this somehow."
So much for providing satisfying answers from the Bible!
--VM44
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Undecided
Who knows what anything that's been promised in the bible means? Nothing has happened so far that's been visible, so it all must be invisible. Oh I forgot about all those people who came back in Chirst day when he died. Did anyone back then bother to talk to any of them?Matt:27:52,53. It really won't be you, you will be CHANGED in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye when that angel plays that trumphet. I guess that just happens to those who are BORN AGAIN, whatever that means. Or maybe your body goes back to dust and your spirit goes back to God? It gets too confusing, just pick your choice and go with that.
Ken P.
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Blueblades
Figure this one out. Angels leave their spirit bodies and appear in physical bodies, have sex with all the woman thay want, then when the flood comes they get out of their physical bodies and go back into being spirit creatures again. All this without God's interferring with them doing it. Angels knew how to make sperm and impregnate woman.
Of course, this is in a book that also talks about the resurrection and re-creation. If you don't believe the account about the angels, then you can't believe the account about the resurrection and re-creation account from the same book. It's the book I question, not the believers in God, Jesus, those we can't question , because, their experiences are personal. The book with all these conflicting stories can be called to account.
Blueblades
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Tuesday
I used a similar illustration; if I get cloned, then some super powerful computer copies all of the memories out of my head and puts them into the clone, is that clone me? It sure thinks it's me, but it's a copy, not the original.
I don't get how that doesn't make sense, I thought that example is a great one. It doesn't make sense to me, if I'm re-created it's not me going into paradise it's the re-created one going. The whole idea of being perfect annoys me because all of my imperfections are what defines me as a person. No one seems to understand that I think.
Eh, I don't know if it's worth debating, I just said "If the bible was putting out a re-creation hope and not a resurrection hope I think they would've said it."
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Leolaia
Here are some statements on putative "resurrection" as recreation in the literature:
*** lp [1977] chap. 10 p. 116 Does God Count You Personally Important? ***
In order to resurrect a person, God has to know everything about him. Only with this information can God bring back the same person with the same personality, so that the individual will be himself and recognize himself. This means that God must restore every detail of the person’s makeup. This would include his appearance, his inherited traits, the influence that environment and experience have had on him, along with his complete memory. What interest and care this demonstrates! Someone may say, ‘That seems impossible.’ But even today men can make a videotape or moving picture of a person. Then, even after he is dead, they can project it on a screen and see the actions and movements of the individual, along with healing his voice. Hundreds of details are recorded. If men can do this, cannot God, with whom "all things are possible," have a record of the thousands of details that make up a personality?
*** lp [1977] chap. 15 p. 175 The End of Sickness and Death ***
As to the resurrected ones, God will accurately "re-create" each individual with his entire life pattern, personality and memory just as it was. The one resurrected will be able to identify himself as the same person. Also, his former associates will know him by his appearance and characteristics.... To the person who is resurrected, the time period that he was dead would be, to him, only an instant, since death is a nonexistence.
I encountered these statements at a book study in 1979 when I was a child, and I innocently asked how this could make sense since a videotape is a copy of an original and since a person has to be "re-created" after a period of "nonexistence". I intuitively understood that if I died, and if my existence had truly ended, a "re-created" version of me would think she was me, but would not really be me. Then a few years later, I saw the movie Blade Runner on HBO, and exactly this theme was explored in the movie. There were these "replicants" who believed they were the people they were living their lives of, but in reality they were manufactured copies.
The actual biblical concept of resurrection is entirely different. There is always continuity between the person who died and the person who is raised. This is especially apparent in the apocalyptic scenario in which the future resurrection is frequently construed as occurring...as a resurrection for divine judgment (and awarding of blessing or punishment) of the deeds committed prior to death, i.e. Judgment Day (cf. especially Matthew, Revelation, 1 Enoch, 2 Baruch, 4 Ezra). Paul's description of resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15 emphasizes continuity; what has been sown has been raised, the physical body is transformed into a spiritual body (soma pneumatikos) in a similar way that a seed changes into a leafy plant. There is clearly a notion of existence after death, of the survival of a person's consciousness, in much of the NT. Some of this has been influenced by platonism (cf. 2 Corinthians and 2 Peter, which uses technical platonic terms for describing the experience of death as the individual's separation from the body), some of it has not, but the notion of the survival of an "essence" of a person after death is very much a component of the resurrection concept. It was the Sadducees who denied the resurrection, according to the NT (Matthew 22:23, Acts 23:8), and so it is no surprise that Ecclesiastes (which the Society quotes most frequently in support of its annihilationism, the belief that death brings total nonexistence) is a proto-Sadducee work and itself declares that "never again will they [the dead] have a part in anything that happens under the sun" (9:6). It is amazing how frequently the Society quotes the preceding verse (9:5), without noticing how the resurrection is denied in the passage. Neither does the Sadducee belief imply total nonexistence; the Sadducees were the conservatives who maintained the old-fashioned OT idea that death extinguishes life irrecoverably, such that the dead continue to exist in Sheol as "shades" (rp`m) who have a ghostly existence completely cut off from "life" (cf. Isaiah 14). Essentially the Society has taken the Sadducee view in Ecclesiastes, interpreted it as total annihilationism, and privileged it over the dominant Pharisee/non-Sadducean eschatology in the NT (which is affirmitive on the question of an afterlife, resurrection, and final judgment), such that it denies that there is an afterlife, a resurrection in the biblical sense, and a final judgment of the deeds committed by a person prior to death. But it must reinterpret all those texts throughout the NT that refer to these concepts. So it substitutes its own idiosyncratic concept of "recreation" for "resurrection"; nowhere does the Bible talk about God recreating people from data stored within God's memory banks.... this is a concept of Watchtower origin that tries to hide the inherent contradiction between annihilationism and resurrection, by redefining resurrection as something quite different. As a consequence, the story of Jesus' resurrection must be understood in similar lines.... thus he was not bodily resurrected and his body was actually destroyed by God; rather, he was recreated as a spirit person who "materialized" a body that only bore a resemblance to his earthly body (bearing his crucifixion marks)...a reconfiguring of the "empty tomb" story from the gospels that pretty much misses its point. Similarly, the Society must reinterpret all the NT references to a final judgment (why would God create a new body just to destroy it again immediately afterward?), and so it uses (via misinterpretation) Romans 6 as the basis for teaching that people are have their prior sins wiped clean in the resurrection, such that they are judged not for prior sins but for new ones committed during Judgment Day... in contradiction to what is stated in Revelation 20 (which states that the resurrection for judgment, i.e. Judgment Day, occurs after the thousand years were completed).
Anyway, the "recreation hope" (to the extent that it is a "hope" at all) does not correspond to anything taught in the Bible per se.