Another J W e mail (page 3)

steve2

The moral of the story:

If your father's a "loyal" JW and you're planning on going sailing with him and your friend, best tell your father ahead of time that you're NOT a Christian and that your friend IS.

Hey, this is about survival!

JWdaughter

I heard the same icky story at churches (more than once, in both evangelical and LDS churches!).

My question is, in the JW world wouldnt it be better for the non JW to die and be resurrected and have a chance in the new system? If he rejects God in this life(and odds are he WILL), according to the JW teaching, he's a goner for sure, right? Or that may be old light. . .it's hard keeping up!

Mysterious

A good example of using emotional urgings to get a reaction and override logical thinking. Furthermore how unlike the way JWs are to save their own first in times of disaster, according to this example should they not be saving the wordly people first?

SuzieQ

Oh! for the love of Pete! It's now o.k. to act like God; making a decision to save someone just because he might be a Circuit Overseer? I guess you would have to become a Circuit Overseer after your friends dad saves you from sure death and lets his son die! Q from Calif.

Odrade

A father who would save someone else's kid instead of his own, (assuming we're just talking about two kids here and not the fate of the free world,) isn't much of a father.

LtCmd.Lore

THEREFORE, HE SACRIFICED HIS SON TO SAVE THE SON'S FRIEND. HOW GREAT
IS THE LOVE OF GOD THAT HE DID THE SAME FOR US.
OUR HEAVENLY FATHER SACRIFICED HIS ONLY BEGOTTEN SON SO THAT WE COULD BE
SAVED.

Y'Know... in EVERY single illustration about WHY god would sacrifice his son for us, they always leave out TWO extremely important elements: Number 1, God is supposedly omnipotent!

Bad illustration: Man pulls lever on bridge to save a train full of people but sacrifices his son in the process.

REAL illustration: Man has the powers of the Q and mindports his son off the bridge into a flower field while also curing the disease of all the trains passengers.

Bad illustration: Father throws rope to his sons friend instead of his son. Thus letting his son drown.

REAL illustration: Super Father magically splits the rope in two equal portions, like so many loaves and fishes, and throws them BOTH one... or better yet, mindports them all to safety again.

For an all-powerfull being, it's NOT an either/or thing, he shouldn't have to choose the lesser of two evils. So if somebody can come up with an illustration of why an omnipotent father would sacrifice his son, then I'd be interested.

Number 2: Jesus only died for three days... big deal... That's a bit different from a real son who, if he sacrificed by his father, would actually be DEAD.

Heck, I'd gladly go into a comma for a few days if it meant saving everyone on the planet... (In fact I'd probably do it to save ONE person.)

I hate these illustrations that exaggerate the actual sacrifice and ignore the omnipotence of god.

Here's MY illustration:

A father is a crane operator, he is in complete control of every move the crane makes, he also conciously decided NOT to fix the faulty hydrolic line because he is paid to work in mysterious ways, and he's carrying a huge junky truck. Also, his son is there with him inside the crane.

A few of the sons younger friends from school show up. But unfortunately their parents are tree huggers who don't like diesil cranes. So this ticks off the father because only he has the right to decide stuff, and he decides to take it out on the offending parents offspring... he makes them all stand in a circle and slowly starts lowering the truck on them. About halfway down he realizes this wasn't a very good idea. But unfortunately he can't lift the crane back up, do to the faulty line.

He now has three basic options, he can either:

A: Let the truck fall on the children. - Thus teaching their holier-than-thou hippie parents a valuable lesson.

B: Simply turn the crane a little bit in any direction so that it falls elsewhere. - But then what would the parents think about his diesel crane?

C: Kindly ask his son to leave the crane and go beat his head up against a brick wall for a couple minutes until he passes out from either concussion or blood loss. THEN simply turn the crane a little bit so that it falls elsewhere. - And also somehow proving that diesel cranes are in fact environmentally safe... ?

The father, who claims to be the smartest guy ever, carefully decides that the best way to get out of the mess he made is option C.

Praise him, praise god. Job well done you two. ______

Lore

steve2

My question is, in the JW world wouldnt it be better for the non JW to die and be resurrected and have a chance in the new system?

A fantastically logical question. Unfortunately, not the sort of question JWs react favorably to.

Pubsinger

As a story/parable I don't really have a problem with it. Especially when the "point of it" is clearly explained.

It's a bit like the "Footprints" story.

When circulated as a "True Story" I have big problems with it.

If every JW learned how to Google properly they'd all be out in a fortnight.

One click away from the truth . . .

dedpoet

That story has been around for a few years. I heard it when I was in,
and had trouble swallowing it then.

Just another jw urban myth, not to be taken literally, though I bet
most of the jws who heard it believed it.

funkyderek

It's been pointed out already that this is a rip-off of a nearly identical Christian tale. So at some point, a JW apparently edited an email he'd received from a Christian friend replacing "Jesus" with "Jehovah" (what's new?) and changing other sundry details (otherwise, it's word for word). Apart from the obvious dishonesty involved here, it just doesn't work in JW theology. For Christians, the son was saved because he had accepted Jesus while the friend was damned to hell because he hadn't. However for JWs, both boys would have had the chance of resurrection. The smart thing to do would be to let the unbelieving friend die so that he wouldn't be executed by God at Armageddon. There was a risk in saving him that he wouldn't become a JW and thereby would still be executed. Actually, he should have let both boys drown to guarantee their resurrection and not risk his son "falling away from the truth".

See http://www.snopes.com/glurge/choice.asp for the background on the original story.

Another J W e mail

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