Gary, the biggest problem with your example is that witnesses tend to flip it around and say "isn't it wonderful that Jehovah was able to provide for the Israelites so they could get through such an impossible situation!"
Maddening.
Noah's ark - Can't believe I once actually thought it was true
by sam_sane_now 39 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
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marmot
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TD
Some might enjoy this. This was the moment in one man's life when he realized the flood story is just a story....
'I want to show you something. Something very important.'
And so at five the followig Saturday we met outside the zoo. It was still dark; the place was silent. I strolled beside Haldane as he wheeled his chair down the asphalt sidewalk past the big cats (leopards and jaguars, I noticed) and an assortment of edentates (anteaters and aardvarks). But we did not stop.
Haldane parked his wheelchair and stood up beside me on the bridge, silhouetted by the faint glow of the pre-dawn sky.
"There!" he said at length.
'What?'
'That's the first of them. Now shhh!'
Birds stitched the sky, at first in broad and arbitrary patterns and then in tight swooping formations moving at different speeds, in different directions and mercifully, at different heights. Haldane knew them all, from sarus cranes to florikens, from chukors to bee-eaters, from barbets to sunbirds, from drongos to shrikes. Some, such as the terns and ibises, sounded familiar. Others, like the rusty-cheeked scimatar-babblers and the red-billed leiothrixes, sounded like a put-on, but when I challenged him on his identification of a flock of blossom-headed parakeets, he merely intoned in Latin, 'Psitticula cyanocephala bengalensis,' with enough flair and flourish to allay my doubts.
'Three hundred and ten species,' Haldane murmered reverently.
'Here?'
'In all of India. Representing two hundred and thirty eight genera, sixty two families, nineteen different orders.'
The marvel I had seen on the bridge - the Eternal Now of the moment of dawn - remained indelibly impressed on my brain like an after-image. It remains still.
'All of them on the ark,' Haldane was saying. 'And this is only India and only the birds---
'Some of them,' I replied lamely, 'were aquatic.'
Haldane's guffaw seemed to be a violation of the peace and holiness of the place, and I was relieved when he suggested returning to the cars.
--The Orwellian World Of Jehovah's Witnesses, Heather and Gary Botting
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Galileo
Gary, the biggest problem with your example is that witnesses tend to flip it around and say "isn't it wonderful that Jehovah was able to provide for the Israelites so they could get through such an impossible situation!"
I don't have that much problem with "Jehovah provided", I guess, if you have already made the leap that he exists and this was his will. What I have a major problem with is why he sent down a legion of angels every morning with brooms and dustbusters to get rid of all evidence that that huge mass of people were ever there! Or for that matter why he went and destroyed all the evidence they were ever in Egypt at all! Was it just to make it harder for future generations to believe his written word? I think it's hard enough to believe without him stacking the deck like that.
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seattleniceguy
What's with the Jimmy Buffet parrot?
Really and truly LOL!
SNG
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Galileo
--The Orwellian World Of Jehovah's Witnesses, Heather and Gary Botting
That's a great passage. I've never heard of this book, but it's on Amazon and you can read a preview on Google Books. I'm gonna order it right now. Thanks.
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LearningMore
I have just recently started to question this type of thing. I am surprised I didn't wonder about it long ago. I mentioned to my mom that I didn't understand how it could have really been global, and she sent me some of the society's information. I pointed out to her that all the references were decades old....like from the 30s and 40s. I told her that a lot of science has changed since then, and it would be good to see updated references. I wonder if she will send me this new WT. I read it here on JWD, and it really does ask one to take a leap of faith. There was no scientific proof in there. I wonder why they don't just restate their reasoning from earlier literature...the ones with the really old references.
I think what also got me thinking was my "worldly" fiance saying, "The flood is just a parable!" I never really thought of it that way. -
Galileo
I have just recently started to question this type of thing.
You will probably find this interesting:
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Liberty
The Biblical Flood story is complete nonsense just based upon scientific/practical problems alone but it also makes no sense from the logical/moral angle. What problem did Ol'Jehoover really solve with His Flood? He kills untold billions of living things and lays waste to the Earth all so He could turn around and preserve a small remnent of the exact same imperfect evil-inclined life forms to start the cycle all over again?
This is evidenced by the fact that within just a few years of the Flood Noah is getting drunk and his son is having impure thought about his drunken naked old man. In just a few more years the world is full of so much evil that God has to disrupt and confuse the human civilization He had just preserved by confusing their language and scattering humans all over the earth from the Tower of Babel. To put the icing on the cake, according to the Watch Tower Society, big "J" will destroy it all again at Armageddon. So why again were humans preserved in the first place.... just so Jehoover can have billions more to destroy later???
If there were a God and He was really this wasteful, foolish, and illogical then nothing else would make any sense and any salvation plan would be based upon pure chance any way. The Flood story is just one in a number of perfect examples of the gibbering nonsense which is included in the big book of fairy tales known as the Bible
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