JW and hate

is there help out there

There is a young JW at work and she states that she does not have anyone. Does the WT teach that all worldly people are evil and therefore JW must hate then. If she does not hate them does this not make her a apostate.

Gopher

she states that she does not have anyone

Please clarify this -- "she does not HAVE anyone"? In what sense?

is there help out there

I ment to say Hate anyone.

OnTheWayOut

Does the WT teach that all worldly people are evil and therefore JW must hate then. If she does not hate them does this not make her a apostate.

One of WTS's talents is to cover both sides of an issue.
You can find articles that suggest hating everything worldly.
You can read into those articles to think they say to hate the people
because they are not servants of Jehovah and his organization.

Then you can read other articles that say that we love everyone and
demonstrate that love by giving them the message of hope. You can
read into those articles that we never hate individuals, but only the
actions that displease Joehoover.

Gopher

When I grew up JW, the organization embedded a strong distrust of anyone outside the organization. They were all going to die soon at Armageddon. The only time you dropped that distrust was if they showed interest in the "good news" you preached.

We were taught a strong hatred of other religions, but not necessarily the people themselves. I'd describe it more as avoidance of the non-Witness people.

So your young JW coworker may be expressing her idealistic view of things.

SPAZnik

other than limited interaction aimed at converting non-JWs, JWs are repeatedly brainwashed to only view non-JWs as "bad associations that spoil useful habits". they don't see being okay with their god destroying anyone living at odds with the JW way, at armageddon, as synonymous with hatred.

Quotes

This is "Double-Think" in action.

JWs are taught to "hate the world and the things in the world" -- and "the world" means everyone and everything outside the JWs.

Yet, at the same time...

...they "love their fellow man, and want them to not be violently killed by the jealous, homicidal sky-daddy they call Jehovah, so out of this love, they preach their story and try to get converts, since only JWs will be preserved through this massive destruction (and even JWs have no guarantee; this Jahoobee can be quite tricky!).

Oh, and if you reject their message and don't join their religion, of if you decide to leave for any reason at all, you are evil and are to be hated. But they don't want to have to hate you, they want to love you, so please, please, don't make them hate you! After all, they love you so much. There is even a quote from a watchtower (I don't have it anymore) where they explain exactly how, in what sense, they HATE former members.

These two ideas may appear, to the outsider, to be mutually exclusive; but to the trained practitioner of Double-Think, there is NO contradiction, and both ideas can be and are held to be completely true.

~Q

P.S. No, it doesn't make any sense to me, either.

nameless_one

I am really sad to say that even though I have never been a JW myself, I understood everything Quotes just wrote ("understood" it, but yeah it doesn't make sense to me either).

It has been explained to me and shown to me in this very twisted way: hate is actually a form of love. It might look like hate and sound like hate and act like hate and even be called hate, but to those who "know the truth" it's obviously love. When Jesus himself is described as an "executioner" full of hate (oops I mean love), well, really, that pretty much says it all.

To address the original question, I think your friend is likely very sincere when she says she doesn't hate anyone. Most JWs would say the same, and believe it. I guess it depends on whose definition of "hate" you're using.

hotspur

I was taught that, to hate is "to love less"....... go figure?

WTWizard

When I was in, they preached that I was supposed to view worldly people as sinister, demon infested people that needed to be witlessed to. Only if the person accepted the study could they properly be called friends (a view I never subscribed to). Aside getting them into the cancer, I was not supposed to have any feelings whatsoever towards them.

Ultimately, that viewpoint led to my blowing out totally (of course, there were other issues--but that didn't help me to stay in.)

JW and hate

Share this