Resurrection Hope - People in the Future who think they have lived before

by VM44 46 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

• 

  VM44

  According to The Watchtower, a resurrected being is a body that has placed within it the memories and attributes of a person who had lived before.

  The "life force" is transferred to the body to bring it alive. Also according to The Watchtower, the "life force" is impersonal and contains no personality. It is like electricity in that it is an actuating force.

  OK, so in the future there will be billions of people with memories of having lived on the earth. Some will have even have memories of having lived on the earth thousands of years before.

  This would be a magnificent happening.

  However, The Watchtower has NEVER answered one important question. Why should the people who lived in the past and eventually died have the hope that some people in the future will possess their memories and attributes? How does that benefit them? Why should they look forward to it? They will still be dead then!

  The Watchtower has been teaching this concept of the resurrection for over 100 years, but no discussion of what it really means has appeared in any of its publications.

  Why not?
• 

  nameless_one

  Marking for reference, because I am really curious to see the answers to this.
  
  I have never been able to understand the great appeal of the resurrection and the paradise; to me it sounds like a nightmare (for many reasons, beyond this one). I would much rather be dead! My JW says I feel this way because I don't understand it, fair enough LOL but I've yet to hear an explanation that makes it sound good. Sure the parts about people petting lions and never getting sick and so on and so forth sound good, but any real questions (like the one posed in this thread) that go beyond the silly surface stuff get completely glossed over, as if they just don't think about them and don't WANT to think about them.
  
  To me the whole scenario sounds wretched and creepy and worse than death.
• 

  VM44

  Russell published an article with the title "THE RESURRECTION THE GREATEST OF MIRACLES" that appeared in the October 1914 Watch Tower [R5559 : page 314]

  In that article he wrote:

  Meantime, however, we might find illustrations to help us to understand. Take, for instance, the making of a record for the phonograph. Something went out of the mouth, and made little indentations on a cylinder of wax. Later on, from that very wax cylinder the voice of the speaker is reproduced. Now, then, if we know how to reproduce the human voice, it gives us a little illustration of how God, with His unlimited Power, can preserve everything recorded by the convolutions of our brain, and of how these could be preserved in the future absolutely --everything by which we could know ourselves in the future. We do not know ourselves by the number of pounds weight we are or by the difference in our beard. We know ourselves by something in our mind. But if our reason be gone, then we would not know ourselves.

  Years earlier, in the February 1896 issue of The Watch Tower [R1935 : pages 27,28] , he wrote:

  The Telephone, by which men hundreds of miles apart, may speak to each other through little boxes on their office walls, and recognize each other's voices, tells us, suggestively, that God can hear infinitely better, and without the wires and batteries necessary to our service.

  The Phonograph, recording our words and tones, preserving them if needful for years, and repeating them with their original emphasis and intonation, reminds us, suggestively, that similarly our brains are much more delicately constructed, and can not only record words but also thoughts and feelings, and classify these, and lay them away for future use, subject to the call of memory. It gives us a hint, also, of how simple a matter it will be for God to resurrect the dead, by creating new bodies with brains having similar convolutions to the deceased, which, thus revived by the breath of life, would reproduce beings which would recognize and identify themselves by the memory of their past thoughts and experiences.

  What does it matter to us if there will be beings in the future "with brains having similar convolutions" to ours?

  Russell says that the resurrection process would "reproduce beings which woulod recognize and identify themselves by the memory of their past thoughts and experiences."

  The key word is "reproduce".

  The resurrected beings would be reproductions of the originals according to Russell's own words!

  The Watchtower today still follows this conception of the resurrection that Russell's described over 100 years ago.
• 

  VM44

  As an illustration, supppose someone had a Ming vase, and suppose that one day it fell off the table and broke into a million pieces.

  Further suppose that the technology existed to reproduce the Ming vase, even to the atomic level if it were compared to the now non existent original.

  Would it be proper, or even legal, to say that the reproduced Ming vase is an original? Or would it be more proper rather to call it an exact copy of the original that once, but no longer, existed?
• 

  VM44

  Hi nameless_one,

  I also want to see what people's comments are.

  The resurrection of the individual might be possible. What I am saying is that Russell's and The Watchtower's explanation of it does not hold up and offers no real hope.

  Unless, of course, one actually wants a reproduced copy of oneself existing in the future!
• 

  Gopher

  One of the public talks stated that the resurrection is proof of God's care for each individual -- because in the resurrection he will be able to re-create the individual with all the memories and experiences that they ever had (proving that God really paid attention). They used a lot of the same wording that Russell did in the articles you cited -- about God recording all the brain patterns (which would include memories, emotions, etc.).

  The necessity for this is brought about by the gap of hundreds or thousands of years between the physical death of a person and their supposed resurrection in the New System. Since the bodies decay and the atoms which made up the body eventually gets absorbed into the soil and come become part of other plants, which are eaten by other animals -- it would be impossible to have the same physical body as one had eons earlier.

  This difficulty is avoided by Christndom's doctrine (as I understand it) that there's no need for the body after death -- a person goes on to spirit life in heaven. It gets confusing for those who teach hell -- I don't know if the body is supposed to go there or not. And I don't know what Christendom teaches about the resurrection -- but I heard in some belief systems it's some reuniting of the body with the spirit, although I don't know how that happens.

  That having been said, the JW version of the resurrection doctrine can seem ghoulish if you think about it.
• 

  VM44

  What I want to emphasize is that according to Russell (and The Watchtower) there is NO reason for the original person to anticpate experiencing what the future resurrected reproduced person will experience. They are separate beings!

  I do not expect to experience the day to day sensations that a thousand years in the future VM44 who has all my memories will experience!

  I DO expect to experience the sensations that the VM44 of tomorrow will experience.
• 

  nameless_one

  Well, I think that the scenario "sort of" works as a hope for JWs who are living NOW, because they basically teach that Armageddon is sooooo close, and surviving Armageddon means you'll still be "you" in the new system and not one of the clone beings (I think?). So I can see how it wouldn't be AS disturbing, looking at it like that, because after all why fret about people who died long before you, whom you never even knew. For loved ones who have died that JWs hope to see again in the new system, I believe the average JW just refuses to think about things like this. It's a fragile, shallow hope that falls to pieces upon close examination.
  
  Having said all that, I do think the entire scenario IS extremely ghoulish. I would much rather die and stay dead than exist in such a system, as either an intact Armageddon survivor or a resurrected clone. The whole thing just seems horrible to me and I will never understand the appeal.
• 

  funkyderek

  VM44:

  The resurrection of the individual might be possible. What I am saying is that Russell's and The Watchtower's explanation of it does not hold up and offers no real hope.

  Unless, of course, one actually wants a reproduced copy of oneself existing in the future!

  Well, what's the alternative. You would acknowledge, I'm sure, that there's no need for the exact atoms used in the original body to be used again in the resurrected body, just as you do not contain any significant number of the atoms that constituted you when you were born. So how could you be resurrected and not be a copy? In fact, aren't you a copy already, and a rather poor one at that?

  The most common way around this sort of problem (aside from the mundane and obvious one) is to posit a special ethereal something that's the real you, independent of your body that can either exist outside your body or (less commonly) be put into a new body. But this idea has at least as many problems as the physical resurrection. Without the hormones and other chemicals of my body and the exact patterns of my neurons and synapses, whatever else that ethereal something is, it's not me. It won't think like me, it won't feel like me, it won't respond to stimulus like me. The resurrected copy on the other hand will pass any test I or anyone else can think of to determine whether it's really me.

  Of course, this is all academic as there's no real way to bring about either event; they are both merely imaginary solutions to our fear of death. But similar issues may be of more concern in a future that includes uploaded consciousness or matter transportation.
• 

  Gopher

  I also remember another part of their pretzel-like reasoning on why it's reasonable to think that the resurrected person could be viewed as the same as the original.

  They pointed to how our body continually renews/replaces its cells, so that every 7 years or so there's a completely different set of cells than you had before. So "you" are not the same as you were 7 years ago, according to that reasoning.

  (Of course, there is the little problem of the fact that the resurrected person would have NO physical connection with or continuity from the person who was born.)