Couldn't agree more inkling.... I trust most people who read here, unless they are brainwashed JW's. But I don't think until they come to their own "breakthrough" that there is anything you can do or say anyhow.
Questioning me as an apostate
by God_Delusion 69 Replies latest watchtower bible
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inkling
And back to the OP....
Welcome to the forums, God_Delusion!
I am highly sympathetic to your position, and applaud the courage and intellectual honesty
it took for you to first face your doubts, share your findings with others, and finally come here.
There is a sea of people who have gone though similar crucibles, and many of the can be
found on this forum, so please stick around, read, rant and feel comfortable finally being
free to be speak your mind without threat of judgment.
That being said, from a purely pragmatic point of view, unless you want to get disfellowshipped,
you need to seriously tone down the honesty when dealing with the elders. Sharing your doubts
and increasingly damning findings with the elders (and JW-loyal family members) is likely a one
way ticket to exile town.
Now, if being brutally honest with elders and family is something you need to do for your own sense
of personal integrity, then do what you feel is right, and props to you for having a brass backbone.
You should know however that there may be another way... known as "fading": an intentional and
calculated process that ideally can end in both your intellectual freedom AND retaining family ties.
Of course, it would require you to pull back from being who you really are and saying what you really
think, and for some this editing of self, and cynical manipulation of a loophole in the rules is something
they cannot stomach.
Others feel that the "theocratic judicial system" is so irredeemably unjust and irrational to begin
with that it doesn't deserve an honest approach.
Regardless, glad to have you, and please keep us updated!
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Billy the Ex-Bethelite
God_Delusion,
Any more thoughts to share?
As you can see, our amateur JW apologist couldn't even begin to give a coherent reply that would convince a householder that the JW beliefs about the "global" flood could be true. Instead of answering the question with WT quotes or scriptures, it turns into a personal attack against the questioner for not having faith. Like the dubs are going to argue with an Indian that Hindus need to have faith in an unsupportable story from the Big Book of Jewish Fairy Tales? Duh, aren't householders allowed to ask questions anymore? Shouldn't they get satisfying answers? Based on reniaa's reasoning, an unbiased questioner would reject the Bible as mythology and JWs as quacks. And the elduhs are gonna DF you since they can't convince a Hindu that the flood really happened?
Another trick to use against the JW establishment in a "judicial case" is...
Come on God_Delusion, do you want to know what it is...?
B the X
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Psychotic Parrot
can we have reniaa banned?
pleeeeeaaaaase!
i'm tired of seeing her ugly face.
and she reminds me of my hardline j-dub aunt.
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DaCheech
i don't want her banned, and i don't mind her havig a diffrent opinion.
but i do mind her giving all these personal experiences that show how holy the wt and the elders are, when she will give a diffrent story the next month.
her personal story has changed many times since she joined and she will not admit the deceit
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dorayakii
The elders, like the flock, are trained to ignore any piece of evidence that they are confronted with. When I was a Witness I would try to argue with Christians, evolutionists or Muslims on the door, but I was never willing to listen to what they had to say and learn from their questions. It was as if all the questions they had raised gathered in a tiny corner of my brain where they could be ignored; the ultimate act of double-think. It was only after I had been mentally freed from this way of thinking that the vault of questions began to open and i began to deal with these objections one by one with an open mind.
The only think you can do is to present your questions and doubts as if they were questions asked by householders. When they fail to answer the questions or (more likely) answer them inadequately (Jehovah's Witnesses rarely say "I don't know"), it might spark an act of double-think that they'll have to postpone thinking about unil later.
Never get yourself into a situation where you can be disfellowshipped or marked because you'll be in a worse-off position to help others.
reniaa said: Absense of evidence is not evidence of lack
then she said: evolution has it[s] own set of unanswerable questions, species jumping i[s] still an issue for them as well as abiogenesis, they cannot find how life happenned from nothing.
she then went on to say: If you read Daniel it very clearly shows that angels are very active around humans and the planet, the could have easily transported the animals to noah.
The first statement is absolutely correct. Yet reniaa seems to be unwilling to apply the principle to the branch of biochemistry known as abiogenesis, yet willing to apply it to invisible angels flying around in the sky, coaxing animals to the ark.
In fact there are several plausible hypotheses of how life could have started from non-living organic matter and a theory of common descent supported by mountains of genetic, archaeological, homological, embryological etc. evidence. The latter theory is so well supported by every new discovery scientists make that the fact that we cannot definitively prove a theory of abiogenesis pales into insignificance next to it.
The fact that there exist a few unanswered or unanswerable questions surrounding evolution is nothing compared to the unanswerable questions found in the Bible's account of how God magicked himself and then the world into existence.Faith in anything is a very straight forward thing and unfortunately needs at some point a suspension of disbelief.
Faith in God and "faith" in scientific theories are not even comparable. Believing in God requires a suspension of every piece of evidence and logic that you have before your eyes. Belief in abiogenesis requires only a rudimentary knowledge of organic chemistry and biochemistry an bit of common sense. Anyone with even a elementary grasp of organic chemistry or the genetic code can see that the gap between non-life and primitive life is very minute and therefore does not require a supernatural explanation. -
Psychotic Parrot
Reniaa is a typical j-dub.
i.e. born without a frontal lobe.
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DaCheech
we are just dirty "apostates"
a
p
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a
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the dirty word that jw's love to yell
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God_Delusion
The bible only describes what happens not how God did it. - Quote from Reniaa
There are a fair few things I could say to you right now, but I wouldn't want to as you'll just have an answer for them anyway, won't you?
Anyway let's recap your above comment. "The bible only describes what happens not how God did it". You see, it's reasoning like that that made me wake up and take the red pill. I'm being really serious to. If the elders took a different stance than the one you continually take, I may still have worshipped a racist, sexist, genocidal maniac and would have probably been top brass with this cult.
So thank you, thank you for blessing people with RL (Reniaalogicitis), for without it, I and many like me would have remain in darkness!
Okay, rant over...
Read the account again Reniaa. I am pretty sure the bible fully explains every little detail about the ark, including the ages, the type of building materials used, the dimensions, etc..
So yes, the bible does describe how certain things happened.
Oh, and explain how each of the gospels have different endings? It's like the director wanted to sell multiple DVD's and ran 4 different endings.
Reniaa, I feel for you because the cure to Reniaalogicitis is very rare, although most on this forum have had their dose and have made a speedy recovery. Let's pray (not to the mass-murdering monster Jehovah) that you to find the cure.
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God_Delusion
Cheers Flipper for clarifying my point. I only posted the above comment as Reniaa reminds me of a lot of single jw's that will try anything to get a man.
My point wasn't about the flood, but how even after I had shown a small amount of evidence in relation to showing the elders that they were wrong, they took off their logic hats and downed a pint of Reniaalogicitis.
Also, in relation to what Booby said about my Manson rant; Booby was right, but I mentioned it in a dual capacity. The other being that Manson finds himself in prison for asking others to commit murder. Don't the GB do the same when they ask parents to let their children die instead of taking a blood transfusion?
I think so.