This is not mine, but my friend e-mailed it to me this morning and I thought it would be great to share........
I was thinking about this laying in bed this morning. Have you ever looked at one of those optical illusion pictures such as the one below. What do you see...a young girl or an old woman? Once you know they are both there, you can close your eyes, look at the picture anew and see the other image. What if I told you that I was a friend of the artist and that this was a picture of a young girl. Would you continue to look for something else? Most likely not, you would most likely see what I told you was there. The same if I had initially told you it was an old woman. Even though there is another way to look at it, you would trust me and look no further. Isn't this what the WT does to people in a way? They say they are speaking for God (the artist) so we see what they tell us is there, in the Bible. It sounds right (just like the picture is that of a young girl) so we don't, or can't, see anything else; we look no further. Now, suppose someone comes along (let's call him an apostate) and tells you to close your eyes and look at the picture again and see if you see the old woman. Suddenly you do! But, until then, your mind was closed to any other image. All of us have closed our eyes and looked again, and this time we saw something else. I have been trying to understand how for so long all of us had, and all the JW's still do, not look beyond the WT's interpretation of scriptures, no matter how wacky it gets. Why didn't we do any independent research but accepted at face value all that was told to us? Thinking about this optical illusion has sort of helped me understand why. We trusted them and never thought about the possiblity that there was another way to look at the scriptures. What I have been trying to understand though, is it impossible for some to see beyond the young girl even after being told the old woman is there? Or do they just choose not to see it and keep focusing on the young girl? Is that what some Witnesses do when confronted with a different way to consider a scripture, Bible story, or doctrine. They can't or refuse to see it any other way than their initial acceptance of what it was? In the real application of this illusion, some people see one or the other right off the bat. I don't know what that tells you about the person, but again, in applying it to our acceptance of the WT, it reminds me how many are drawn into it and others see it right away for what it is. Just some musings today I guess.  |