by journey-on 15 Replies latest jw friends
Ouch! My tongue is bleeding from biting it so hard.
JW: "I don't need to question anything. I have faith Jehovah is guiding and arranging His organization and giving us the proper food in due season through His faithful and discreet slave. All I have to do is follow His direction faithfully to the end."
Me:
(How do you argue with THAT?)
Well, you can't argue when someone falls back on THEIR view of faith, well you can but its a waste of time.
Faith is NOT "buying it hook, line ansd sinker" without questioning, thoug certainly some parts of our faith may indeed require that at certain points.
Doctrine is NOT something accepted on faith.
I say don't bother. Staunch believer such as this will have to come to their own conclusion once they take the blinders off their eyes.
I`ve heard it before.."Why would I want to think for myself,when the WBT$ does it for me?" .....You can`t stop somebody from being Proud,for being an Idiot..............LOL!!...OUTLAW
A certain amount of 'faith' is required when you 'believe' in anything (no one has 100% knowledge)- but before you can believe, you need the facts and to be able to trust the sorce of the facts- trust is something earned after years of experience/knowledge, it is tested and tested many times and if it still holds true at the end of the day- one may feel comfortable enough to place there faith in it.
Bottom line- If you lean in close and it smells bad, DONT EAT IT! For me the borg was tryed, tested and found to be YUK! LOLLOL
Faith is a difficult concept to fully understand. I think that's why JWs fear questioning anything pertaining to their religious dogma. They are constantly admonished from the platform and from the literature about not allowing anything to "weaken" their faith. They are constantly told to hold fast to your faith....losing faith results in spiritual weakness....safeguard your faith lest doubt creep in and you lose your hold on everlasting life.
They confuse faith with buying into the JW dogma hook, line, and sinker, so getting them to question anything makes them feel guilty and spiritually weak. As long as they don't allow themselves to think and question anything, they think their faith is just getting stronger. How do you help someone with this kind of mentality?
Notice how the reply quickly substitutes the organization, and it's direction, to assume it the same as God's [Jehovah's] direction?
This inability to distinguish between God and his organization, is key to the brain washing they have taken as 'truth' isn't it?
Jeff
buying it hook line and sinker doesn't leave a place for faith.
Faith has a place between a world of complete safety/security (but with tyranny) and a world of chaos. Faith means accessing formless potential and using it to navigate between the 2 worlds.
Having been there, in my experience, JWs shudder at the chaotic decadent world outside of their safe (but tyrannical) spiritual paradise.
edit: however I think this can be true of all of us to an extent
The WTS have summed it up well.
Reasoning Book p129
Definition:
“Faith is the assured expectation of things hoped for, the evident demonstration of realities though not beheld.” (Heb. 11:1) True faith is not credulity, that is, a readiness to believe something without sound evidence or just because a person wants it to be so. Genuine faith requires basic or fundamental knowledge, acquaintance with evidence, as well as heartfelt appreciation of what that evidence indicates. Thus, although it is impossible to have real faith without accurate knowledge, the Bible says that it is “with the heart” that one exercises faith. Rom 10.10"
So they say the right words...but what is the practice?
Fact is, accepting everything unquestionably in un-Christian and un-Biblical.
