by Terry 32 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
I saw Garner Ted Armstrong on tv this morning on a kind of infomercial.
Twas sad to see him hawking cassette lectures! Wow! Is that keeping up with advances in technology or what?
Jehovah's Witnesses are even behind THAT curve!
No TV ministry. Too much exposure with the advent of the internet to give ammunition to the "loyal opposition."
Terry - this post is excellent.
No matter how hard I try, I can never get my head around the prohibition of blood. Why is something that represents life (blood) more important than the life it represents? God expects us to value life, our own included, and do whatever we can to prevent a preventable death. Can't the WTS understand this?
No matter how hard I try, I can never get my head around the prohibition of blood. Why is something that represents life (blood) more important than the life it represents? God expects us to value life, our own included, and do whatever we can to prevent a preventable death. Can't the WTS understand this?
Well said.
The Watchtower isn't in the business of "understand".
Think of their function as the same function a sphincter has: to squeeze off products into discreet packages. The only difference is that the brothers at the Kingdom Hall have to carry these products to householders and pretend it is the most important job on earth.
Tough one.
In a way, you do have to kind of admire the courage that the reorg of the WW Church of God tried to do.
Tried? I got the impression from that video that they DID reorg everything.
I have always believed that the JW blood doctrine came mostly from a need and desire for life & death control over their membership.
They also have a sort of masochistic tendency to teach and do painful things to themselves and claim that it is faithful service in the face of persecution...the draft (CO status) issue in the U.S. in past years, Flag Salute & National Anthem, and the Malawi party card are other instances of this weird tendency to bring really unscriptural "persecution and pain" upon themselves.
Tried? I got the impression from that video that they DID reorg everything.
True enough - but didn't they lose a lot of their following in the process?
No matter how hard I try, I can never get my head around the prohibition of blood.
The prohibition on blood is what happens when the legal nature of ancient Judaism is fused with the "No part of the world" martyrdom of ancient Christianity by those who understand neither.
You end up with martyrdom from an internal rather than an external source, which is an abomination from both a Jewish and Christian perspective.
True enough - but didn't they lose a lot of their following in the process?
More than half, they went from 150k to just over 60K.
Most people were more interested in being "not wrong" and admit being mislead than they were in being "right" and admiting they got suckered.
How typical eh?
The best way to "prove" that modern day Jehovah's Witnesses aren't really about the purity and soundness of the teaching is the fact that no counter movement has sprung up as a successful schism in any manner other than a loose federation of complainers on the Internet.
Religion just in America is full of spin-offs due to doctrinal disputes.
The Mormon Church is quite iconic and yet it has a Reformed Branch.
They are pretty darned recent, but, Jehovah's Witnesses are even more so. All there schisms took place after the death of Russell.
No--it isn't the purity of teaching or the false prophecy bugaboo that fuels this religious cult.
You want to know what I think holds it together?
It is narrow and oppressive.
Dumb people need to be told what the world is about in a black and white fairy story. Then, something has to be demanded of believers and enforced with lots of pressure, threats and scary consequences.
Rational thinking is hard work and a lonely one as well.
With hardcore Authoritarianism you get to run in a pack and no thinking is required of an individual nature.
Groupthink, lockstep behavior, promised rewards ("soon") and lots of scary consequences.............
That's what JW's are all about.
-promised rewards ("soon")
Good point, Terry,
If you put a grape behind a trap door for a monkey, they will keep opening it for as long as you keep putting a grape behind it. But just as soon as you stop, they get discouraged and give up playing that game. JW's like to play that game, too- only, all they ever get is a picture of a grape. They never get tired of "hoping" for the day a real promised grape will appear. They keep dancing to the WT music hoping to get into that promised paradise. A 10 year old JW girl told my daughter yesterday that she was going to have a pet cheetah one day real soon. I told her, it wasn't going to happen and left it at that.
