by watersprout 52 Replies latest jw friends
The watchtower teaches that we return to dust. I'm not taken with that idea!
We are spiritual beings so where does our spirit go?
Does it float around in another dimension, does it go to God? Where does it go??
If our spirit does go back to God [which i like to think it does] then are we conscious? Do we know we are there?
Can we float down and see what is happening with loved ones that are still on the earth??
We? What are we that we can go anywhere. We come not to the earth but from the earth, which we all return to.
It has always been thus. Writing a few religious books that promise more does not change reality.
There are about as many answers to that as there are religions. Since you already believe that you have an immortal soul perhaps you can start with what other interpretations of the Bible aside from the Watchtower's interpretation.
For example, they say that the dead are conscious of nothing but others take that to mean that the dead are conscious of nothing under the sun.
If a simple man like a dentist can put me to sleep so I dont know whats going on then I think God can do it. Theres no contiousness on an operating table. Same as death. Thats the great thing about it. You die and the next day you wake up greeted by a new world. No time passes. Just like the dentist. One minute your counting to ten the next theyre shaking you to wake up and go home.
Where do we go when we die?
Nowhere
I like that analogy, Friggin.
I often think, if we can trust an anesthesiologist, why not God?
Syl
One minute your counting to ten the next theyre shaking you to wake up and go home.
frigginconfused - perhaps someone should shake you right now. You might wake up!
Oh, hush, Gladiator!
You know he makes a perfectly good point.
Syl
Even if a person is religious - if that person is also logical, they would have to admit that they do not really know.
Therefore, it becomes very important to make as much of this current life in a productive way.
This, to me, is the grand failure of restrictive religions like the JWs - they limit real life accomplishments for some vague promise of paybacks "later in paradise" which they cannot prove or even accurately predict.
I am currently reading "the resuerection of the Son of God" by NT Wright and the first few chapters deal with WHERE and WHEN the notion of ressurection and after life came to be.
It was NOT there in the Penteauch but you do start to see the formation of a "life AFTER the AFTERLIFE" afterwards in Ezekiel, Isiah and of course Daniel, even more so after the second temple and the liberation from the Babylonians, as the Hebrews got "intertewined" with th e Hellenistic world, they started to but things in a more "greek" way, but there was still no real belief persay in an immortal soul, but then again, the spirit was alwaus viewed as "never dying" but just returning to God and death was always viewed as sleep and the decomposing of the body.
The hebrews and christians (early) believd that the sould can be killed/die, but that doesn't mean it wasn't immortal ( immortal and eternal are not the same, even an immortal being CAN die if it is killed).
Of course at the same time, in the OT there was a belief of SOME life in the grave, the prohibiltions against "calling on the dead" show that it was possible to communicate with them, as in the case of King Saul speaking to Samuel.
I think that it is wrong to believe it was an either/ or situation, the Saudacees believed in NO ressurection and no "interim" transformation into spirit or "angel", the pharasees believed in them.
Jesus preached resurrection, he warned that the soul CAN die and also preached that there is SOME concisouness in the "death state", Paul himself believed that upon his death he would be with Jesus and the souls of the martyrs are "alive and well" under the throne of God in Revelation.
