by leavingwt 25 Replies latest jw friends
When you look for information just to prove your point then most likely you will disregard any other information that goes against it.
when you look for information to learn then you are more likely to see all the information.
I dont have a problem with information. I have a problem with misleading information or wrongful information.
Sometimes our belief system is based in faith that no amount of information would change our views on things.
I am not sure if it was your FAITH that didn't survive or your faith in "Jehovah" and the WT that didn't.
This topic has been discussed on this forum hundreds of times. In the end, some are unwilling/unable to accept the personal testimony of others. Spiritual abuse caused me to examine why I believed the Bible to be special. Prior to the spiritual abuse, I had never thought of questioning it.
So, again some think it worked like this, for me:
Spiritual Abuse ---------> Non-Belief
However, for those who want to know what actually happened, it's this:
Spiritual Abuse -------> Critical Thinking ---------> Non-Belief
If you'll read my DA letter, you'll discover that at the time I left the WT, I was a believing Christian. It was months later before I realized there was no rational reason for my belief in everlasting life. This is simply what I desired to be true.
LWT,
Understood, thanks.
LWT, thanks for posting your letter. Very well written. Hope you don't mind that I saved a copy for reference. Your quotes on blood guilt were excellent. I might want to remember that for future use.
I was like you when I first 'awoke'. I still accepted Jehovah and Jesus...it was the WTS that had failed me. Look at my early posts and you can see my confusion as I tried to face the paradoxes and conundrums that then became present in my life. The more I looked into things I had never bothered to study before the more irrational the whole thing became.
PSacramento:
You will probably enjoy some of this. . .
Is 'New Atheism' Counter-Productive?
But in “Militant modern atheism” Kitcher’s new piece in the Journal of Applied Philosophy, he’s taken his criticism of atheism a bit further (access is free, and you can download a pdf). His main point is that New Atheists, while attacking the truth claims of religion and demanding that the faithful adduce evidence, are completely ignoring what may be the most important aspects of faith: its function as a form of social glue and as a community that meets a human need for participation and interaction.
Kitcher distinguishes what he calls the “belief model”—the form of faith that is initially built on truth claims about God, Jesus, Mohamed and the like—from three other forms of what he calls the “orientation” model: the forms of faith that begin with a person identifying secular goals and beliefs that he shares with others, and then choosing a faith that properly frames these goals. Kitcher calls the three religious forms of the orientation model the mythically self conscious, the doctrinally-entangled, and the doctrinally-indefinite. I’ll leave you to read about their differences in his article.
Kitcher contends that New Atheists, by concentrating solely on the “belief model,” don’t realize that adherents to the other three models don’t care that much about specific truth claims of faith. Therefore, the Gnus are attacking faith at a place where it’s not that vulnerable. As he says, “Nobody who reflects on what sociologists have to say about the ways in which people become attracted to particular religions will suppose that the spread of a creed has much to do with its truth.”
Kitcher concludes that for most people the benefits of faith outweigh any problems of believing in falsehoods:
. . . it is a fallacy to think that, for any religious person who currently fits the orientation model, that person can attain a cognitively superior position by rejecting the beliefs militant modern atheists discern as false. The cognitive gains can simply be outweighed by other forms of psychological and social loss.
He seems to think that its social benefits portend that religion will be with us forever, or at least until atheists find a way to associate those same benefits with humanism. And he takes prominent Gnus like Dennett and Dawkins to task for suggesting that the contemplation of science and the universe can provide psychic benefits that can replace religion. After quoting Dawkins on the wonders of science, Kitcher notes:
There is much to agree with in these passages, but they seduce readers—and Dawkins and Dennett too, I suspect, into thinking that anyone can orient a worthwhile life, one that will survive reflective probing, on the basis of contemplation of the cosmos as the sciences have revealed it.
Ouch! Well, I’m not sure whether Richard and Dan would agree that they’ve prescribed a diet of science to replace a gluttony on Jesus, but never mind.
LOL, Nice one.
I don't really have issues with ANYONE attacking "blind faith", to me faith must be based on something and believing just for the sake of believing is just as bad as not believing.
Dawkins and others have always made fair points, sure at times it seems their views of religion tended to be very "rudimentary" but that's ok, most religious people's views are like that too, LOL !
There is nothing wrong in questioning, th ebible says, "test everything", the issue is that sometimes, certain people test on one side of the pool and, getting the reading they wanted, are happy to accept that.
That really isn't much critical thinking is it?
I know many have read Dawkins and Hitchens and others, but how many have read the counter-arguments to them?
On a side note:
Some like to rag on people that have "heard Christ", as if they have mental problems and they do this without trying to understand what that person has heard and WHY they think it was "God speaking" and they do this INSPITE of the fact that the voice ( not voices) heard is saying nothing but loving and beautiful things, as if that was a BAD THING and needed to be "fixed".
I think that if MORE people heard a voice telling them to be good, not to steal and not to cheat, to love and not judge and they FOLLOWED that voice, the world would be a better place.
Leaving: Awesome letter, you make your points very clear. 1-Did you get any positive feedback from any JW or any elder? Just wondering. 2.-Did your wife also DA? Did she send a letter too?
OTWO:
I would have left upon discovering Ray Franz' book
His book was a deal-breaker for me, too, in regards to WT being "God's Organization".
cyberjesus:
Leaving: Awesome letter, you make your points very clear. 1-Did you get any positive feedback from any JW or any elder? Just wondering. 2.-Did your wife also DA? Did she send a letter too?
(1) Only from ex and non-JWs and (2) my wife simply stopped going cold turkey and does not care what her 'status' is.
undercover:
LWT, thanks for posting your letter. Very well written. Hope you don't mind that I saved a copy for reference. Your quotes on blood guilt were excellent. I might want to remember that for future use.
Thank you. Feel free to use it however you'd like. I pulled from various sources when I was compiling it.
