Extraordinary events and amazing coincidences: why do JWs always attribute them to God?

by MrMonroe 8 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

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  MrMonroe

  I’ve just been reading an excellent book called Wolfram: The Boy Who Went to War. It relates an incident during the latter stages of World War II in which Moroccan soldiers barged their way into the home of a home in Germany and began scouring the house for anything incriminating. Read this section and see if it rings any bells:

  Marie Charlotte reluctantly led them downstairs and watched in dismay as they rifled through her various store boxes and alcoves. Her dismay turned to alarm when she saw the thoroughness of their search: they were turning everything inside out and upside down. She knew that the family friend, Kurt Weber, had hidden his German uniform down there. If the Moroccans discovered this and realised that he was a deserter, they would shoot him on the spot.

  Her anxiety grew as the Moroccans approached the alcove where the uniform was hidden. They were emptying everything as they searched for items to loot and were certain to find it within the next few minutes.

  Suddenly (until her dying day she was never able to explain how) she began talking to them in French – an almost fluent stream of words and phrases that she had not used since her childhood in Alsace. The men were so taken aback, and charmed to speak with someone who knew their own language, that they promptly abandoned their search and traipsed back upstairs.

  If this had happened to a JW, and been written up in a Watchtower article or Yearbook as an “experience”, it would without doubt have been attributed to an act of God. But this woman wasn’t a religious person. She simply couldn’t explain it – just as people can’t explain how they summon almost superhuman power in a time of disaster to escape or rescue others. In life, strange things happen, and they happen to everyone.

  Life is also full of coincidences. A couple of weeks ago as part of my work I knocked on the door of a woman I’d met (also by chance) exactly a year before in a different city. She had moved house since I’d last spoken to her. It was an amazing coincidence and we’ve all had them. But when they occur to Witnesses (“I was just praying to God, asking him to show me the true religion, when there was a knock at my door”) it’s always an act of God, the direction of angels.

  JWs scorn superstition. But boiled down, the relentless repetition of claims about angelic direction and movement of the Holy Spirit, the constant hunt for a spiritual explanation and confirmation that they really are God's special people, makes JWs no less superstitious than anyone else in the community.
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  wobble

  I find that when I think about a lot of what are claimed to be "Amazing" coincidences, they are not so amazing, apart from the slight surprise that such things do not occur more often, but the circumstances surrounding them mean that such things should happen from time to time.

  As to the knock on the door thing, how many people pray and do not get the knock, how many people pray and a LDS member or even SDA or Baptist member is at the door ?

  JW's do not tell us.

  The stupidest one I read in a WT was about a guy praying to god for help as his child had been killed by a huge T.V set falling on him. The man got the knock. The WT claimed angelic direction.

  Would it not have been better for the powerful angel to have stopped the T.V falling ????

  NumbnutzDubs.
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  cantleave

  I have known people who are muslim, and others who are Christian. They all pray, they all appear to get some prayers answered. I bet if you measured the number of answered to unanswered prayers of Muslims to Christians the result would be the same. I reckon if I prayed to the FSM or the IPU I would have the same success.

  Life is full of coincidence and extraordinary events.
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  Aussie Oz

  One of the most foremost people in this regard has to be William Miller.

  His survival of a military battle led him to conclude that only God could have been behind the extraordinary victory against all odds.

  At the outbreak of the War of 1812, Miller raised a company of local men and traveled to Burlington, Vermont. He transferred to the 30th Infantry Regiment in the regular army of the United States with the rank of lieutenant. Miller spent most of the war working as a recruiter and on February 1, 1814, he was promoted to captain. He saw his first action at the Battle of Plattsburgh, where vastly outnumbered American forces overcame the British. "The fort I was in was exposed to every shot. Bombs, rockets, and shrapnel shells fell as thick as hailstones", he said. One of these many shots had exploded two feet from him, wounding three of his men and killing another, but Miller survived without a scratch. Miller came to view the outcome of this battle as miraculous, and therefore at odds with his deistic view of a distant God far removed from human affairs. He later wrote, "It seemed to me that the Supreme Being must have watched over the interests of this country in an especial manner, and delivered us from the hands of our enemies... So surprising a result, against such odds, did seem to me like the work of a mightier power than man." [ 3 ] (Source, wikipedia)

  And from there, it all just goes down the toilet.

  oz
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  TheOldHippie

  The French writer Émile Deschamps claims in his memoirs that, in 1805, he was treated to some plum pudding by a stranger named Monsieur de Fontgibu. Ten years later, the writer encountered plum pudding on the menu of a Paris restaurant and wanted to order some, but the waiter told him that the last dish had already been served to another customer, who turned out to be de Fontgibu. Many years later, in 1832, Deschamps was at a dinner and once again ordered plum pudding. He recalled the earlier incident and told his friends that only de Fontgibu was missing to make the setting complete—and in the same instant, the now senile de Fontgibu entered the room.

  In his book Synchronicity (1952), Jung tells the following story as an example of a synchronistic event: "A young woman I was treating had, at a critical moment, a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. While she was telling me this dream, I sat with my back to the closed window. Suddenly I heard a noise behind me, like a gentle tapping. I turned round and saw a flying insect knocking against the window-pane from the outside. I opened the window and caught the creature in the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to a golden scarab one finds in our latitudes, a scarabaeid beetle, the common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata), which, contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt the urge to get into a dark room at this particular moment. I must admit that nothing like it ever happened to me before or since."

  Jung wrote, after describing some examples, "When coincidences pile up in this way, one cannot help being impressed by them—for the greater the number of terms in such a series, or the more unusual its character, the more improbable it becomes."
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  dozy

  I've seen similar claims from other religionists - I suppose if you believe you are blessed by God / Jesus etc then it comes with the territory that you in some way have divine guidance.

  The WTBTS certainly encourages this mindset. What about the experience in the latest Watchtower about "Jean-Claude" whose manager told him that he would lose his job unless his worked evenings. When he went back to work his manager had been fired & he still had his job.

  When JWs come up with similar experiences , I ask them that if God is micromanaging peoples lives to such a degree , why isn't he (for example) stopping the pioneer couple from driving into a lake or the plane carrying rbc members from crashing. I used to live in a very rural area & we often would have JWs moving into the area giving great credence to how Jehovah had helped them find a job , a house etc. Often a few months later they would lose enthusiasm & suddenly Jehovah was helping them get jobs & accommodation elsewhere.

  .
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  OnTheWayOut

  My oh my, this is one of my hardest parts of their stories to reconcile. I want to assume the GB and powers that be in the WTS are victims of their own religion, believing the crap. But when I hear how their experiences from the platform are embelished to drive the point home, then reminded of their amazing "Jehovah provided miracles" stories of how a food truck broke down right in front of the convention or how only the truck loaded with Bibles wasn't searched at the border.

  I know these stories are made up and stolen from "Christendom." Lying like that is more than just being victims. It's participating in a deception that makes you part of the crowd that's aware of the fact that it is a mind-control cult.
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  losthobbit

  I don't know many Jehovah's Witnesses... and I only know of one family where both parents were killed in a car accident, leaving all three children behind... oh right, it was a JW family. I guess God decided to release them from the stress of having to raise three children, and hand over the stress to their Baptist gran (whom he later killed with cancer). What a wonderful God.

  So, two questions come out of this:

  1. Do JW's attribute all bad things to the devil?

  2. Is dying good or bad?
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  MrMonroe

  @Losthobbit, No, Witnesses say bad things happen because of time and unforseen occurence. Dying is bad. Conversely, when good things happen, it's because of God and the angels ... or the universe responded to their generosity in the amount of time they spent in field service..