by Fernando 9 Replies latest watchtower bible
According to Paul no one can, and no one has to.
God IMPUTES a right and clean standing to anyone who follows Jesus instead of the Watchtower.
Any LGBT who follows Jesus is 100% right and 100% clean?
Anyone who follows the Watchtower is 100% wrong and 100% dirty?
Yup! That simple!
(LGBT = Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender)
100 percent right!
agreed
If there is a God, he's defective compared to the same standards we'd expect of any so-called intelligent creature.
Before John Lennon imagined "living life in peace," he conjured "no heaven … / no hell below us …/ and no religion too."
No religion: What was Lennon summoning? For starters, a world without "divine" messengers, like Osama bin Laden, sparking violence. A world where mistakes, like the avoidable loss of life in Hurricane Katrina, would be rectified rather than chalked up to "God's will." Where politicians no longer compete to prove who believes more strongly in the irrational and untenable. Where critical thinking is an ideal. In short, a world that makes sense.
In recent years scientists specializing in the mind have begun to unravel religion's "DNA." They have produced robust theories, backed by empirical evidence (including "imaging" studies of the brain at work), that support the conclusion that it was humans who created God, not the other way around. And the better we understand the science, the closer we can come to "no heaven … no hell … and no religion too."
Like our physiological DNA, the psychological mechanisms behind faith evolved over the eons through natural selection. They helped our ancestors work effectively in small groups and survive and reproduce, traits developed long before recorded history, from foundations deep in our mammalian, primate and African hunter-gatherer past.
For example, we are born with a powerful need for attachment, identified as long ago as the 1940s by psychiatrist John Bowlby and expanded on by psychologist Mary Ainsworth. Individual survival was enhanced by protectors, beginning with our mothers. Attachment is reinforced physiologically through brain chemistry, and we evolved and retain neural networks completely dedicated to it. We easily expand that inborn need for protectors to authority figures of any sort, including religious leaders and, more saliently, gods. God becomes a super parent, able to protect us and care for us even when our more corporeal support systems disappear, through death or distance.
Scientists have so far identified about 20 hard-wired, evolved "adaptations" as the building blocks of religion. Like attachment, they are mechanisms that underlie human interactions: Brain-imaging studies at the National Institutes of Health showed that when test subjects were read statements about religion and asked to agree or disagree, the same brain networks that process human social behavior — our ability to negotiate relationships with others — were engaged.
Among the psychological adaptations related to religion are our need for reciprocity, our tendency to attribute unknown events to human agency, our capacity for romantic love, our fierce "out-group" hatreds and just as fierce loyalties to the in groups of kin and allies. Religion hijacks these traits. The rivalry between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, for example, or the doctrinal battles between Protestant and Catholic reflect our "groupish" tendencies.
In addition to these adaptations, humans have developed the remarkable ability to think about what goes on in other people's minds and create and rehearse complex interactions with an unseen other. In our minds we can de-couple cognition from time, place and circumstance. We consider what someone else might do in our place; we project future scenarios; we replay past events. It's an easy jump to say, conversing with the dead or to conjuring gods and praying to them.
Morality, which some see as imposed by gods or religion on savage humans, science sees as yet another adaptive strategy handed down to us by natural selection.
Yale psychology professor Paul Bloom notes that "it is often beneficial for humans to work together … which means it would have been adaptive to evaluate the niceness and nastiness of other individuals." In groundbreaking research, he and his team found that infants in their first year of life demonstrate aspects of an innate sense of right and wrong, good and bad, even fair and unfair. When shown a puppet climbing a mountain, either helped or hindered by a second puppet, the babies oriented toward the helpful puppet. They were able to make an evaluative social judgment, in a sense a moral response.
Michael Tomasello, a developmental psychologist who co-directs the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, has also done work related to morality and very young children. He and his colleagues have produced a wealth of research that demonstrates children's capacities for altruism. He argues that we are born altruists who then have to learn strategic self-interest.
I find it hard to believe the witlesses measure up. The organization has to know about the pedophiles within the ranks, yet they do nothing about it except hide the problem. They have to know that there are people that will insinuate that children need to "consent" to sex with them, and then will silence them under threat of getting disfellowshipped, within the ranks. Yet such are regularly promoted to become hounders, so they can arrange shepherding/hounding calls with such children. Yet nothing gets done.
I think I would rather have homosexuals that are practicing with consent than those pigs that use their authority and threaten their eternal lives to get children to "consent" and then threaten them.
Rather than being "just another Watchtower lie", I think it's the foundation of the cult. But once again, it's only made possible by "God's Word, the Holy Bible". Without the old Bronze Age Relic, they would have no claim to authority of any kind.
the WTB$ hasn't 'measured up' to it's own standard.....................consider the NGO UN thing!
The WTS on the surface teaches that people all should try to imitate Christ as a model but not ever being able to be like him. Did Jesus say we should measure ourselves or others? Or is the word truly "judging" others taking their measure. Are we qualified to judge ourselves. Who would stand? The WTS forgets their own words that it is "undeserved" kindness, given in love not earned. What price can any jw pay for everlasting life other than what has already been paid by Christ?
(Matthew 7:1-5) .“Stop judging that YOU may not be judged; 2 for with what judgment YOU are judging, YOU will be judged; and with the measure that YOU are measuring out, they will measure out to YOU. 3 Why, then, do you look at the straw in your brother’s eye, but do not consider the rafter in your own eye? 4 Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Allow me to extract the straw from your eye’; when, look! a rafter is in your own eye? 5 Hypocrite! First extract the rafter from your own eye, and then you will see clearly how to extract the straw from your brother’s eye.
(2 Corinthians 10:12) . . .For we do not dare to class ourselves among some or compare ourselves with some who recommend themselves. Certainly they in measuring themselves by themselves and comparing themselves with themselves have no understanding.
*** w03 8/1 p. 21 “You Received Free, Give Free” ***As recorded at Romans 3:23, 24, Paul thus told anointed Christians: “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and it is as a free gift that they are being declared righteous by his undeserved kindness through the release by the ransom paid by Christ Jesus.”
Blondie.
One would think "stop judging" does not appear in the NWT!
Each of the WBT$'s 100,000 "congregations" has a venomous, vindictive and clandestine "Judging Committee" that operates as a blasphemous "star chamber". It is made up of "militantly ignorant" and "malignantly self-righteous" powermongers whose sole "gift" is hounding those they consider dumb and weak sheeple.
Not one "congregation" has a "repentance counselling committee". Strictly forbidden by their father the devil.
(Repentance = Holy Spirit convicting us of dysfunction, and the ultimate answer namely the "unabridged gospel" about unmerited favour).
