by Fernando 2 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
"Purely vertical thinking leads to compliance, conformity, and a false sense of knowledge. (False because it’s often just memorization in disguise. The student knows what to do without understanding why.) The purely vertical thinker is a nit-picker, a legalist, a tight-ass."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_de_Bono (under heading "Lateral Thinking")
What's your point?
Hey Disillusioned Lost-Lamb!
Looking back it does seem to hang in the air a bit. Sorry, I should have clarified. This is what came to mind:
WBTS followers are akin to mechanical robots that can't think and reason. They know WHAT the WBTS says they must believe, think and do. They do not know WHY - the background reason, nor do they care.
Human beings seem to function best when they are self-directed from WITHIN and have properly functioning consciences.
However when we IMPOSE mountains of EXTERNAL rules, traditions, laws, moral codes and the like on them they become robotic and oddly begin to decay and underperform across the MMEEPS spectrum (Mental, Moral, Emotional, Ethical, Physical, Spiritual).
Herein is the problem with religion. It is unable to practice what it preaches. The is due to EXTERNALISM.
The Watchtower preaches against LEGALISM in writing, but embraces it in practice (g79 6/8 pp. 27-28).
The Watchtower arrogantly, pompously, piously and pedantically IMPOSES mountain like EXTERNAL pressure on human sexuality, at one time even prescribing against oral sex between married couples. This merely produced sexually repressed males and to a lesser degree females. As to deviant expressions sexuality, these were simply removed from public view and internalised where they festered and when ripe manifested as adultery, rape or incest. To save face Watchtower leadership would often find ways to help the perpetrator hide or deny the facts and evade the law. Whitewashed graves full of dead men's bones indeed. Gnat straining that leads to camel gulping. Now wasn't there a spiritual guru who nearly 2,000 years ago warned against these stupid religious devices and people. And didn't they kill him for speaking up? It seems some things never change.
The Watchtower is able to write about the "good news" according to Paul, but it is not in the hearts or on the lips of its followers most of whom are totally ignorant of what the "good news" according to Paul even is. This is a significant problem. More than half the Bible's ±152 references to the "good news" are by Paul!!
A spiritually inebriated Watchtower religionist can read Acts 20:24 over and over without being able to identify, explain, believe, teach and obey the particular ingredient of the "good news" contained in that scripture. It was remarkable to observe this bizarre supernatural phenomenon of the veil at work in 2009, the year that this scripture was their year text in big bold letters next to every Kingdom Hall stage to be seen by 100,000 congregations two to three times a week for 52 weeks!
Nothing was more important to Paul than the "good news". His focus was definitely not doctrinal dissection of inane peripheral doctrines like the trinity, hellfire, immortality of the soul, or the exact nature of the instrument on which Jesus died.
In the early 1980s there was an outbreak of Acts 20:24 (the gospel of grace) amongst some at Bethel headquarters. The Pharisees and Sanhedrin ran around like angry kids and "killed" (DFd) as many as they could denouncing them as wicked apostates!
Greetings
Fernando
