TD:
Your post about the pyramid of technology reminds me of the BBC movie "Threads."
Paradise earth doctrine - did it strike anyone else as a bit odd?
by sseveninches 39 Replies latest watchtower bible
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mP
The crazy thing is, the bible doesnt say crocs will eat hay or any of the other nonsense published by the WTS. If i recall it says lions will rest with sheep, but it enver says lions wont eat the sheep if they are hungry.
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blondie
I could not see it happening in a physical, practical way considering how people interacted at the KH. I would wonder who would run the power plants, who would pump, process, and truck the oil and gas. Would jws willingly live without power, using wood to heat and cook, hand pump their water, use outhouses. Even if jws knew how solar power worked, where would they get the parts, the knowledge, after things ran out. Who would make the cotton cloth, process flax, shear the sheep and make the woolen cloth, where would leather come from if animals weren't killed, who would make the shoes, current houses would be useless without power and water. Generators, but where would the gas come from. The "spoils" jws say, but how long will these things last, 50 years. Today people are nine meals away from no food if the trucks stopped trucking. Will jws be content to eat manna, and use their peg to go in the back yard? I knew volunteer BC jws who complained that they had to haul water in their assignment, that there was no cheese or peanut butter, that they had to use a pit to potty and were so happy to get back home.
How many jws know how to plant a self-supporting garden, one that produces enough food to get you to the next harvest season? Will there be cheese, butter, milk allowed, eggs? Can they keep chickens and cows?
I discovered this story some time ago and it more accurately depicts what jws today would do in the post-apocalyptic Paradise of the WTS lore.
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blondie
PS the phrase "paradise earth" never occurs in the bible, even the NWT.
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BluesBrother
When I was "in" I did believe in it , hook line and sinker. Any rational questions such as TD has posted above were just dismissed with the line that we "trusted Jehovah and the Holy Spirit" to help us". Tools and materials were to be gathered from the ruins of the old system. There were pictures drawn of a blacksmith hammering "swords into plowshares". That is fine, as long as I am not told to be the blacksmith!
I always pictured it as an English country idyll (in good weather of course) I was going down a lane l with a big shire cart horse and wagon, bidding everyone I met "good day" by name..rather like the Middle Earth in Tolkein's Lord of the Rings...
It is amazing how that once you are mentally "out" and the veil falls from your eyes, it all seems so silly and unreal - a complete pipe dream that could never become reality.
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Glander
When I was growing up I was constantly being told about the New World. It was all about having a lion as a pet, etc But as I grew older, I was never satisfied with my questions that you listed above. I never spoke out about it when I was a JW. The attitude was, why spoil a nice fairy tale?
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snowbird
It never struck me as being odd; I still believe the Earth - the whole Universe, for that matter - is going to experience a radical transformation.
What got me to thinking hard and long was the fact that some thought they would be heavenly rulers while others would be in the trenches toiling to bring about a Paradise.
That reminded me a little too much of what my ancestors experienced during slavery and afterwards.
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sseveninches
Don't get me wrong - I believed it, and still want to believe it, it's just those wrinkles that refuse to get ironed out.
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TD
Giordano,
I'm praying that the Amish survive or we're going to be seriously F%$#
I've watched barefoot Amish children go down the street on those little scooter bikes with no pedals and those bikes were made of the same machine welded tubular steel as any other bike. Similar observations could be made about the heads on their hammers and axes, their braces and bits, their sawblades, kitchen knives, pots and pans, wood stoves, silverware, door hinges, leather tools, farming implements, etc., etc.
I admire the Amish in many ways, but they are in similar boat as Jehovah's Witnesses, who condemn human society, but at the same time, could not live without it.
Knowsnothing
TD, an objection to technology would be living as the primitive tribes do, thus allowing for sustainability. However, that just seems like an incredibly boring life to me.
That's a fair point and if JW depictions of paradise showed that standard of living, I'd withdraw my criticism. But JW depictions of paradise show happy, smiling people wearing shoes of machine-stitched leather and clothing of finely woven cloth that only comes from textile mills. They show houses with plate glass windows, mill-sawn lumber, kiln-fired clay bricks and quarried stone. They show drinking glasses and pitchers of clear glass. They show men and women groomed in styles that would require razors and scissors of high quality steel.
The stamp of technology is everywhere in their pictures and that standard of living is simply not possible without a division of labor
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kepler
As one radio commentator observed, most predators have their eyes set forward (hawks, eagles, tigers, sharks...) and most animal prey have their eyes on the sides of their heads (pigeons, chickens, sheep, cattle, game fish...) to get a wide field of view. So when Paradise Earth commences, you have to wonder which way will eyes re-position themselves. Will hawks and owls look more like pigeons or pigeons look more like owls? Will our own eyes take on a wider spacing?
The Paradise Earth was something I was never raised in - and only deduced after several years of engagement and living with someone who eventually returned to the society like a yo-yo on a string.
Not to get wrapped up in the details of my own religious upbringing, I would say that the idea was entirely foreign - save for the notion that when I was introduced to parochial schools in the 7th grade, the sister/nun who was my first teacher in a Catholic school used to go on about how the world was designed for us. I liked Sister J- otherwise she did everything she could to help me transition into the parochial school system - but the notion that the world was like a custom made suit or car made little sense to me because I was already secular enough to see the counter arguments: that we were part of the world like fish, monkeys, birds, trees and everything else that was born here. If the world and we were not made for each other, then there was little likelihood we would be sitting in a class talking about it. If we would be suddenly introduced into Jupiter or Mars, we would certainly die. But if there were beings placed there by God or an evolutionary process they would stare at us in amazement and wonder why we expired or existed at all with the apparatus evolution or circumstance had given. The next five years, taught by brothers in religious orders or their lay equivalents, only one or two of them were actually naive enough to pull the same argument - and it didn't hold with anyone who heard it. Certainly the biology and physics teachers didn't try to pull an argument like that - even though we started every class hour with a prayer. Whatever the motive, we weren't there because we wanted back in the Garden of Eden as soon as God would announce a shutdown.
No, where I got a suspicion that some doctrine liked that lurked in the background was if my fiancee caught me speaking of, reading or watching anything that suggested that someone might live a normal day on another planet or even strive to do so. That offended her somehow and she started to explain how the earth was designed for us. Only movies that had Denzel Washington, Louis Gossett, Jr. or Eddie Murphy could address espionage, science fiction, historical conflict or much of any drama; otherwise it was an artistic travesty. Books were career counseling and self help and movies were for light comedies - I finally figured out.
We had met in a non-denominational church and I only gathered slowly what were the implications of her background: If you observed it in the sky, if you dug the bones out of the ground, if you observed the geological strata in the Grand Canyon, it didn't matter. We could attend an open night at a science institute or stroll in a museum. No evidence based on centuries of labor in laboratories, at blackboards, computers, measuriing lava flows, parallaxes to stars or anything else really mattered. At one point, we had dinner in Maryland with immigres I had helped to get into the country. Their visas came in a process like they would have been excellent pitchers for the Yankees if they ball players from Cuba instead of physicists from Russia. But it turned out they actually believed that people could live in space or other worlds and that they were striving for a future like that for their descendants. They had sat at campfires in their childhood in Siberia dreaming of the day and dedicating their careers for that possibility for their children or grand children. She was inches from their faces telling them that we were made to live on a Paradise Earth.
It was obvious that she was offended by the idea that human aspiration within the 21st century could exist outside the interpretive scriptural framework of 19th century Anglo-Protestants who just had to come to terms somehow with the west's ancient institutional church. The only way was to declare most of history an apostacy that was only resolved by the sort of efforts in America that produce figures like Joseph Smith, Brigham Young or leaders of "Awakenings". A pity the people she was talking to did not get the same indoctrination she did starting from when she was five. They probably had a philosophical background that skirted Anglo-Protestantism millenarianism entirely. But she never found out what people from that part of the world dealt with in terms of indoctrination. Why should she, now that she was planning to go back into the indoctrination business.
Who exactly will reside in-on Paradise-Earth and why, I am still not clear on. And since this is a rectification due to an egregrious event in the Garden that the society had once clocked at 6000 years ago in 1975, I have to wonder as others do why this confrontation with mortaility affected all animal life as well as human. There is no satisfactory explanation for all the biota that seems to be dead material on this earth, animals that died in tar pits or perhaps even turned into chalk or coal. Then there are bone remains of animals that were slain by other animals than man. And then there are feline carnivores that cannot even digest meat dinners and never could.
Then there is all that geologic evidence that this earth which was made for us was a very hostile place for anyone like us for aeons of time as well. Camping on the earth 500 million years ago would be no treat if there were enough free oxygen by then. I don't know if there would be any firewood. And some of the possible snapshots millions of years later...
But OK. So the select get to stand around on paradise earth because for humans without immortal souls there is no transcendance to a higher plane in death. Whether you believe there is any substance in an afterlife or not is certainly worthy of other threads. But if you believe that human fate is to remain on this earth forever, then are we not asking all of the nature we observe to stop in its tracks as well?
The Earth is not static in its nature. Nor is even the moon - it is receding away with time. The sun is growing brighter and hotter as it burns up its nuclear fuel and it has a finite life as can be determined by observing and modeling stars that are similar to it. If half of its ten billion year life is expired, paradise on earth a billion years from now is not necessarily part of the warranty. And water boils away into space anyway when you are counting that long. Then there are even more immediate and subtler ways that eternity slips through one's fingers.
If the earth and its environs are supposed to work perfectly like a monotonous machine forever, how is it supposed to reset itself to the task? Does this make any more sense than having all of us simply die at our appointed times and meet our Maker on whatever terms that might entail beyond our ability to perceive on this plane of existence? On hand you have the impassable veil of death and the other, the banal.
While perhaps Buddhism and other eastern philosophies have attempted to clear the mind through meditation, it appears to me that the WTS attempts to clear the world of all distractions from a vague PG rated return to a theme park. The faith of my background is sceptical about the perfectability of human kind, but it encourages its adherents to take part in the re-ordering of the world, perfectable or not: works, professions, charity, arts, search for knowledge or even truth, raise, protect and teach children... and in the process to glorify God - whether The End comes with a colliding comet in ten minutes or in a billion years.
In that regard Judaism, Islam and most of Christianity not obsessed with Apocalypse have more in common with each other.