Do You Ever Doubt Your Efforts Are Futile? (page 6)

Now, “Do I ever doubt that my efforts are futile?”

Let me get around to that starting with what Londo111 writes in answer to the question posed by the topic’s originator:

"Why does it seem impossible for everyone here to disconnect from what is obviously a great source of frustration to (in extreme cases) anger bordering on hatred?"

ANS.

That's simple…in a normal religious denomination:

(1) One can leave and not lose friends and family.

(2) One can question or disagree with any or all beliefs and not lose friends and family.

However, in a high control group, like the Witnesses, one cannot leave without losing all loved ones inside. And there is no more vicious a person than a member of a high control group toward one who has decided to leave it.

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Very close to my own thinking; and yet…

Should sleeping dogs be left to lie? They could have been in the time it has taken to put this note together.

I much agree with Londo111. But the odd thing about it for me is that it wasn’t a question of leaving; I had never subscribed to the system of beliefs in the first place. Yet all the same, I found the implications of points 1 & 2 applied to me anyway after eight years with someone I loved, cared for in all ways. Whatever the perfect storm was that separated us, this was a big part of it. For not only is it a question of leaving, but failing to join.

I had no background in any of this, save a checkered upbringing which gave me some early Protestant background. JW pamphlets had never reached me; no one prior had brought me into this dialog. But with death of her adult son, this new persona sprang like the Manchurian Candidate from within.

For background, when my ex suddenly started asking me: "Don't you think you need someone to explain the Bible to you, a true expert?" …I did start studying Protestantism, puzzled by this strangely non-Protestant inquiry. And then when study seemed to lead nowhere with her increased insistence to return to the faith her mother brought her into at 5 years old specifically, I took lessons from local elders at our home, elders selected from another congregation - so that even though we had lived under the same roof, we would become immediately more and more divided.

Regarding home visits, I read the material carefully and concluded that I was lied to on every page.

I asked the elders questions about the text and they invariably were evasive or pressured me to back off.

She's gone; she's been had. And she will be knocking on doors under scrutiny until “times indefinite” trying to con other people into the same scam like so many other multi-level marketing schemes.

Now exactly what can I do about it?

Nobody else is interested in the fact that I can show that Babylon (repeat, Babylon) was not destroyed as described in my indoctrination classes; nor that Jerusalem was destroyed in a breech of the historical and celestial record in 607 BC (I've recalculated the related lunar eclipses myself); nor that I see numerous Biblical misquotes, quotes out of context and twisted translations.

Nor is there anyone interested whatever in the “scholastic” approach taken to the subject in linkage or origin on Biblical matters; it was always subordinated to a 19 th century apocalyptic view where all words were turned to prophecy even when false or after a contravening fact.

When you discover some of the things that I have when examining claims of the organization, knowledge of these matters becomes disturbing of itself. One sees that the Org follows in a long tradition in the use and generation of Holy Writ, the sort that might have caused one of Jeremiah’s laments: Chapter 8, verse 8.

Holy writ becomes a contract book which my visitors quoted without sequential pattern and seemed to think they held “all titles to which” in their vest pockets; and that the Principal Party in the matter was deaf, dumb and locked in a basement in Brooklyn with some self-appointed Robespierres acting as his direct agents and spokesmen; these were supported by anonymous grapho-maniacs clearing forests to write “commentary” more binding and studied than the original. And then there was a network of theocratic STASI (likeThe Lives of Others / Das Leben der Anderen ) securing the beach heads of paradise earth. I didn’t mention yet the two R’s.

Coming away from this and observing a relationship with MLMs. Where MLMs make their entrance is appealing to greed. Here, what’s the corrupting motive? Dangling Paradise Earth at the end of iron-clad prophetic verses that just have to force God’s hand?

Nobody I know is interested in these observations - save for the people that are responsible for selling this bill of goods to my ex. And the people who have discovered the same falsifications and are experiencing the same loss as I am.

Then there is the dissident literature which I should shelve beside Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. Since the former is in first person, this is not all good news. Koestler's hero is a fictional version of Bukharin in Stalin's world, still true to the basic faith; Franz is the real thing.

After a while of this, I need a breath of fresh air.

A couple of weeks ago, one of my high school friends, who is not a practicing Catholic, sent out to a group of us a book recommendation, something that came out 2003:

The Life You Save May be Your Own - An American Pilgrimage - by Paul Elie, an editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

What it is is simply four biographies tied together into one: Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy – 20 th century Amercian writers and converts to Catholicism who tried to make sense out of their lives. This is done to large degree via reading more closely Matthew 25 and the 8 beatitudes rather than speculating on when the clock might stop after reading Matthew 24. Mind that when I say Roman Catholic, I am not talking about bishops, monsignors or anyone of any rank in the hierarchy, save perhaps if we count what holy orders Merton eventually takes on. These are just people who thought, wrote and acted based on their perceptions about God and the notion that they were to imitate Christ, not necessarily to preach from door to door.

The four authors I am acquainted with to varying degree. From the top: Percy, Merton, O'Connor and Day. Percy has the dubious honor of being quoted on the JW homepage about 1914.

THE modern history of Jehovah’s Witnesses began more than a hundred years ago.

“... have been killed in this century than in all of history.”—Dr. Walker Percy ...

wol.jw.org/en/wol/pc/r1/lp-e/1200264464/ ? 5/0

That should be a reason for some to be curious about him. He certainly didn't need the JW website as a sounding board. The WT needed him and Percy needed it not at all as he indicates in "Message in the Bottle". Merton seemed to make more noise as a Trappist monk than a thousand Pioneers going door to door. Pacifist Dorothy Day founded a publication called the Catholic Worker on the Lower East Side, and had Martin Cruz-Smith not devoted some attention to her in his novel Gorky Park in 1980, I would never have known of her.

Of the first three, the author characterized them respectively as “searcher”, “rebel” and “reformer” for reasons the text makes known. Flannery Connor’s “title” is as yet unknown to me 100 pages in and she is the most difficult for me to give a capsule review: a southern Catholic short story writer with a Gothic touch? …Maybe someone can help me out.

But all these people were connected, as their biographer asserts - and to a lesser degree I am connected to them (e.g., via the Maple Street bookstore in New Orleans to Percy or another of my high school friends continually taking retreats at Merton's Gethsemane monastery in Kentucky). These four did not have all the answers, but they were searching for them. And their lives certainly were not all triumphs. They read the Bible, but they read other things as well. They started with English, French and Russian 19th and early 20th century writers as well as Americans, some of whom they associated with and came to join professionally. Their careers among these people place these writers ( as with Van Doren below) in new contexts. Safe to say, they themselves wrote plenty.

Now, "Do I ever doubt that my efforts are futile?"

As for my main objective, I don't know if they are or not. Before all this happened, by comparison I was happy as a clam. But this turn of events has had significant impact on me. I have learned much from the experience and I have influenced others in ways that those who set this ball rolling were not anticipating.

I'm not done yet either.

Nor am I done with the illustration I’ve pulled down. Let’s go back to one of those questions posed by our topic’s initiator:

"Why does it seem impossible for everyone here to disconnect from what is obviously a great source of frustration to (in extreme cases) anger bordering on hatred?"

I sense an assumption here of monopoly on religious experience and in knowledge of God. And this I would suggest is a point 3 to add to those two already noted. To my mind this books argues against this with nearly every page.

To examine this, let me quote an episode from the book with Thomas Merton commuting Columbia University student in the late 1930s.

“Thomas Merton wandered into Mark Van Doren’s class by accident…Through Van Doren, Merton found a new set of friends [ including Robert Giroux]. …To them all Van Doren was at once a friend and guide … soon to be famous as an expositor of Great Books – he is cast as the Virgil in The Seven Storey Mountain… He shows them how to tell good writing from bad, the genuine from the phony…Van Doren sponsored a way of reading grounded in the conviction that genuine literature is a kind of wisdom literature, in which readers would find the deepest account in the way life actually is. …

“More than that he introduced Merton to particular books or writers, Van Doren emboldened Merton to read the way he read already: with his whole self, his whole life. …He was taking literature classes of all kinds: English, Spanish, French. And yet the writers most formative to him, those who showed him a way or led him further on, he encountered on his own.

“He saw The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy in the window of the Scribner’s bookshop on 5 th Avenue while browsing after classes … On a whim he bought it. Though it was in English, the author Etienne Gilson, the dust jacket reported, was a professor of the Sorbonne.

“On the train back to Long Island, he opened the book and spied some odd text on an early page: black cross, a Latin inscription – Nihil Obstat. Imprimatur – and below it, a bishop’s name, printed like a signature.

“He knew what the Latin meant: Nothing stands in the way; officially stamped [let it be printed]. ‘I felt as if I had been cheated. They should have warned me it was a Catholic book! Then I never would have bought it. As it was, I was tempted to throw the thing out the window at the houses of Woodside – to get rid of it as dangerous and unclean.’

“The problem wasn’t that the book was about a Catholic subject. Merton hardly could have expected otherwise. The problem was that it was an official Catholic book; if it was official philosophy, he reasoned, it was not philosophy. One has no trouble imagining him – young, headstrong, anxious, violent in his passions – throwing the book out the window, and his life going in a different direction altogether. He didn’t throw The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy out the window, however. He started to read it. When the train reached his stop, he took the book with him.

“He read the book … in the next few weeks, and was changed by the experience. In that book, he found a conception of God that he thought plausible and appealing. This God was not a Jehovah or a divine lawgiver, nor a plague-sending potentate or a scourge of prophets, nor the heavenly Father of Jesus Christ or the stern Judge waiting just past the gate at the end of time, but the vital animating principle of reality – ‘pure act’ being itself or per se, existence in perfection, outside of space and time, transcending all human imagery, calmly, steadily, eternally being. ‘What a relief it was for me, now,’ he recalled, ‘to discover not only that no idea of ours, let alone any image, could adequately represent God, but also that we should not allow ourselves to be satisfied with any such knowledge of him.

“ ….The effect was no accident. It was by design. The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy collected Gilson’s Gifford lectures, the same lecture series that had produced William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience thirty years earlier.

“… Now he had come upon a conception of God that he could respect, and it was in this discovery, by his own account, that his religious life really began.”

Amid all this I have not noticed mention of Armageddon. … Nope, not in the index. If no mention of the elect or anointed, certainly no mention of 144,000s. Though there is a lot more taking of communion. And the hierarchy of the church thus far seems mainly tied to matters of what are known as sacraments. The connection to Christ seems more direct here though… Imitation of Christ and Thomas a Kempis is a recurring theme.

Do You Ever Doubt Your Efforts Are Futile?

still thinking

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