by Bloody Hotdogs! 13 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
I've been dying to ask this question for years:
JWs love to say they are NOT young earth creationists. Surely, then, they must accept that dinosaurs lived long before humans and original sin. So why did dinosaurs suffer injury, infection, disease, predation, and probably a lot of pain???
because they could not get to the tree of life, the cure-all.
that is why the dinos died, that is why A&E died too. read it in genesis.
Hey Bloody Hotdogs and welcome to to the forum!
My first answer is they lived in the real world. To be alive means you can get hurt.
On a more serious note animal suffering is never equated on the same level as human suffering since most people don't respond to non human suffering. Come to think of it most people don't respond to human suffering either.
Our complex nerve endings protect us from ignoring fire or other life ending events but damn that comes with a painful price.
Put another way Jesus was not a happy camper on that cross.
I think the standard WT explanation is that animals were not created to live forever.
But in my opinion that WT explanation paints Jokehova as being less than loving. Since even us "sinful" humans don't like to see animals suffer and die, how much more so should the perfectly loving and just Jokehova hate such a situation! So how could he have created animals without protection from sickness, pain and death? It makes no moral sense. It is indefensible!
It's one more powerful argument disproving the loving God of the bible.
So JWs admit that Jehovah must have personally created disease, infectious bacteria, suffering and death?? I guess that explains why we need such an amazing immune system! LOL
Beyond that JWs claim that before the flood not even animals are other animals. It extends to their belief that in the new system lions won't eat lambs. JWs claim that the dinosaurs died off before or at the flood. But then how do they explain evidence of dinosaurs with meat in their stomachs?
Like all of God's creation, dinosaurs were perfect and so would not die. They also wouldn't kill because we know from the Awake magazine that animals were not created to do that - they learnt it from man.
The simplest answer that still fits with WTS teachings is that someone went back in time and taught them to kill and caused their demise. Yeah, I'm sure I saw that in a move or cancelled TV show ... or maybe it was Stewie with his time-machine.
Or the WTS could be wrong about everything ...
I believe the Society has not commented for a long time on a literal application of the scripture about lions eating grass like bulls, and wolves lying down beside lambs. I think the Writing department probably came to a quiet consensus a long time ago that this was an idiotic idea. If you search the literature for the scripture in question (sorry, I don't have any materials on-hand here, DIY), what you will find is that the Society does suggest a metaphorical reading of the verse(s) which refer to the lion and wolf as 'formerly voracious men' who now live peacefully with the meek ones. I believe in at least one place, they suggested both a figurative and a possible literal meaning. But I think you will be hard-pressed to find anything in the last 20-30 years of publications stating that carnivores will go herbivorous. I could be wrong.
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........Dinosaurs are Going to Eat..
....Jehovahs Witnesses on Bicycles................................It`s in the Bible!..
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...OUTLAW
I see that the passage I was thinking of is in Isaiah 11, where the wolf resides with the lamb, the leopard with the kid [goat], the calf with the lion, the cow with the bear, and "the lion will eat straw just like the bull". Later on I will look at what the Society has written about this scripture over the years, but first, some literature quotes for you guys on the subject of the OP:
Dinosaurs As an archaeologist and geologist, I quite enjoyed the Awake! articles on dinosaurs. (February 8, 1990) With regard to the time of their disappearance, the articles stated that human fossils occur in rock layers well above those containing dinosaur fossils and that there are rock layers in between. In many parts of the world, these intervening rock layers, or strata, also contain fossils. Many new varieties, or kinds, of animals appear in these layers, such as elephants, saber-toothed cats, and several varieties of flightless running birds. This would strongly suggest that God was still creating new animals after the dinosaurs were gone and that the dinosaurs disappeared during the sixth creative epoch.
G. S., Canada
The Bible does not specify the time of either the creation or the disappearance of dinosaurs. Nevertheless, the comments of G. S. are of interest.—ED.
(Awake 10/22/90)
Here's a blurb from an extensive cover article on dinosaurs:
The Genesis Account and Dinosaurs Some dinosaurs (and pterosaurs) may indeed have been created in the fifth era listed in Genesis, when the Bible says that God made “flying creatures” and “great sea monsters.” Perhaps other types of dinosaurs were created in the sixth epoch. The vast array of dinosaurs with their huge appetites would have been appropriate considering the abundant vegetation that evidently existed in their time.
(Awake 2/8/90)
Abundant vegetation?! Holy misdirection, Batman! What about abundant dinosaur flesh?!? When talking about the T. rex and other predatory dinos, they don't mention what they ate; the only mention of dinosaur diet seems to be when they refer to a fossil of a "plant-eating dinosaur in Antarctica" and that the apatosaurus was "a plant-eating dinosaur that walked on all four legs". I took the liberty of searching my CD-ROM for "tyrannosaurus" and there are no references to it eating meat, in the 2 or 3 times it is mentioned.
Now, keep in mind what I said earlier, that the Society has not been in the habit of talking about herbivorous lions for quite some time. Therefore, the idea of meat-eating animals being created is not contradictory to Watchtower teaching if they have truly abandoned this interpretation. For instance, there's an article in the Awake of 5/8/04 about carnivorous plants which would seem to implicitly acknowledge that God must have created the Venus flytrap, the pitcher plant, etc. to eat insects (at least, they don't offer any explanation for this, as if they think it needs explaining in light of Isaiah 11).
I did, however, find an article from WT 12/15/61 (Questions from Readers) that states that animals once ate only vegetation and will return to that state. I just haven't found anything newer yet. They actually don't mention the scripture in Isaiah 11 at all, instead using Gen. 1:30 and the Flood account as their evidence that animals could and did subsist on vegetation at one time, so they can do it again. Amusingly, they are using the Flood account to remind us that Noah did not have the ability to keep meat on the ark, therefore the lions and other "meat-eaters" must have been eating vegetation that he brought onboard; this makes a better point for disproving the Flood account than proving universal herbivory :-)
Edit: I forgot to mention how this QfR ends. The final sentence is classic: "Let us take the Bible position on the subject and not over-occupy ourselves with merely incidental matters to the extent of wasting time, thought and peace of heart and possibly stumbling ourselves into the camp of the godless evolutionists." So there's your real answer, OP. Shut up and read the Bible more ;-)
