Meeting with friends Pastor

by sunny23 9 Replies latest jw experiences

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  sunny23

  My close friend has stopped attending meetings about 2 yrs ago. Is DF'd. And attends memorial and a meeting here and there to appease his mother enough that she will still communicate with him. He has however this year realized that the WT is bunk and has no intention of putting all his chips into them.

  Now he is trying to fill his spiritual void by going to a non-denominational church his boss introduced him to. From there he started meeting with his bosses father-in-law who was Catholic for many years and then a non catholic pastor, who is now a free-roaming agent of God so to speak that despises organized religion and aspires to enlighten people about the truth of the Bible. Apparently this man met up with my friends buddy who is still active JW who brought a Circuit Overseer with him. This pastor of my friend "tore the CO a new one" in some debate to which the CO retreated by saying he would come back with a researched response. In the car the CO told my friends buddy that they would never go back because that pastor just wanted to argue and didnt want to listen. So now my friend thinks this pastor is apostle Paul reincarnate.

  My friend invited me to this church to "give it a try and at least let me know if I'm wasting my time." I agreed even though I had already informed him that I no longer held any supernatural beliefs to which he said, "well you at least still believe in the bible and that its true!?" I replied "no." Gave him a few brief reasons but he wasnt moved by them.

  My goal here really is not to deconvert the pastor or my friend. Its to show my friend that he needs to question everything, be skeptical, think critically, and never agree to weak premises just because it sounds appealing. He seems thus far to be chewing up everything this man says as complete fact. I cant teach my friend to think for himself but I can maybe expose a few flaws in what he is learning enough to plant seeds and see where he takes them.

  Our first meeting covered topics like OT vs NT God, accuracy of prophecy, the ability to actually "Know" you are saved by God, and i finished with asking how one could reconcile the non action of God in things like tsunamis to which he responded "it can't be reconciled, no one could...God works in mysterious ways." We moved way too fast and topics got switched so much that nothing was addressed adequetly. Im going to try and set a better pace this time and maybe bring a pad and paper to write and keep us on track and finish a topic before moving on.

  To The Point:
  

  The main theme of the meeting tonight is Why The God of the OT is Perfectly Loving, Kind, and The Same as the God of the NT. I will try and record it on my phone to post here. Any specific suggestions?
  
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  cofty

  I am envious!

  Please let us know how it goes
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  sunny23

  I feel it will be hard to keep him on track and face my questions concerning morals and ethics of the OT rather than skirting the issues and putting emphasis on the NT. I feel though he will go one of these 3 routes to excuse acts in the OT:

  1) cultural context

  2) god works in mysterious ways

  3) people of that time had to have those laws in place for the good of the whole and preserving His people

  I feel ready to spare those points but I have never had In-Person religious debate before. Thinking things out and typing on a forum are much easier. Preaching work didnt count, not the same.
  
• 

  Crazyguy

  The god of the old testament is pure evil.
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  sunny23

  So the venue was too loud and crowded for recording unfortunately. I can sum up from memory what many of their (Pastor and his son-in-law) main points were:

  1) He asked if I have done as he asked me to do and that is approach God in prayer and ask Him to reveal Himself to me. Pastor knows I don't believe in Gods existence. This is silly. I may as well pray to the pink unicorn behind Jupiter to also reveal itself to me. I said I did just to continue conversation.

  2) He spent a good amount of time trying to convince me that salvation is dependent entirely upon accepting Jesus Christ as savior and having a righteous heart despite your actions. Through my questioning we discovered that God blanketed the deserving ones of the OT with His righteousness thus saving them without Jesus Christ. God also reveals himself through the "evidence" of his creation to small tribes of people who have lived and died without the Gospel. These very people choose to accept or deny almighty God after merely being exposed to His creations. And finally, now that Jesus has come and gone it is through his name alone and our righteous hearts that God choses to open up that we can be saved. No matter what I said regarding the logical needlessness of Christ's death based on these premises and the issues with good people going to hell for non belief and bad people going to heaven for accepting Jesus on their death bed, this Pastor could see nothing wrong with this. Oh and before Jesus came everyone was thrown in Hades after dying and were to be judged after Jesus came so they can go to their respective destinations at that time. Babies fall under the blanket of their parents, evil parent=baby goes to hell...wow.

  3) I mention something happening millions of years ago and suddenly get barraged with anti evolution and young earth questions and fallacies. These included:

  a) how does anything become more complex, like genetic code. I gave several examples of things becoming more complex or dense in information.

  b) 2nd law of thermodynamics. I interrupted his spouting about this topic with the fact that the universe is not in a closed system.

  c) they made comments that showed that they don't know what evolution says and does not say. I taught them about natural selection, selective dispersion, environmental pressures, and they seemed amazed that whales have useless hip bones and their confirmed-by-genetics ancestors had legs, they wanted to see evidence of this. (I will provide it).

  d) where does the human eye come from, its so complex blah blah blah. Also you cant through a grenade in a junkyard and expect a Mercedes to appear. They couldn't seem to agree with me that this very same logic must also be applied to a God who is far more complex than the human eye, and thought nothing of the fact that our eyes a far inferior to many birds and octopus.

  4) We talked about God's acts of love and justice in the OT along with salvation aside from works. They read to me where Daniel on his deathbed was saying that he has never wronged God or broken a commandment and is saved by Gods righteousness. I got the pastor to make the claim that the actions of Daniel in killing Uriah didn't matter. I said that if that were true then God wouldn't have punished him for it. Pastor said that even today people have to be held responsible for their actions, murderers go to jail. I said "exactly, it would be unjust to kill a murderers baby to punish the murderer." They looked very confused by this. I said, "God killed Daniels baby to punish him for Daniel killing Uriah." They didn't believe me that God caused it, we read the scriptures and then they went on saying "oh well, God was merciful to spare Daniel because he had a plan for Daniel that included many good things and we cant know that plan, plus that baby went straight to heaven so its ok." I tried to show that the action of killing the baby is wrong no matter what the father did or what good may come of it. They then said "many things seem to go wrong or look bad but we can trust God is good and has a plan that leads to the most good in the end."

  5) "Even Hitler was part of God's plan." I don't think my jaw could have dropped any lower here.

  From here there was a lot of bouncing around back to the topics already listed because I felt I could never cover more than one or two refutations before they lead me to a new scripture or another horrible analogy pertaining to another topic.

  6) I was given a print out of this explanation of why God allows evil including tsunamis here. This includes quotes like:

  "If there is an absolute moral law, then there must be an absolute moral Law-Giver.”

  "As for why God has permitted so much evil for so long, we can only ask: Who would know better than an all-knowing Being? As for us finite creatures, we must be content to know: “The secret things belong to the Lord our God” (Deut 29:29). "

  “There were no earthquakes, tornados, or hurricanes in the Garden of Eden, and there will be none in the new heaven and new earth. The reason there are such things in between Paradise Lost and Paradise to Come is that “sin entered the world by one man [Adam] and death by sin (Rom 5:12), and as a result “the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it, in the hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Rom 8:20-21)." "

  "Although God does not cause the evil, nonetheless, He is working in the evil to bring about a greater good. God permits evil in order to defeat evil. He allows lower evil to produce the higher good."

  "We can’t achieve patience without tribulation. Even if our suffering is lifelong, Paul reminds us that “this slight momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison” (2 Cor 4:17)."

  "God is more interested in our holiness than in our happiness. There is no verse in the Bible that says, “Be happy, as I am happy.” There are verses that declare, “Be holy, as I am holy” (Lev 11:44-45; 19:2). Yes, God is more interested in our character than our comfort, and He has been known to sacrifice the latter in order to achieve the former."

  "All that are in hell chose it. Without that self-choice there could be no hell."

  I plan to expose the absurdity in these statements to the best of my abilities but feel this will be our last meeting. If any could offer advice on how best to deconstruct the article I linked at point 6 it would be much appreciated. Thanks.
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  cofty

  Thanks for the update. I will have a read through it more carefully later.
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  millie210

  Actually, a lot of what they said reminds me of old light JW-ism. I was thinking specifically about the childrens salvation being dependent on the parent.
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  cofty

  Why Earthquakes, Tornados, and Tsunamis?
  Why does God permit such horrible disasters? My response is this: “There were no earthquakes, tornados, or hurricanes in the Garden of Eden, and there will be none in the new heaven and new earth. The reason there are such things in between Paradise Lost and Paradise to Come is that “sin entered the world by one man [Adam] and death by sin” (Rom 5:12), and as a result “the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it, in the hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Rom 8:20-21).

  No, christians don't get to have their own facts.

  The evidence of earthquakes and tsunamis going back 10s of thousands of years is beyond dispute. At one time it was possible to walk from England to continental Europe across Doggerland. 8 200 years ago the "Storegga Slide" caused a tsunami that killed an unknown number of of ancient Britons. research has shown that similar events have occurred here about every 100 000 years.

  Natural disasters like tsunamis have nothing to do with human activity. These sort of "answers" demonstrate a willful ignorance of the facts.
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  sunny23

  "No, christians don't get to have their own facts."Cofty

  Yes I was going to attack the claim about earthquakes by first showing how tectonic plates move to form mountains. Earthquakes are the result of rigid moving plates and we have mountains with sediment layers that date them older than 6000 years. Then say that by this false premise of Geislers that the plates in Adams time before sin were either 1) not moving or 2) moving but they were not rigid thus not causing earthquakes.

  Either way it would have been Gods deliberate decision to make the rigid plates move as a result of mans sin, or make the moving plates from smooth to rigid knowing full well that it would bring about the death and destruction of millions of even innocent creations given enough time when he could have left sins results to only birth pains, farming difficulties, thorny bushes, and human aging/death. This would accuse God of more than negligence, it would be premeditated evil.
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  sunny23

  Also I forgot to add that they attacked evolution as being only a theory, not a fact.

  I informed them that theory is the highest that an explanation can achieve in the sciences and that the theory is based on facts. Later on a different topic the son-in-law tried to use an analogy that involved gravity and I interrupted and sarcastically said that "I would hear no more" because gravity is only a theory. After proving to them that it was it seemed like their skulls were about to cave in, it looked painful.

  I look forward to addressing the quote "God permits evil in order to defeat evil." This is like a father permitting his daughter to walk down a dark alley every night in minimal clothing in hopes that she will be raped so that the rapist can be put in prison. Better yet, this is like superman waiting for the bullet from a criminals gun to go through the skull of a woman so that he can then kill or imprison the criminal for the evil act instead of jumping in front of the bullet. God doesn't jump in front of bullets, not even millions of bullets. No he even permits viruses and cancers to form.