I'm not a big movie watcher but last night I watched part of Schindler's list. This was my second attempt to do so because I couldn't watch the whole movie when it first came out. Again last night I cried at the cruelty of it all and hatred behind the extermination of 6 million people because they were of different origin or had different beliefs. For JWs only Satan could have driven Hitler to such cruelty including the persecution and murder of thousands of faithful JWs during the Holocaust. I couldn't stop thinking of how our loving God Jehovah is about to do the same thing at Armageddon and destroy billions because they have different beliefs or were born in the wrong culture. In the movie there is a part where thousand of dead bodies are being burned and their ashes are coming down like snow all over the city...I was thinking about the billions of bodies that will need to be disposed of after Armageddon. How can JWs see the cruelty in the Holocaust as coming from Satan and still believe their deliverance by their loving God can only be achieved by the destruction of millions of lives at Armageddon? My wife is still in and I wanted to ask her these questions...but unfortunately it would have only led to a dispute about my apostate thinking...
My thoughts while watching Schindler's list movie...
by NVR2L8 6 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
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AndDontCallMeShirley
How can JWs see the cruelty in the Holocaust as coming from Satan and still believe their deliverance by their loving God can only be achieved by the destruction of millions of lives at Armageddon?
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It's not just JWs that feel this way. Many/most of the Fundamentalist religions like JWs relish the thought of god exterminating everyone who does not believe in the same fictions as they do.
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"Men, in order to do evil, must first believe that what they are doing is good." -Alexander Solzhenitsyn
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This can be re-written, 'in order to believe in evil thoughts like Armageddon, a Jehovah's Witness must first accept that what they believe is good'.
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Incidentally, a belief that is becoming more common among JWs (I've heard it from a Circuit Overseer from the platform) is that most JWs will die at Armageddon as well. I've heard one elder recently say that "80% of JWs will not make it". I guess because they've already condemned all non-JWs to death, the only ones left to turn on are their own brothers. Wonderful religion, isn't it ?
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humbled
NVR2L8,
Good description of how your heart can teach you what is true if you let it "talk" to your brain.
Something like this worked on my brain when some of my children just could not believe--really believe---that God was there or( if he was) they just could not find any way to honestly relate to him--even with Jesus leading the way.
They studied and lived without hypocrisy--our dialogues were as open as could be.
One girl broke down and I got a counseler to come to the home for her. She was suicidal--having been baptised: her crisis of faith, she knew it well, would cost her mother.
to know your beloved 16 year-old daughter had stopped on her way home from school, talked to the neighbor about an inability to believe in her religion's god anymore and then curl up on her couch and sob "I going to lose my mother, I'm going to lose my mother." --Until the woman called me and I went to her.
(She didn't lose me--but if we had not moved out of state soon after this event, I don't know what would have happened. I was, after all one of JEHOVAH'S WITNESSES. The elders were NOT sympathetic, NOT happy that I got her a counselor ASAP . But that is another story.)
It really was painful to watch a child grow--and sometimes get baptised or sometimes resist it because they had so much respect for the idea of god that they didn't "play" with it. It was so emotionally rending that I did FINALLY let my brain talk to my heart---
I had to ask myself--would god really destroy a person because in all the integrity of their heart they wouldn't pretend or fake anything. They trying to mask bad behavior. They were people that the WT taught me would die at Armageddon.
It wasn't just that these were my kids that I couldn't believe they could die at the hands of the God-of-Love. No--it was that I had seen them struggle with faith with honesty as genuine as I had ever had. I had struggled too--and I had come up with the "blessing". How was it that could happen?
It took time. It did take time. But finally, all the things about WT doctrine and Love came into sharper contrast, polarized and began to break me down--and open me up.
Yep, it came in sideways and opened me up.
I hope the same happens to your wife as has happened to you.
I know it happened to me.
Maeve
Added later: As for the theology of it--Here is the seguey to release from the fear of God: If god operates as the WT says he does, then I definitely don't want to live for ever in his world, their world. And having gone that far I went further yet......
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NVR2L8
Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
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kaik
The best research material on O. Schindler was written by Czech historian Jitka Gruntova whose book was published in 2002. When the movie came out in Czech Republic, the old timers had booed as it was not reflecting the historical truth. People forget that it was not documentrary but movie based on horrible tragedy. I think my grandmother knew him, because they were going in the same school district in the 1920's, I wish I could ask her before she died. Problem with the movie occurred when it was written 25 years after the events in Australia by guy who did not know the locations located behind the Iron Curtian and he recorded memories of the survivors.
When I was in the school in the 70's we had survivors of WWII and concentration camps coming there and retelling stories from their life. Some of them were really shocking. My father told me that he witnessed Jews being thrown from the roof of the highest building in the city while there was music playing and that the bodies made imprint in the sidewalk below. In 1944 he was as child evacuated into countryside from the city due air rides (it leveled much of my hometown city center), but Gestapo set up entire villages on fire and killed bunch of people as a relaliation for supporting the partysans. After the war, there was ongoing civil war until 1947, which almost killed him and my grandparents after someone thrown grenate into their house that luckily did not exploded.
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Heaven
Armageddon is not coming.
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KateWild
Striking parallel indeed. Non JWs amount to around 60 billion people and their message has not even reached 1.97 billion people in Asian, and Arabic countries. If a God would plan to kill all these people it would certainly be a holocaust on a grander scale. Striking parallel. Kate xx