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"Who else is preaching in twos? Who else is putting kingdom interests first? Who else rejects the trinity?"
by Island Man 15 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
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Apognophos
Yes and when the witnesses say this then ask who else also rejects Christ?
Heh, good point.
And there are fewer Two by Twos and Cooneyites than there are Jehovah's Witnesses. That means that THEIR road is even cramped-er and narrow-er and THAT, folks, is solid evidence that Jesus selected them over all other religions.
Yes, I was thinking that too. If I was still in my "Witnesses are Pharisees" phase before I became agnostic, I would want to learn more about these religions.
Written in 1909, Hogben's impassioned call demonstrates the tireless orchestration required to revive flagging Christianity.ye are my witnesses indeed! Vainly wasted lives spreading tiresome yearnings from a bygone age.
Well said. I skimmed through it last night. It's mostly a series of stories of people witnessing to others, to inspire the reader to witness. It comes across as absurdly needless badgering in many cases. For instance, a sailor who is a One By One "politely" confronts a chaplain and proceeds to argue him to death over whether he is "born again" or not, and what "converted" means. Somehow at the end of this the chaplain is considered to be "saved" because he now agrees with the other guy's arbitrary definitions of concepts from the Bible over his own former definitions. There's no major change in most of these peoples' lives, they're just saying, "Huzzah! I'm really saved now!" It all comes across as so meaningless and based in fleeting emotional epiphanies.
Nevertheless, it is interesting to see the call to "witness" for "Jehovah" (I guess a lot of self-styled Christians were still using that name at the time), and it's interesting to think about whether Rutherford was taking notes. Hogben died in 1921, ten years before Rutherford renamed the religion.
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kaik
Rejection of Trinity can be traced all the way to medieval period. In medieval kingdom of Bohemia, protestant movements in the 15th century that culminated with Hussite Wars and Revolution, there were groups that rejected Trinity. There were various protestant groups in the 16th through 19th century in Europe that did not believe Trinity. WT was not first that rejected Trinity.
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Phizzy
Not that there is any great merit in rejecting the Trinity, but you could not discuss this point of view with a JW.
I do not wish to defend the Doctrine, but when you analyse what Theologians actually mean by it, the JW version of how things are supposed to be as to The Father and the Son etc has more holes in it.
As to "who else is preaching", the JW's do not preach the Good News as explained by the Apostle Paul, who forbade teaching anything different in Galatians, so all the JW hours are worthless, according to Scripture.
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punkofnice
''Who else is.....'' and so forth. Sounds like the 'no true Scotsman' fallacy.
It doesn't matter who does what............doesn't make it true.
Who else is selling 'miracle wheat(tm)'?
...........and whatever no one else is doing that they do now, it'll change in the next 10 years, so that it would be 'apostacy(TM)' to do what they're doing now.
Who else is eating fish fingers and custard? Dr Who?
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Apognophos
I do not wish to defend the Doctrine, but when you analyse what Theologians actually mean by it, the JW version of how things are supposed to be as to The Father and the Son etc has more holes in it.
It's true. I used to think, "Well, even if we have some things wrong, the Trinity (and hellfire, and some other things) is clearly false." But now I see more clearly that certain scriptures are clearly equating Jesus with God. It's technically more of a Binity, or at least a proto-Binity. The holy spirit seems to have been added in some time after the canon was completed.
But when reading the NWT, it's hard to see the best evidence that some early Christians believed Jesus was one with his Father because the Society translated a bunch of "Lord"s as "Jehovah", and some of those "Lord"s were definitely referring to Jesus. For instance, in Romans 10, Paul took a number of scriptures originally referring to YHWH and applied them to Jesus, but the NWT obscures that by putting the tetragrammaton back in, whereas the version Paul quotes in Greek had "kyrios" there, which was what allowed him to make application of the scriptures to Jesus. Removing the ambiguity works against the point Paul was making.
And the hellfire bit isn't so clear-cut either, as it turns out.
''Who else is.....'' and so forth. Sounds like the 'no true Scotsman' fallacy.
Yes, that's exactly what it is. Any religion can do this. "Who else believes that marijuana is a holy plant?" "Who else believes that cows are sacred?" "Who else makes women wear doilies on their heads?"