My proposal for Mankind to end all doubts...

by James Mixon 27 Replies latest watchtower bible

  • CalebInFloroda
    CalebInFloroda

    It is, but not impossible.

    I was just a teen when it happened to me, but partly because I was lied to by the elders who studied with me.

    You see I had relatives who tried hard to keep me away from it all. My parents were of no use, but I should have listened to what I learned from aunts, uncles, and cousins who kept telling me I was a "Mexican Jew," as they put it.

    At 17 I didn't know what this meant, and I asked the elders who studied with me about it as they were preparing me for baptism. "My family tells me I can't get baptized because we are Mexican Jews."

    The elders laughed. "There is no such thing," they assured me. "This is all that attack from Satan we warned you about that would happen."

    A few years later I learned that it was no such Satanic attack. My family was trying to tell me I was from a group known as the "Mexican Jews of Monterrey." Monterrey, Mexico was settled and founded by some of the Jews who were expelled from Spain due to the Spanish Inquisition. The Inquisition followed them to Mexico, hunted them down, and chased them into Texas where my family settled.

    Being uneducated is the worse thing you can be. The elders made a stupid assumption and told me there was no such thing as the "Mexican Jews" because they are religiously and historically ignorant. I was stupid enough to believe them because I was just a kid and didn't know my own ancestral history or its significance well enough.

    Many Jews who convert to Christianity do it merely because of this lack of education in their own history. You are right that it is an enormous leap to make to become a JW. Catholicism is the only thing similar to Judaism in Christianity. Everything else is pretty much foreign and Gentile in nature. JWs are dripping in pagan practices and don't even know it. So for a Jew to make that leap is to be willing to assimilate into a culture that is foreign and anti-Semitic, something Jews can smell miles away unless they just don't know anything. There is nothing more evil in the eyes of Jews than assimilation...well, maybe genocide. So for an educated Jew to become a Witness would require embracing the principles that inspired Hitler.

    I will tell you this. I learned of and verified my ancestral history while still a Witness. It did not take long after before I went rushing out. I didn't wait or fade either. I was giving a talk one day and gone the very next.

    I look back at all those brochures and publications with illustrations of Paradise, and now I wonder how I could be so blind. Do you know what is missing from all those people dressed in different garb of different nationalities in the JWs pictures? Do you know what type of dress you never, ever see anyone wearing at one of those international conventions of Jehovah's Witnesses? You never see Jews.

    You never see men wearing traditional head coverings known as kippah or yarmulke. You never see Jews in prayer shawls or women in Jewish dress. You never see Jewish men with full beards. You see none of this. The Watchtower is anti-Semitic. There are no Jews in their paradise, no Jewish culture left. No one from Israel is seen in traditional clothing at their conventions either. I'll bet your Jewish friend never got to wear his head covering in a Kingdom Hall or wear a beard or prayer shawl, am I right? They likely made him do what they made me do, assimilate from Jewish culture to pagan Western culture.

    God's organization? Yeah, right!

  • azor
    azor
    Caleb please don't take this the wrong way I'm just a little confused by your stand as a Jew. Perhaps I'm off here but earlier you mentioned a former boyfriend and your username is Caleb. Are you a gay believing Jew?
  • CalebInFloroda
    CalebInFloroda

    Yep.

    Except for Orthodox Jews, all branches of Judaism accept lesbian and gay members. Reform Judaism, the largest Jewish branch in the United States and the one to which I subscribe is very accepting of the LGBT community. It was even at the forefront of the fight for marriage equality here in the United States.

  • James Mixon
    James Mixon

    Calebin: WOW! I really appreciate that. I have never thought about some of the points

    you made,"the WT is ant-Semitic, what is missing from all those people dressed in different

    garb of different nationalities". And yes my Jewish friend never got to wear his head covering

    in the KH or a beard and prayer shawl..

    I believe he only became a JW because of his wife, she was black. They divorced and he have

    not been seen since. This happen around 1970...

  • azor
    azor

    That's great what they have done for the LGBT community. My niece is part of that community and I have recently reestablished my relationship with her after leaving the cult.

    What I gather from reform Judaism is that it is more culturally based than religious. Good for you having a community. That is one of the toughest things leaving is not having friends or family and starting from scratch. It can be very lonely.

  • never a jw
    never a jw

    Calebfloroda

    "By the way, my post in not meant to be taken as a challenge to the current convictions of a non-theist."

    It's not a challenge at all. It's a challenge to my brain capacity to understand what your brain Is trying to get at. I think the opening piece was quite simple and clear.

    If I may add, why a good G-d who is interested in humanity and according to many, wants humanity to know him, doesn't communicate in unequivocal terms. He could fix all doubts, all religious wars, all debates between sects, most wrong doers (at least they will be scared). Either he doesn't exist, or he doesn't care, or he is having fun playing "hide and seek"

  • never a jw
    never a jw

    CalebinFloroda

    "The Watchtower is anti-Semitic"

    The entire Christian movement is anti-Semitic. Haven't you read the New Testament, the epistle of Barnabas, and many other Christian writings, haven't you read European/Christian history?

  • CalebInFloroda
    CalebInFloroda

    Never a JW,

    While many of your questions might seem to imply something in the Christian paradigm of Western Society...why G-d wants people to know him, why not end all doubts, debates, etc., why play Hide and Seek, etc...they aren't specific to the Jewish concept of life, duty to humanity and the world, and don't take into account that some Jews don't believe that God exists.

    Unlike Christianity and especially the JWs, Jews don't claim to have all the answers or even see having definite replies for everyone to accept as a good thing. After all if everything were spoon-fed to you, could you ever really learn to grow and understand things for yourself? We all have to learn to read, write, do math problems for ourselves. We are born in a world where we have to find or even make the answers we constantly have to seek.

    And why does G-d have to exist anyway? Can't you be a good person without there being a G-d?

    Want the debates to stop, then stop engaging in them. You may not stop others from doing so, but who are you to tell others what they can or cannot debate about.

    And who said G-d was hiding? Is the concept of the G-d of Abraham limited to reality? If the stories are just myths, do they not have any moral value or point to them? Many people are suffering, many searching for hope and direction, etc. If you notice such needs then why are you not doing something about it? Does a deity need to exist for these people to have hope and direction? If people in our world are lost, is it not our responsibility as members of a community to let them know we are here for them?

    Instead of worrying about whether G-d is real, Judaism says you should fix what you see needs fixing in the world. If there is a G-d, then you have done good, but if it not you have still fixed things. Stop acting like a bitching and moaning Christian and do something on you own initiative. Like G-d asked Job, "So you think you know so much that you think you should have answers? Then you supply them to me!"

    Not all facets of Christianity are anti-Semitic, and not all individuals within a given Christian sect can be charged with being anti-Semitic. And yes, I've read the New Testament and Christian writings...in Greek. I'm a philologist. Bible translators and teachers of all denominations call on me for help in their work. It's not all anti-Semitic.

    And the history...yeah, I know it well. I'm Jewish, remember? There's this thing called the Diaspora, the Spanish Inquisition, and the Holocaust, and they happened in Europe. They were anti-Semitic, but a lot of history was not too.

    And lastly, I added that part you mentioned because what I write might sound like a challenge to some atheists, because some here have told me so themselves. That was where my brain was at, to counter that before someone brought it up and misread my comments as a challenge to an ideology I have no problems with.

    Good questions, though, even if you didn't mean them to be literal.

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