Things That NEVER Made Sense To Me:

by Englishman 29 Replies latest jw friends

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  dark clouds

  anne rice
  captured the sorrow of living eternally best
  with claudia
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  ISP

  Hi Englishman,

  I could never dig those manic prophecies that had supposed fulfillment in the WTS itself! Wow ours must be the god of true prophecy! Like Daniels 1130 days-(whatever the time period) utter garbage!

  ISP
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  expatbrit

  How about this:

  1)The great universal issue is about whether mankind is better off independent of God. About whether we can effectively "rule" ourselves.
  That's why there has been 6000 years of suffering and crap, to test this.

  2)BUT, the whole world is lying in the power of the wicked one, S the D.

  Surely those two WT doctrines are mutually exclusive. How can humanity be tested as to our fitness to rule ourselves if during the test we are all under the control of Satan's system?

  Expatbrit
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  Francois2

  Englishman:

  You quoted: "All scripture is inspired of God and beneficial for teaching." But think about it. What constituted "scripture" when that was written? It certainly wasn't the letter you are quoting. Those guys didn't at that time know that their letters would be collected and one day regarded as the word of God. In fact, nothing from Matthew to Revelation even existed at that time. Therefore, "all scripture" at that time was the Hebrew scripture and nothing but the Hebrew scripture. I suppose if you use the Borg's thinking process, you'd have to rule out the entire Greek scripture when you wanted to deal with inspired materials, huh?

  Francoise2
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  hybridous

  How about this one...

  If the earth is to be a paradise where the lion & lamb get along (no longer hunter and prey), how would nature continue to function?

  The assumption is made that animals would stop preying on humans and EACH OTHER...but isn't nature dependent on aminals living & dying? Nature needs animals to die...it's as simple as that, for a whole list of reasons from population control to soil regeneration.

  Along those lines, consider this...if evolution did not happen (that is, more or less, the animals are as God designed) wouldn't changing their behavior in paradise amount to the fact that the animals in Adam's day (who presumably DID hunt & eat each other) were NOT part of a perfect paradise? Summarily, if the animals were perfect in paradise - they were NOT perfect in the beginning.

  I mean, come on...if the lion & great white shark were specifically designed by God and have remained basically unchanged to the present, weren't they intended to eat meat?

  How many times has a spider's web been used by the Awake magazine to illustrate God's superior design? Too bad the spider web serves no purpose in a paradise where animals no longer prey on each other. And too bad the average witless doesen't question the discrepancies of these beliefs. It can't be both ways!

  Anyone with anything else to add on this subject, please do so...this one has been killin' me.
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  TR

  Englishman,

  3. "You fathers do not be irritating your children etc.......by not taking children to the meetings you are thereby irritating them". Now that is astonishing reasoning! I can think of little else more irritating to a child than hours of interminable meetings!

  Dragging my kids kicking and screaming away from their mom to the meetings, the above WT quote confused me as well.

  TR

  "cults suck"
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  Had Enough

  Hi Englishman:

  A couple of things I found very hard to explain because they just didn't seem to make sense were:

  1. How the GB could publish or tell us at conventions, 'actual accounts' of God's spirit protecting some faithful person's life during some disaster, or accident, or attack etc. when others just as deserving died under similar circumstances. Why did God pick and choose who he would let live and who he would let die. It made no sense to me to say Satan caused all the woes and deaths in the earth, but when someone miraculously lived, it was God's direction.

  2. We constantly heard and were to incorporate into our service messages, the reference to these 'wicked last days'. Everything was 'getting worse than ever before', harder to deal with, more dangerous times, more wars etc. But all we have to do is look at accounts of how little value life had for the ordinary 'joe' in say medieval times, or the times of the different world powers and see how expendible life was, or read of the hardships the first settlers had in new lands, no modern conveniences, machinery, medicines, etc....no comparison to the ease and technology of our life today.

  Those are just a couple for now.

  Strangely though, ISP, the prophecies of 7 times, 2,520 years, 607 to 1914 all made sense to me and were actually a large part of my foundation of being convinced this was the 'truth'. I grew up with feeling how privileged we were to live in these last days and see the paradise and live forever. That's all I ever knew.

  Anyway englishman...like your rendition of 'the other sheep.

  Had Enough
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  tergiversator

  One thing I never understood was the motivation for the preaching work. I mean, I knew we were helping people to learn the "truth" so that they could survive Armageddon, but really, why on earth would anyone think it fair to judge someone based on being woken up on Saturday morning to fifteen seconds of "HiMyNameIsJillPublisherIHaveTheLatestAwakeOnTheRealHopeForTheRainforestsOhNotInterestedOkMaybeSomeOtherTimeBye"

  Really.

  It also seemed silly, thinking about, say, China. I remember one day out in service in the early 90's with a bunch of pioneers sisters (pre-generation change) speculating about how close the end might be. Someone relayed a CO's comment that the "good news being preached throughout the world for a witness to all nations" didn't mean that it couldn't come until after China and the middle East had been thoroughly covered (which, if so, gave us a good couple of decades at least).

  Rather, "all the nations" was "symbolic", and if people in China didn't hear the good news they would die at Armageddon for not knowing better. But, get this, they would then be resurrected in the new system because "Jehovah would know their heart condition". That seemed very inefficient, to me; kill a billion people, then resurrect them again. Not to mention a little hard on the individuals involved, all for an accident of geography.

  I also didn't understand (being the individualstic uppity girl that I was ) why women needed to be "in subjection". The argument about "can't have two captains of the same ship" never flew very far, and anyways, even if it were true, who said the guy was always the most qualified?

  And Had Enough, I agree, one of the reasons I held on mentally for all those years was because it seemed like, whatever other faults there were, the chronologies and prophecies seemed to make sense and indicate that there might still be something to it. Reading Franz's book, looking online, and generally taking a step back and re-examining everything from the outside convinced me that there wasn't anything at all.

  -T.
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  patio34

  Expatbrit,
  That is a problem I've had (and subdued) before: if God was giving humans a chance for self-rule, it wasn't a very good chance.

  My reasoning was that they DIE and are subject to disasters. He was going to rule them in perfection. It wasn't much of a chance since they all had to die in 70-80 years.

  Plus, I didn't even think of your equation that Satan would be ruling. So, how would that be man-rule? Some chance!

  Plus, they weren't even presented with a fair statement of the proposition. "If you listen to the serpent, HE WILL RULE YOU." It wasn't, as they say in the medical field, informed consent.

  Actually, it was a fairy tale.

  Hybridous, I enjoyed your post. I had the same problem, but it was with the dinasours. They, by all accounts, predated humans. They were carnivorous. Adam's sin could not have affected them. If there were a God, he created them with no choice but to kill.

  The writer of Genesis had no way of knowing about the dinasours. Also, there is a clear contradiction of Gen. 1:30 where it states all creation would be given green vegetation to eat. Imo, this is a fatal flaw of the Bible and reveals the ignorance of dinasours on the writer's part.

  Good thread, Englishman!

  Patio
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  larc

  Regarding the lion and lamb thing and the dinasours, I believe the JWs still teach that all the animals ate veggies before the flood. That means that there had to be instant evolution after the flood to account for fangs and such. Of course, this still doesn't expalin the dinsour part of it.

  I was raised in it, so as a kid I didn't give any thoughts to the inconsistencies. However, my father, the unbeliever, used to bring up something to my mother. He asked about this channel of communication thing from God to Brooklyn. Was a voice they heard? Did it come to them in a dream? My mother had no answers of course, and it was one of the few times I saw her get mad.