Is the religion of Jehovah's Witnesses really an inferior form of Christianity? (page 2)

nicolaou

Over simplification and you know it Slim'.

In answer to your thread. In some ways other religions might be superior. But one way JWs will always be superior in my opinion is that they won't take part in war. The perennial questions to Anglicans, Mormons, Catholics or whoever: would you fight your brothers in France if we went to war? is pretty damning imo.

David_Jay

If my literal, spiritual, or otherwise “brother” and I lived during the time of World War II, and this brother of mine was a Nazi gathering up Jews into concentration camps and slaughtering them, and my brother would not stop and listen to reason, yes, I would fight him. I will do whatever it took to save the life of innocents.

Just last year Catholics and Protestants in Austria formally apologized to Jews for the part they played in NOT standing up to the Nazis and stopping the transportation of Jews across their borders to be placed into concentration camps. These were religious people who did not fight in the war, and they were apologizing for their lack of action. For whatever it was worth, regardless of the fact that many Jews did or did not accept such an apology, these people and their organizations realized that doing nothing could be just as bad as fighting.

Sometimes defending oneself requires a fight. Sometimes wars are more than just battles with bombs and guns, sometimes they are merely debates and arguments with words. Sometimes there have to be disagreements, and sometimes there are battles that have to be fought, obstacles that have to be overcome.

And yes, sometimes the violence engaged by some religious people is totally beyond the pale. But just as often standing by and doing nothing can make you just as guilty.

Jehovah’s Witnesses often praise their “neutrality” because they praise everything about themselves, not because it is the right thing to do. One smooth, reflective facet does not a jewel make.

Half banana

To evaluate JWs in terms of Christianity has many difficulties because it means different things to different groups. In a way I think that JWs take all the worst aspects of primitive Christianity such as unthinking belief in supernatural revelation and they run with it. In many respects JWs do appear to maintain the credulous cult enthusiasm of the early centuries but that certainly does not make it better than others. You cannot deny that the early church was also a doomsday cult yet JWs unquestioningly borrow those same doomsday scriptures to justify their own existence. The fact is that Jesus got it wrong in the first century so how can repeating the same failed prophecy have any relevance now? This contrasts with the established churches which try and serve the welfare of the communities in which they operate and don’t worry about the fairy-tale nature of the Bible.

The essence of Christianity is the focus on the saviour figure, as it was for all the other father and son Christ cults before it, but the Jesus cult offered a new twist on the old story which claimed that the Christ figure had become blood and flesh! The written word of the legend they taught; had become a breathing man... what a story! You would have to have been illiterate and desperate to believe that in the first place, however later on, Roman Catholic propaganda sanitized the hoax and not only made it acceptable but demanded that it was holy truth.

(The Gnostics, David J, as I have read... but can’t remember where... recognised that Jesus was the same religion as the former Christ cults and appreciated the idea without partisan judgement as all of them being a positive expression of human hopefulness).

So JWs inferior? No, I don’t think so since the whole of Christianity whilst giving comfort for the downtrodden is all based ultimately on folk myth and not on testable evidential truth. In other words Christianity including JWs, proclaims what it cannot deliver, they preach a false hope.

sowhatnow

seems to me they want to be a spin off of Judaism or be ancient Israelite's . they really don't believe Jesus is who we should be praying to, or that he is as important as god, since they have put Jahs name in place of 'Lord'[JESUS] . [thus actually supporting the trinity, lol ]

or that Jesus' name is to be preached, or that he is a mediator and whatever else.

they also pick and choose an mosaic law to' sort of' follow. and then twist it terribly. the whole,

no blood, no divorce, women are inferior, shunning, the whole us and them, mentality,

got to be baptized in water, [old baptism] 1000 pharisee like rules. and 'we belong to jah. ie: Yhwh.

hmm

Finkelstein

But one way JWs will always be superior in my opinion is that they won't take part in war.

There are other religious faiths that through their own doctrines will not partake in war.

slimboyfat

Not many. In Nazi Germany 10,000 JWs were improsoned, and only a handful from other faiths combined.

David_Jay

Slimboyfat, there were not only a handful of other faiths in the concentration camps of the Nazis. There were millions of Jews there too.

slimboyfat

Jews were victimized not because of what they did, nor because of what they were. They were targeted for destruction because of what their grandparents were ...
Alone of all the groups targeted by the Nazis, the Jehovah's Witnesses were victimized because of what they refused to do. They would not enlist in the army, undertake air raid drills, stop meeting or proselytizing. They would not utter the words 'Heil Hitler.' Their dissent was irksome, disciplined and systematic ...
Jews had no choice. Jehovah's Witnesses did. As such, they are martyrs in the traditional sense of the term - those prepared to suffer and even to die for the choice of their faith.
Michael Berenbaum, former director of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum

David_Jay

That's a classic example of what is known in forensics as a "red herring."

Slim: "Only a handful of other faiths [were] in the concentration camps."

So Jews are not a people of a certain faith?

Besides, the real issue is whether Jehovah's Witnesses are an inferior form of Christianity. Was being neutral to the persecution of the Nazis something God wanted the Witnesses to do? What about the JWs who did not end up in the camps? What about those free JWs who did nothing to stop them?

If being victims makes Jehovah's Witnesses a superior religion, then Jews are superior to JWs because five to six millions Jews perished in the Holocaust.

And forgetting that Jews are people of a certain faith and made up the majority of people in the camps just didn't sit right with me, so I mentioned it.

Is the religion of Jehovah's Witnesses really an inferior form of Christianity?

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