Why do some Jehovah's Witnesses choose to be atheist or agnostic? (page 6)

breakfast of champions

You win breakfast.

I don't think I won.

I think you chose to let me win.

-BoCotR

Vidiot

Cassaruby - "Why do some Jehovah's Witnesses choose to be atheist or agnostic?"

We didn't.

The WTS just did such an effective job inoculating us against any other form of religious expression, the choice was practically made for us.

cobweb

I choose not to believe in fairies, except for metaphorical fairies. Like grimms fairy tales is a book I like.

So belief is just a matter of choice to you? Just a whim of feeling? It requires no underpinnings of evidence whatsoever. You could just so easily believe in Santa Claus as not or believe in elves and pixies or not.

Cassaruby

Well belief is probably rooted in the emotional side of our brains. It's difficult to reason out belief. I like how Buddhist can stay in reality and distinguish what are stories. If my intuition tells me a belief is true I will accept that belief as long as it serves me from a personal standpoint.

I really value JWs use of evidence as I value Campbell's use of poetic metaphors. When it comes to working with a book such as the Bible I wouldn't be able to work with any particular church without scriptural evidence.

cobweb

I was talking to my cousin about the state of the world and how I thought it was taking a very dark turn. This cousin thinks as you do, and tried to tell me that if it upset me to believe this about the state of the world, then I should simply think differently about it and I would not feel upset. She was trying to be comforting but she was encouraging me into a delusion.

Cassaruby

When taken to extremes reason serves us better than faith. In it's extreme faith is intolerant. People can't stop making meaning so outside of extremes faith serves man very well.

Delusion seems like an extreme word in this conversation

cofty

Does it even matter if something is true or false

Yes

When it comes to working with a book such as the Bible I wouldn't be able to work with any particular church without scriptural evidence

Why do you think it is worthwhile organising your beliefs around a collection of books written by ignorant Iron Age nomads and warlords with the ethics of ISIS?

cofty

outside of extremes faith serves man very well..

How are you defining faith?

Saename

Cassaruby - Mostly I'm curious why a former jehovah's witness would make a direct 180 and run the other way instead of making use of the positive things they discovered.

I think there's a simple reason for that. While being a Jehovah's Witness, you are taught to be gullible and naive. You believe everything the Watchtower says in the publications; you believe everything the elders teach you. Then, one day, the illusion disappears, and you learn that you were just biased all this time. You only trusted information from the Watchtower while dismissing any contradicting evidence.

When that illusion disappears, you become less gullible—much less gullible. When I personally became an agnostic atheist after being a Jehovah's Witness (an unbaptised publisher), I instinctively began to follow evidence wherever it led me. Hence, becoming an atheist wasn't much of a choice. It isn't a choice. One day I realised there is no evidence for God, and the belief disappeared on its own. I didn't choose agnostic atheism. I decided to follow evidence wherever it led me, but becoming atheist wasn't exactly a choice. It was a by-product of the choice I made previously to follow the evidence. The belief in God disappears on its own.

However, I should note that I didn't become an atheist by investigating the Watchtower like many here have done. I do investigate the organisation from time to time (such as the child sex abuse cases), but becoming atheist was something that happened as a result of studying the Bible from the critical point of view. Here is my thought process:

I read Deut. 22.28–29, which is a law given to the Israelites by God (allegedly.) That law says that if a man rapes (the verse uses Hebrew words taphas and shakab which mean "to seize, lay hold of, or capture" and "to lay down [with someone]" respectively) an unengaged virgin, he has to pay her father 50 shekels and then marry her. The woman gets no justice but hey! she gets to marry the man who raped her. Really? That's a divinely inspired law?Here is the most important question to ask when reading this law: Why the hell is it in the Old Testament?

Other laws that inspire questions are those from Exod. 21. These laws explicitly support slavery. When I was a Christian (Jehovah's Witness), I reconciled these laws with my faith by saying that (1) Christians are not under the law anymore, and (2) the whole world back then was primitive morally, so it's no surprise the Jewish society also reflected this primitiveness. I rationalised that God could not have forced the Jews to have laws against rape and slavery because Jews were just too backwards morally. They needed time to grow up as a society. But I also realised that this rationalisation is simply too problematic.

Firstly, it's true that Christians are not under the law anymore (theologically speaking.) But that's not the issue. The issue is why those laws are in the Old Testament in the first place (and additionally the New Testament also supports slavery [Eph. 6.5]). The Old Testament is supposed to be of divine origins—inspired of God. But if it contains laws that support slavery and rape, does it mean God also condones these things? If not, why are these laws in HIS goddamn collection of books? They shouldn't be there.

Secondly, saying that God could not have given the Jews laws against rape and slavery because Jews were just too backwards morally, and because the whole world was simply primitive is also highly problematic. Most importantly, the Christian God is supposed to be omnipotent. Why couldn't he just rewire the minds of the Jews so that they could accept these laws? Is he not "omnipotent enough"? Moreover, there are other laws—nonsensical laws, I may add—that this Christian God did include in the Bible despite the fact that these other laws are simply ridiculous. I'm talking about laws such as these: don't eat pork, don't eat shrimps, and don't boil a young goat in its mother's milk. How are these laws relevant to morality? They're not! They are downright idiotic. They don't benefit the society. And yet he forced the Jews to accept these laws, but he could not have forced the Jews to accept laws prohibiting rape and slavery? Really?

You would've hoped that the whole thing gets better in the New Testament. And it does—to some degree. The New Testament at least has laws that tell you to love your neighbour, etc. But you cannot focus on the good laws and ignore the bad ones. The bad ones are still there! There—in the supposedly divinely inspired collection of ancient books written by ancient authors who knew nothing about science. And we're supposed to listen to these books? Well, let me list some of the ridiculous laws it has:

1 Tim. 2.11–14

Let a woman learn in silence with full submission. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor.

Rom. 1.26–27

For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the man, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.

1 Cor. 11.5

[...] but any woman who prays or prophesies with her head unveiled disgraces her head—it is one and the same thing as having her head shaved.

Eph. 6.5

Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as you obey Christ; [...]

Do you see what's wrong with these verses? They do not reflect a morally superior God. In fact, I would say they lack morality. What is so good about these verses? How the hell do you find "truth" in these passages (not the Watchtower "truth" but the "ultimate truth" mainstream Christians say there is in the Bible)? I mean, sure, you can cherry-pick the good verses and ignore the ones I cited. But why are you doing that? Because the verses I cited don't fit the modern world? If they don't fit the modern world, what do you conclude about the Christian God? Did he inspire these passages? If so, are those his moral values? If not, why are they there?

You may know that 1 Tim. and Eph. are forgeries not actually written by Paul. So why are those forgeries in the New Testament? Did God inspire the Bible but forgot to protect it from forgeries and interpolations? If so, why are we to trust anything from the Bible? For all we can actually know, all of this could have been written by some wackos from the first century. If there are forgeries in the New Testament, why should we trust that everything else but these forgeries was written by divinely inspired writers? There is no way to trust the Bible. There's simply no way. When you consider what I wrote about the Old Testament, there's just no way. How could this have been written by God?

What does inspiration even mean? Does it mean that all those writers of all those books wrote word for word what God told them? That would be ridiculous because it would show what kind of ridiculous moral values God has. And if not, then does inspiration mean that those writers of the Bible got the basic idea of what to write from God but actually wrote the words for themselves? If so, it still shows the basic idea of God's ridiculous morality. Or does inspiration mean that God made those writers just "wise" in some ambiguous, undefined sense (anyone would want to define it?), and then these authors wrote on paper (papyrus, ha!) their own ideas? But if they wrote their own ideas, not God's, why should we trust some ignorant (meaning: lacking knowledge) people from the Antiquity? They were obviously sexist, racist, and god knows what else...

There's simply no way to trust the Bible. All the objective evidence suggests it contains outdated values of people from the Antiquity. There's no "enlightenment" from God.

Cassaruby

I think there are benefits to reading and understanding mythological books.

I define faith as an emotional belief in the mystery that is involved in experiencing life.

Why do some Jehovah's Witnesses choose to be atheist or agnostic?

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