To DevilsAdvocate:
You certainly struck a sour chord with some people with your post.
You said that the point of your original post was that "not people or
organization should be the big rocks in our lives, but Jehvoah God,
Jesus Christ and the holy spirit". All well and good in principle,
but there are several practical problems with this view.
For one thing, principle and practice within the Witnesses are often
inconsistent. Your stated "rocks" principle is not generally followed
by the average JW, although Brother Average Jaydub will tell everyone,
and perhaps even be convinced in his own mind, that he is following
God first, and the JW organization second. In order to first follow
God rather than humans, you must be convinced that you are fully able
to obey God directly, without human intermediary. If you let a human
intermediary tell you what God is supposed to be saying, then the
intermediary in effect becomes your God, because whether the
intermediary is right or wrong, you're obeying him first and God
second. This is exactly what JW leaders teach the JW community is
proper in God's sight, because they teach that God has appointed them
to this very position, i.e., God commands that to get his approval,
all proper Christians must obey his appointed representatives on earth
today. In other words, JW leaders teach that it is actually wrong for
you to exercise your own thinking ability to the extent of believing
or practicing something that goes against what JW leaders believe or
practice. Really, these men have inserted themselves between God and
humans. The practice of disfellowshipping people who reject this
Watchtower teaching proves my point.
I have no doubt that if Jesus returned along with 'celestial signs' as
described in Matthew 24 and elsewhere in the NT, most JWs would not
believe it until the Society published a Watchtower article about
it. Do you not agree?
I have no doubt that if the Society decided to teach that "new scrolls"
had been opened, per Revelation, which said that Jehovah had gone off
to new things and that from now on Jesus was to be worshiped and prayed
to, the majority of JWs would nod dreamily and comply.
Why do I make such claims? Because the Society has already convinced
JWs to do things that they would condemn as horrendously unchristian
in others. If I went around to your friends and family, and convinced
them that they should avoid you, completely shun you, think of you as
thoroughly wicked and worthy of extermination, simply because you don't
follow my personal teachings about God, and if they followed my
teaching, you would rightly condemn me as looney, and them as idiots
for being convinced to commit such folly. Yet that is exactly what
JW leaders have convinced the JW community to do with tens of thousands
of people. Yet you probably see nothing wrong with what JW leaders do,
simply because they've introduced such wicked teaching with smooth
words. How is it that an entire community of believers can see such
wickedness in others but not in themselves?
How do I know that you go along with such unchristian practice?
Because it seems to me that you have implicitly equated leaving the
Watchtower organization with leaving God.
For another thing, before you can properly adversely judge people who
don't go along with your notion of God, Jesus and the holy spirit, you
have to prove that they exist and have real effect in peoples' lives.
It is the experience of many on this forum, including myself, that
they have no effect at all. Prayer simply does not work. If God is
"out there", he doesn't respond, and he doesn't do anything. Such people
have justifiably concluded that people who claim to get responses to
prayer are fooling themselves, since they cannot actually demonstrate
that they have received responses. It's like a JW who needs, say, to
find a certain kind of cloth to complete a set of curtains for a KH
project, and she goes to a store and happens to find just barely
enough fabric on the roll to do the job. She concludes that Jehovah
somehow orchestrated the whole process of deciding what fabric was to
be used, then made sure that the last person to buy that particular
fabric didn't buy too much, then influenced the Sister to go to that
particular store on just the right date, etc. etc. etc. Sounds pretty
silly when you lay it out like that, doesn't it? Similarly, in most
cases I've heard, where people claim that prayers were answered, the
way things worked out is indistinguishable from pure chance.
Thus, your lament that some posters have left God is hollow indeed.
As JWs, they were never with God to begin with -- partly because their
loyalty was almost certainly to a manmade organization just like it is
with most current JWs, and partly because no one can demonstrate that
there is a God to be close to in the first place.
You posed a couple of questions that amount to, "If we don't stick with
the JW organization, to what organization should we go?" There are a
number of satisfying answers. Which one you like best will depend on
any number of factors.
First consider an illustration: suppose you were dreamily wandering down
a railroad track and didn't notice a train bearing down on you. If I saw
it and wanted to save you, should I first determine some other good
track down which you could safely wander, and then, having made such
considered determination, present you with a variety of evidence urging
you to consider stepping over to an alternate track? Or should I holler,
"Get the bloody hell off that track! A train is coming!" What would you
do if you were faced with such a thing?
Then consider that when Jesus asked his disciples if they wanted to
leave him because of certain problems, they answered not "Where shall
we go?" but "To whom shall we go?" The point is that they were not
concerned about which human organization to obey, but which supernatural
spiritual leader to obey. Jehovah's Witnesses are mostly concerned about
obeying human leaders, since those leaders claim to speak for God, and
JWs believe them.
Finally consider that a truly independent thinker doesn't need to be
told every little thing to do, either with everyday living or with his
religious life. He certainly takes in information and advice from many
quarters, but in the final analysis it is he or she who makes all of
the final decisions as to what is right and what is wrong. That is
precisely what we would expect from an intelligent person. And if you
believe that God created humans, that is precisely what we would expect
him to expect from his intelligent creation. Anything else amounts to
expecting people to behave as robots, and if that's the way you think
God expects people to act, then he might as well just have created
sophisticated tape recorders to play back on command whatever they've
recorded. Of course, that's exactly what the Society expects.
So I would say that a BIG ROCK that is offered by many posters here is
very simple: the mental freedom to think and decide for oneself without
the guilt imposed by the Watchtower Society, which guilt is a result of
its command not to think for oneself but blindly to obey JW leaders.
Whether such freedom involves the concept of God or not is irrelevant,
since God is not demonstrable. Many people, including me, are quite
happy without leaning on some God.
AlanF
