Exposing the Core Premise of JW False Teaching

by TerryWalstrom 13 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

TerryWalstrom

EXPOSING the CORE PREMISE of JW FALSE TEACHINGS
Poison is at work in any argument with Jehovah's Witnesses. This poison has little to do with the beauty of WatchTower logic or the tasty morsels of JW reasoning.
The poison is odorless and tasteless and it has absorbed into their core premise: Scripture Interpretation directed by Jehovah.
If you BUY into the core premise (somebody possesses a divinely granted access to an infallible source of truth) you are already dead in the water.
That is THE deal breaker. False premises lead always to false conclusions.
Stop right here.
The core misrepresentation of Christianity solely rests in accepting the Bible as the inerrant Word of Almighty God.
What logically follows from swallowing that poison is what leads to cults and denominations’ next step: offering personal interpretation as the only true interpretation.
A leads to B. Buy one and get one free!
This false premise is planted in your head practically from birth. It is inescapable. You find it everywhere like Santa Claus at Christmas.
THE BIBLE IS THE WORD OF GOD and INERRANT?
Is it worth asking the right question about this????
What is the right question?
WHY DIDN'T GOD PRESERVE the original documents?
Original?
(i.e.Moses,David,Paul, etc-sat-down-and-wrote-these-words-on-this-animal skin or papyrus.)
IF YOU DON'T HAVE ANY ORIGINALS AT ALL, what DO you have? Obviously, all you have is somebody's assurance 1. There was an original 2. It was copied accurately. (Without number 1. All you’re left with is an I.O.U. for 2.)
Sleight-of-hand! Your having to trust the assurance rather than the word of God itself. One is cold cash while the other is a promise of cash.
Neat trick, eh?
If GOD did not see fit to preserve the ORIGINAL (Spoiler Alert!) and He didn't…
Why trust the assurances of those who stand to gain by interpreting it for us?
You cannot get past this PREMISE, this fatal flaw, the foundation of Christianity and of Jehovah’s Witnesses. There is no original manuscript preserved to be used to prove anything at all.
The original Bible "books" do not exist anywhere on Earth. We are forced to accept neither the apostles nor the church 1. Thought enough of them to preserve them 2. Had any in the first place.
Jesus never wrote a word of scripture. His teaching was oral.
We are told (by others) those who heard his teachings wrote down what they knew.
Well---DID THEY REALLY?
How do you KNOW?
IF THIS PREMISE IS FALSE......then what??
1.The Catholic Church would have had to develop its religious doctrines based on the authority of men.
2.The authority of church officials would be considered equal to that of God.
3.The activities of the church would indicate how "divine" they were.
4.All the early Christian believers would simply be groups of OPINION MAKERS who interpreted opinions of leaders they found worth listening to.
5.Nobody could prove the superiority of one opinion over and above another's without source authority to point to for refutation.
6.The Church would have to try and settle all the fights, arguments, disagreements and clashing orthodoxies with an OFFICIAL canon and pronouncement of right belief. (All because there was no original manuscript to settle those matters.)
7.The Church would have to use its self-created official status to destroy all opposition by declaring heresy punishable by death. Counter opinion would have to be eliminated by burning documents and destroying naysayers in the harshest possible manner.
Well--isn't this EXACTLY what history shows happened?
The 73 books approved and canonized by the official Christian Church did not prevent that same organization from committing foul deeds throughout the millennia. The fruits of their core premise were dastardly.
When Martin Luther challenged Church authority and inadvertently split Christianity yet again---the Bible was the first thing to be challenged as to authenticity!!
Where are those 73 canonized books purported to be the true word of God?
7 of those books were simply tossed out because they did not match Luther's ideas! So much for the inerrant message from the True God passed on by the authority of The Catholic Church.
For a millennia the church would kill anybody who asserted against their magisterium or anyone who tried to place Scripture ahead of official pronouncement.
Martin Luther, in effect, put his thumb in the eye of Mother Church by asserting a NEW PREMISE.
What was his PREMISE?
NEW PREMISE
1. God doesn't rule men through an Organization.
2.Each Christian is authorized by God to his own bible to discover God’s message of salvation, hope, and truth. In Luther’s words: Sola Scriptura (the Bible alone).
Since the 16th Century, the BIBLE alone was the new PREMISE replacing (go ahead, say it) Organized religion.
You and I--if we grew up in a non-Catholic household of Christian faith--were served this PREMISE on our plate. We grew up with it.
Here’s a scary question.
WHAT IF THIS PREMISE IS AN ERROR as well??
1.Does there exist a True God who communicates with humanity through a book without any original manuscript to back up such claim?
2.If not--how does Christianity get away with opinions pretending to be Divinely authorized?
3.Why should any of us be bound by opinions, claims, counterfeits?
4. Why waste time arguing scriptural interpretation when no scripture of any kind is demonstrably DIVINE?
Clearly, such “religion” is only a man-made tool for controlling the behavior and loyalty of people gullible enough to swallow the poison.
The Watchtower Society embraces BOTH false premises:
1.WatchTower is a provably ever-changing organization of men pretending to authority to interpret Truth and enforcement of orthodoxy
2. WatchTower’s divine communication between God and man with them as the channel of interpretation is a lie.
The WORST of both lies is embodied in one false premise.
WatchTower's organization is what the Catholic Church was no matter how you slice it. Men pretending to be able to tell you how to live while saying it isn't really them saying it. At the same time, they point to the Bible as a source authority redundantly. The Bible they've gone out of their way to rejigger over and over again (proving how malleable a non-sourced prop it really is.)

Food for thought.
We live in a real world and our life is finite in length. Do we need to waste our time arguing scripture, interpretations of scripture, when the only strategy worth asserting is aimed at Jehovah’s Witnesses Achilles heel; their false premise?
How can you believe you have The Truth based on interpretation of the Bible when the Bible itself has no valid foundational documents preserved?
Stick with that and you’ll expose the house of cards on which WatchTower teaching rests.
sir82

The core misrepresentation of Christianity solely rests in accepting the Bible as the inerrant Word of Almighty God.
Not all churches teach this.
But for those who do (such as the JWs), the argument in this thread is sound.
TerryWalstrom

I'm guessing you take exception to "inerrant". The major evangelical churches fudge by adding the words "in the originals"--as though there ARE any originals :)

I think a good analogy is in our currency. A legally tendered note of any denomination is "backed up" by the Federal Reserve. At one time the U.S. had a Gold standard which made good on the paper currency. Richard Nixon's inability to finance the Vietnam War (ran out of money) forced going off the gold standard. From that point forward, the Fed could issue I.O.U.'s linked to Oil Reserves (Petro dollar).
Christianity under Catholicism was backed up by the Pope's infallible pronouncements on faith and morals. The Pope was in effect THE FEDERAL RESERVE :)
WatchTower leaders try to have it both ways, interpreting Scripture AND making up their own ideas as equivalent to Jehovah's whispers in their ears.
Their "Truth" is inflationary. They must constantly print (New Light) like new currency to replace the old disproved nonsense.
venus

Matter is very simple. If "There is no original manuscript preserved to be used to prove anything at all" it means God has not authorized the writing of scriptures. If he has, it follows that he must also take measures to preserve it.
And also, misinterpretation is the mother of all scriptures--hence we have many scriptures and interpretation--God must be laughing seeing all these fun.
Island Man

To make matters even worse, the JWs teach that God allowed his name to be thoroughly expunged from the New Testament without leaving any manuscript evidence testifying to its original inclusion. So JWs foolishly contradict themselves by saying God accurately preserved his Word, while simultaneously saying he allowed apostate christians to expunge his name from the NT. They claim to encourage faith in the Bible while simultaneously undermining faith in its preservation.
Island Man

If you look up the All Scripture book, at the criteria used to determine the inspiration of Bible books you will notice that the arguments take two or three forms:
1. Book X is inspired because Book Y quotes from it or mentions it.
2. Book Y is inspired because earliest Jewish records list in among the writings that the Jews considered to be scripture.
3. Book Z is inspired because [insert name of famous early Christian apologist] quotes from it and considers it as scripture.
So ultimately the claim of inspiration for the current canon of Bible books rests entirely on putting faith in ancient tradition - faith in men.
Drearyweather

TerryWalstrom, You have made certain good arguments. You can fight on the authenticity of the Bible in many different ways, as it was written in antiquity or in ancient times where people did not possess the technologies to record or preserve things the way we do now. This not only applies to the Bible, but to all other documents from that era.
However, I feel differently about your assertion that the Bible should not be believed because the original manuscript does not exist. Even if the originals existed, people would have still questioned if they are actually originals.
I personally feel that the words of the Bible are not confined to the papyrus roll or the perishable material on which it was originally written. The original manuscript or the autograph was not meant to be a sacred object of worship. Once the author wrote down the words in the manuscript, they were copied by the copyists and others meticulously over the years, in the similar way we print or take photocopies of original documents.
Since people in those days did not have any other way to preserve the originals, they did all they could to make copies of all original documents that they had. If you and I lived in that era, we would have done the same to preserve personal documents, business transactions, financial documents, etc.
Even in our day, original documents exist as a proof to validate our dealings and transactions. For e.g. a marriage certificate, the original constitution of the country, school and college certificates, etc. However, our lives are not confined to these originals. Someone’s marriage doesn’t get invalid if his original marriage certificate gets lost in a flood or hurricane. Someone’s citizenship doesn’t get revoked simply if he loses his original identification proofs in an accident. Neither does a person’s educational qualification get revoked if he loses his originals while on transit. Would the theory of evolution fail if the original documents of Charles Darwin get lost? No, because they are not bound to those papers that were written. Similarly, the Bible doesn’t get invalid simply because the originals have ceased to exist and we personally were not present to see the copyists doing their replication and preservation. The constitution of a country, the laws, statutes, acts, etc. are not confined to the original document on which they were drafted. The content is important, not the paper on which it is written. If you lose the original document, the constitution and the laws still apply.
The Bible says that the word of God would be preserved, not the manuscript or the papyrus scroll on which it was written. An audio testimony of an important witness for a legal case is taken on a device and is then copied to other devices to ensure its safety. The message is important and is to be preserved, and its validity does not depend on the medium in which it is recorded. The multiplicity of the manuscripts of the Bible available are enough for a person to believe it.
smiddy

An excellent post TerryWalstrom ,if God was so interested in preserving his words to mankind why did he wait some 2000 years before Moses wrote down what was supposed to have happened in the first two centuries.?
And whose word do we have for that ?
Half banana

What is written here in this post is from God.
You have to be pretty stupid to believe such and yet that is the level of intellectual acceptance used as the final proof of the Bible in the minds of those who have come under its spell.
Terry I like the way you are seeking a definitive illustration for the pitfall for those hungering for a divine answer to everything; the tasteless and odourless mind poison, the false premise that the Bible is inerrant and interpreted by Jehovah.
There is so much harm which comes from basing one’s life on any false premise and one of the worst is trusting a dodgy cult who claim a monopoly in Bible interpretation on God’s behalf.
Life can be hard, not all people are up to the challenge of coping with the real world without a lot of help.
Seeing the market opportunity, JWs peddle a comprehensive account of how existential worries can be overcome; firstly by the assumption that there is a God then the assumption of faith in the Bible as God’s revealed word and third the assumption that the only true interpreters are the governing body of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Assumptions built on false premises only confuse people and make them more dependent on others, they do not cure their original problems.
All of these religious premises promoted by the Watchtower without sound evidence are so far removed from logical thought that it is not surprising the gb condemn serious education.
The new JW is egged on by other victims and having swallowed the poison, is promised a smiley life in a Valium haze which ignores common sense, logic, having to think or work hard. The crunch comes when trying to shake off the JW drug. (To start with many try milder brands with fewer side effects to wean themselves off the habit).
waton

The bible as we have it today is flawed, not because we do not have the originals, because one way or the other the details we read are not jiving with reality. Would the originals read so differently that these errors are corrected?
4. Why waste time arguing scriptural interpretation when no scripture of any kind is demonstrably DIVINE?
because if it can be shown, proven, that the interpreting authority has erred, contradicted scripture [flawed or not], their claim to divine mission is shattered.
It is like proving the alibi of an accused to be flawed, a fraud, a lie, although it turns out, there never was a crime committed; and the whole affair was staged to get publicity, money, fame. double lies proven. Prove black and white reality.
Time, if you have it, well spent.

Exposing the Core Premise of JW False Teaching

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