by RULES & REGULATIONS 34 Replies latest watchtower bible
12 By supporting the elders’ decision to disfellowship your loved one, you may actually help him to return to Jehovah.
Wait just a minute, I thought the eldurrs claim was that the decision to disfellowship is already made by God. And just exactly how many would ever return to the JW's IF they were not being shunned by all their family and friends and nothing changed? I dare say not one single one!
We need to remember that Jehovah has given each of us the gift of free will. This means that we can choose whether we will obey him or not.
I know this is not the point of this article, but once again, these numnuts still can't see how utterly ridiculous this idea is.
God: "I'll give you free will, but if you actually, you know, use it, I'll slaughter you mercilessly."
What's the point of having "free will" if you are punished for using it?
JW "free will" (to be fair, pretty much any Christian religion's version) is comparable to the "free will" you have when a mugger holds a knife to your neck and says "give me your money!" Well, yeah, you have "free will" to say "nope", but the consequences are immediate, irreversible, and fatal.
Let's review: "It's a Cult!"
When I got baptized as a JW, did Jah rejoice as he supposedly did for Jesus. NOPE
When I left the WT, did Jah express his grief to me or to my fellow JWs.? NOPE
Then how the heck can they equate leaving the WT as leaving Jehovah
Phizzy, I agree with your point of turning one's back on Jehovah. I have thought much the same way for more than 10 years. I have thought that "I did not break my baptismal vow with Jehovah God, when I stopped being a JW and even later when I stopped believing in Jehovah and in the supernatural. That is because I now recognize he is a fictional/imaginary character. Since he doesn't exist it is impossible to turn away from him. Instead, what I did was turn away from the imaginary idea of the fictional character named Jehovah God. I broke my vow that was made to the imaginary idea when I stopped worshiping the imaginary character."
Rocketman123 has written many times that the WT was devised by apostates. I now realize he is right in that matter, and I even recall that at times before I read Rocketman123's words I recognized most JWs are apostates in some sense. [The dictionary broadly defines an apostate as someone who has turned away from his/her former allegiance, especially in regards to politics or religion.] That is because most of them apostatized (turned away from) a religion/denomination of Christianity (such as Baptist or Methodist, for examples) before becoming a JW.
Russell had attended the Presbyterian and Congregational denominations (he joined the latter "because of its more liberal views") of Christianity before he became a skeptic (and before he was persuaded by "the logic of infidelity" [infidelity in the religious sense regarding disbelief in Christianity and the Bible]) and before he later came up with his Watch Tower organization. Rutherford was a Baptist before he became an atheist (by becoming an atheist he became an apostate of Christianity) and before later joined the Watch Tower organization. Both Russell and Rutherford apostatized from mainstream/mainline Christianity and even lost much of their confidence in the Bible before they adopted the views associated with the WT. Even in adopting the views of the Watch Tower they adopted many views that deny parts of the Bible as meaning the plain clear sense of what they (the Bible verses) say. In doing such, even as International Bible Students affiliated with the WT, they were apostates not just of a specific mainstream denomination of Christianity, but of a number of the Bible's teachings itself!
For evidence of what I wrote above about Russell see pages 34-35 of the 1975 YEARBOOK of Jehovah's Witnesses. Page 36 of that book says Russell turned away from the belief that Christ would return visibly in 1873 or 1874; Russell came to believe that Christ would return (or did return) invisibly (what Russell called the beginning of Christ's second presence) in the year 1874. The plain sense of the Bible teaching in the book Matthew is that Christ would return visibly, for that book says that Jesus said that the people would "see the Son of Man" and Revelation says "every eye will see Him" [Matthew 24:30 and Revelation 1:7 (NASB-1975)]. The WT organization denies the plain sense of those verses, when they teach merely mean in the sense of figurative 'eyes of understanding'. In doing so they teach an apostate doctrine regarding those verses. They have been able to get away with such largely because no Christ exists in heaven (and even because there is no supernatural heaven) and because Jehovah/Yahweh God/Elohim doesn't even exist.
