by IWant2Know 45 Replies latest jw experiences
Well, I disagreed with some things the WT teaches and got disfellowshipped for that 19 years ago, so I had to continue without support from a congregation to follow Jesus and obey his teachings. Personal prayer and reading of the Bible has kept me in the faith.
Kosonen, I totally get it. Thanks.
Also, do you belong to any Christian denomination?
KalebOutWest said:
If I had cherished those beliefs, I would be heartbroken and somewhat confused to see what I honored and believed to disappear day by day, week by week, month by month, year by year. It's all going away.
The religion I know and it's teachings are gone. How are you coping since you could never go back? There is nothing to be faithful to as they are not even faithful to themselves or those that came before them.
But JWs' response to that is that the basic foundational doctrines have not changed, being: The Trinity, Hellfire, the Immortal Soul, and that All Good People Go To Heaven.
IWant2Know--
Actually, except for most Fundamentalist Christians and some groups like the Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses, the rest of Christianity and all Jews acknowledge that there are no foretelling of events by the prophets in the Scripture, such as predictions.
Jehovah's Witnesses often use the following to explain what a true prophet can do in refrence to foretell the future:
When a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word that the Lord has not spoken; the prophet has spoken it presumptuously. You need not be afraid of him.--Deuteronomy 18:22.
But in reality, it is not speaking about predicting the future. Take for instance the prophet Jonah, whose message to Ninevah from God did not come true at all:
"Forty days more and Nineveh shall be overthrown!"--Jonah 3:4.
Did that make Jonah a false prophet? According to the way Jehovah's Witnesses define prophecy and prophets and Deuteronomy 18:22, the answer is "yes." "Uh, no, uh, what?"
But the word "prophet" in Hebrew means "spokesman" and not a foreseer of events. In fact it if forbidden by the Mosaic Law for a Jew to attempt to forecast the future by any means.--Lev 19:32, Deut 18:9-12.
There are no "prophecies" in this sense, whatsoever, about anything, anywhere in the Bible, let alone about the Messiah.
The Jewish concept of the Messiah came about after the last of the books of the Prophets was written, after the Maccabean Revolt which ended in 160 BCE, the events which gave Judaism the first Chanukah celebration. These events led to the Jews crowning a member of the Maccabees as king of the Jews.
But the family line of Judas Maccabeus was not in the line of David or of the tribe of Judah, but of the tribe of Levi. And the Maccabees became oppressive. They aligned with Rome and married into a family known as the Herods which took over from the Maccabees.
Due to the oppression, the Jews began to study the Jewish texts and realized that the prophets and the Psalms mentioned that God had promised that a son of David was supposed to be anointed as their king, not someone in the line of Levi. So they began to pray for God to redeem them from the hands of the Herods and the Romans, to bring the promised Son of David, the promised anointed (in Hebrew, Masiach or Messiah).
A theology began to be built around many of these texts, though none of them are "prophecies." There are NO texts in the Bible that say: "There shall come a Messiah..." or "The Messiah shall come that will do this and that..." The first time the Jews used such expressions as a concept were in the Gamara, then in the Mishnah, which came to be transfered into writings of the Talmud.
The fullest concepts of the Messiah were developed by the early Christians themselves, not the Jews, which is why the Jews rejected Jesus as the Messiah. The theology of the Messiah is found still developing in the writings of the Church Fathers.
Simultaneously at the time, the Jews began developing their own theology to counter what the Messiah should and should not do.
The use of Genesis 3:15 in reference to Jesus does not come from the Jews but the Church Fathers, in the writing of St. Irenaeus entitled, "Against Heresies" in which he states not that Jesus is predicted by the verse but that it is a divine illustrative drama in which God takes on human nature in Jesus by means of Mary to battle Satan the Devil.
For more information on that, you will want to look up that writing in the Church Fathers.
"CalebOutWest: How are you coping since you could never go back? "
It has been hard, but since 2010 I have found prophecies in the Revelation book get fulfillments and that has kept me hopeful. So I believe Jesus will return as he promised within 10 years. And I have been waiting for the time to flee to the wilderness according to Revelation 12:6. Time for that could come in about a year. So I am very much looking for that. It should if I am correct become possible before the mark of the beast starts to get promoted as were promoted the Covid vaccines.
Yes, I think that's what has kept me spiritually hopeful.
"IWant2Know: Also, do you belong to any Christian denomination?"
No I don't. My wife is still active JW. And she goes to the meeting with my 4 children who are 11 -24 years old. Our relation has been most of the time very tense since I was disfellowshipped. But for the past year our relation has improved significantly. That has made daily life much better.
"IWant2Know:
If he really wants to overcome his homosexual feelings and thoughts, he should confess in prayer to Jehovah God about it and ask for God's help in the name of Jesus Christ, what ever God could provide. And he should continue to do that everyday for a while, maybe for 100 days and see if there is any improvement.
One has to realize the seriousness of the situation and make it a priority to overcome. If we just pray and hope Jehovah will solve this for us without us putting in effort, that won't work. To overcome different kind of sins, we need to understand the seriousness of sin and really want to overcome it and say it in prayer to Jehovah God. And continue doing it day after day.
We should ask God to make us so busy in good things so that we would not have time to think about sins. That is a good remedy for keeping sins out of the mind.
Matthew 7:7“Keep on asking, and it will be given you; keep on seeking, and you will find; keep on knocking, and it will be opened to you; 8 for everyone asking receives, and everyone seeking finds, and to everyone knocking, it will be opened.
IW2K. I'm assuming my friend meant that (likely as most kids do) that he had sexual feelings (maybe desire is a better word) probably expressed through masturbation. I guess that's common to both gay and str8 young ones.
He does recollect that he belonged to a scout troop, that group owned a hut in the bush, with 9 bunk beds on one wall. At times each kid would be lying alone in his bunk masturbating.
A guess another common factor is wondering what it's like to have sex with someone. Maybe for both groups that we categorise as gay or str8, curiosity about sex comes first, then later crystalises into a desire to share sex with specific persons.
As to specific sexual desire, I think that rather than categorised into groups like gay, straight and Bi, maybe its lineal scattered along a kind of continuum from exclusively gay to exclusively str8, with a large majority on the str8 end.
We likely do not know enough about this topic to be dogmatic as to how it operates (works).
There a books that make claims, and some are interesting. I found Chandler Burr's, A Separate Creation: The Search or the Biological Origins of Sexual Orientation, informative, although some may argue that since Burr is gay, he's self-serving. Another book, Bruce Bagemihl's, Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Exuberance. Bagemihl draws on the field notes of other wildlife biologists/Zoologists and records 450 animal species among whom, homosexual activity has been observed. B.O.Y.'s got a job ahead of him, explaining why he did that.
More responses to IW2K's thoughts:
1. Quote: "you mentioned a good-looking brother. So, was there any conflict of feelings with your friend and this brother?"
I don't know how my friend felt toward that brother. He made no mention of conflicts and they were friends for a long time. That brother was on the circuit work here in Australia for a while and later went to Gilead.
IW2K: "So, are you perhaps implying that he may have been attracted to her because she looked boyish? "
I wasn't, but you're probably correct. In the matter of what makes another person appealing to us, it would be logical for your view to be correct.
IW2K: " Also, you friend sounds like he was bisexual, because 100% homosexuals don't have attraction towards the opposite sex."
I'm not sure what a 100% homosexual person is like, or desires. Or for that matter, what the real difference between a 100% gay guy and a bisexual is. It's easy to classify people into groups, but the reality is that most people are too complex for that simplification.
I think it likely that some gay guys have successfully lived either a celibate life, or a successfully married to a woman life. But we can never fully be sure about anything to do with a person's private life and thoughts.
Final comment:
As you say, "Well, it sounds like Isaiah 40:29-31 didn't help him since I'm pretty such most JWs have tried to apply those verses to themselves."
Of course, it's not just the Isaiah text that promises help. And, my friend did think that he had changed, other wise he claims he would never have married.
Likely, he merely suppressed his same sex desires, if something is part of us (whatever the causes of homosexual desire) it would indeed take a miracle to change, and miracles are rationed in today's world.
Christianity makes many claims, few seem to come true. Armageddon and associated promises have been predicted many times through the centuries, but all were fake.
Even the topic of this thread, that homosexuals must change has a problem, many cultures do not condemn same sex activity. Some years back, during the Asian history degree I studied. One of the lecturers has been studying, is the Japanese movement called Shonen Ai. Last century, a number of Japanese women, dissatisfied with traditional Japanese marriage relationships, began studying gay relationships. Developing out of that are images called yaoi, and illustrated literature called Mangas. These are now known throughout the world, with millions of readers in most languages. The fans of that genre are mostly young, and I'm wondering to what extent that genre is responsible for changing attitudes towards gay people
I've been reminded that I did not really give a direct answer to some of IW2K's questions, which were ...
Quote: " Was your struggle difficult or nearly impossible, or did you just decide that the struggle wasn't worth it, and you decided that you just didn't want to do this anymore? Also, did you feel that you experienced Isaiah 40:29-31, or did you feel that you didn't and that you had a much more tremendous struggle compared to heterosexual JWs? "
I called my friend for his answer, and again (as with most things human) his comments were not concise. But summing up he felt that that the whole religious experience was pointless.
He said there were many good things about his religious experience with the Jws! There were many happy times. But in the end he badly hurt someone he loved, and also badly hurt his children. He sometimes hates himself for this. In fact, when first 'outed' he planned suicide*, and came close to killing himself.
Why didn't he? Purely by accident, one day he stopped to assists a young Asian guy who looked seriously troubled. He got involved with the young man, found he was also gay, but an illegal migrant. In helping him, he came to understand himself better, fell in love with him - and they are still together some 3 decades on.
So a short answer to your questions IW2K, is that it was not worth it, and he wishes he'd never heard of the bible, religion etc.
*Research has found that attempted suicide rates and suicidal ideation among lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) youth are significantly higher than among the general population.[1][2]
Slurce: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_among_LGBT_youth
