Col 2:16, the scripture that blows away all of WT's Pharasitical man-made rules and cult guilt trips

by WingCommander 12 Replies latest jw friends

  • WingCommander
    WingCommander

    Colossians 2:16

    "Therefore do not let anyone judge you by what you eat or drink, or with regard to a religious festival, a New Moon celebration or a Sabbath day."

    Ironically enough, I never even knew about this bible verse until I had grown up and was POMO of the WatchTower Cult.

    Read it, then read it again. It wipes away all of the petty WatchTower nit-picking, guilt-inducing, joy killing, Pharasitical rules that are in endless supply and go FAR "beyond what is written" in the Bible.

    Like a rare steak? Shrimp or Pork (not under Mosaic Law anyway anymore) on the barbie? A Macallen's scotch with your occasional cigar? - NO JUDGEMENT

    Religious Festivals or celebrations, such as Xmas, Easter, Passover, etc, etc? - NO JUDGEMENT

    How about Mother's & Father's Day? (ironically, one of the 10 Commandments about honouring your father and mother!) - NO JUDGEMENT

    How about a seasonal festival or celebration, such as Thanksgiving? Some sort of Jubillee (as the Jews had) - NO JUDGEMENT

    Birthday, in which you're not removing someone's head? - NO JUDGEMENT

    Halloween even? (Kind of a moon celebration, all in fun now) - NO JUDGEMENT

    Want to observe the Sabbath on Saturday like Jews or Seventh Day Adventists? - NO JUDGEMENT

    In short, no allowing self-appointed "Princes among Men" to lord judgement and guilt trips upon you, as some sort of "Masters of your faith." Truly, when I discovered this scripture many, many years ago now my mind was truly freed from this cult prison. It totally dismantled this imaginary "authority" they had over my every action and decision. They don't get to have it, Period! Fugg 'em!

    Imagine.....just imagine, how grown ass adults have been fooled into allowing a small group of old guys in upstate New York, whom they've never even met, don't personally know, etc to dictate their every move and decision, even their very lives thru the warped blood doctrine. Madness!

    The Truth about the Truth, really does set you free.

  • slimboyfat
    slimboyfat

    It’s sure one of the harder texts for JWs to explain. Another in relation to blood is:

    Mark 7:15 Nothing outside a person can defile them by going into them. Rather, it is what comes out of a person that defiles them.”

  • Dagney
    Dagney

    Good one WC.

    That and Matt. 24:36 "... no one know the day nor the hour..." were the ones that kept me from trusting anything the GB/WT said, especially when they went off into "evidently" explanations of anything so they could keep their high control.

  • LongHairGal
    LongHairGal

    WING COMMANDER:

    The scripture you quoted should blow away the Jehovah’s Witness religion’s reason for even existing with their life-ruining rules and regulations.

    Those are good points you mentioned.. But, I would add one: ‘making judgments on people’s education and/or employment’.

    Isn’t it funny that all these things are coming to a head now in the religion???

    All I can say is that I am ever grateful NOW that I never listened to any of those judgmental S.O.B.’s in the Witness religion all those years ago!👍🏻

  • aqwsed12345
    aqwsed12345

    The discussion around Colossians 2:16 and its devastating implications for the entire Jehovah’s Witnesses’ legalistic system of man-made prohibitions cannot be overstated. Here, in the heart of Pauline doctrine, lies a text that not only refutes but utterly demolishes the Watchtower’s endless list of forbidden celebrations, foods, drinks, and so-called “conscience matters”—all of which are designed to create an atmosphere of guilt, fear, and psychological bondage. “Therefore, do not let anyone judge you by what you eat or drink, or with regard to a religious festival, a New Moon celebration or a Sabbath day.” In a single inspired sentence, the Apostle Paul exposes the entire machinery of religious micromanagement for what it is: a betrayal of the Gospel’s liberating power.

    When Saint Paul dictated his letter to the Colossians, he was confronting teachers who insisted that baptism into Christ was not enough. They pressed on the little flock a catalogue of ritual observances—dietary fasts, new-moon rites, sabbath prescriptions—claiming that only by these external badges could one hope to stand righteous before God. The Apostle’s answer was a thunderclap of evangelical freedom: “Let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food or drink or with regard to a festival, a new moon, or a sabbath. These are only a shadow of things to come, but the reality belongs to Christ” (Col 2:16-17).

    Every earnest Bible reader recognises that Paul is not abolishing the moral law—he would still say, “Neither the immoral nor idolaters nor thieves will inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Cor 6:9-10). He is exposing the folly of letting self-appointed guardians bind consciences with pre-Messianic ceremonial rules once their prophetic purpose has been fulfilled in Jesus. The primitive Church therefore felt at liberty, in the living guidance of the Holy Spirit, to maintain or discard particular observances, to keep the Lord’s Day rather than the Mosaic sabbath, to share one common chalice in place of temple sacrifices, to celebrate the new Passover of the Eucharist and to rejoice yearly at Pentecost when the Spirit first descended on the Twelve—an echo of the Jewish Feast of Weeks, yet now transfigured by grace.

    What, then, becomes of the modern Watchtower claim that these very words of Paul forbid Christians to cherish Christmas, Easter, Pentecost or any other festival? The inconsistency is glaring: the leadership that shames its members for a birthday cake or an anniversary card has simultaneously invented a calendar of its own—Memorial evening once a year, tightly regulated “circuit assemblies,” even a yearly commemoration of the organization’s corporate beginnings. The problem, evidently, is not the principle of sacred remembrance but the Watchtower’s allergy to anything it cannot police. Where the mainstream Chrianity sees in Paul’s verse a liberation from obsolete Jewish ritual while welcoming the spontaneous flowering of Christian feasts across time and culture, Jehovah’s Witnesses wrench the text into a pretext for another catalogue of prohibitions: do not salute the flag, do not accept a blood transfusion, do not sing a carol, do not buy a raffle ticket at the parish fête. The Apostle’s very antidote to legalism is re-purposed as fuel for further legalism.

    What makes the Watchtower’s tactics so grotesque is the way it arrogates to itself a role that St. Paul explicitly condemns: the self-appointed arbiter of God’s grace, the spiritual police, lording it over the flock and enforcing the most minuscule, pharisaical rules. The irony is rich: the very sort of “judgmentalism” Paul denounces is what Jehovah’s Witnesses elevate to a way of life, and they do so with a straight face while branding themselves as “Bible students.” Imagine grown adults surrendering their consciences, their ordinary joys, and even the love they owe to their families, at the altar of anonymous, unreachable men in upstate New York, who dare to claim a monopoly on salvation and the right to dictate every detail of your existence.

    It is no accident that Paul’s words are so comprehensive. Festivals? No one has the right to judge you. Food and drink? No one has the right to judge you. Sabbath observance? No one has the right to judge you. Yet the Watchtower not only judges, but metes out harsh punishment to those who dissent or simply exercise the liberty that Christ Himself won for us. Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Christmas, Easter, even giving your child a birthday cake—these are all proscribed, policed, and treated as matters of eternal consequence. Why? Because in the end, the only way the Watchtower can maintain its authority is by manufacturing a sense of crisis, difference, and perpetual anxiety about one’s standing before God.

    Yet Paul’s teaching leaves their system in ruins. The entire edifice of Watchtower control is revealed as a grotesque parody of the freedom of the children of God. “Let no one disqualify you,” he warns (Col 2:18), “insisting on self-abasement and the worship of angels, dwelling on visions, puffed up without reason by his sensuous mind.” Substitute “Governing Body” for “angels,” and the description could not be more apt. Where Christ calls us to sonship, the Watchtower calls you to servitude. Where the Church administers the sacraments as free gifts of divine grace, the Watchtower withholds everything except guilt.

    Notice also the self-contradiction in their interpretation of “magoi” in Matthew 2. One breath they insist that the word must denote damned astrologers whom Satan lured by a counterfeit star; the next breath they quote Colossians to prove that God forbids any judgement against dietary or festival observance. Yet here they judge the Magi most severely—indeed, they judge nearly every Christian century as apostate for daring to rejoice at the Nativity of the Lord. Such selectivity betrays what truly motivates the governing body: not fidelity to Scripture, but the perpetual need to mark their followers as different, to isolate them from the Body of Christ and from ordinary human joys.

    Christianity, conversely, does not fear creation. If a rib-eye steak may be enjoyed with thanksgiving (1 Tim 4:3-4), if wine makes the heart glad (Ps 104:15), then surely the rhythm of fasting and feasting, of Advent longing and Christmas exultation, of Lenten penance and Easter alleluia, is a wholesome participation in the redeemed cosmos. To be sure, Paul forbids us to treat festivals as if they purchased salvation. But he also commands, “Rejoice in the Lord always” (Phil 4:4), and Scripture itself records how the Holy Spirit descended on Pentecost precisely while the disciples were gathered for the liturgical festival that crowned the Passover season (Acts 2). First-century Christians did not abolish the feast; they discovered its fulfilment. Why, then, do Witnesses shrink from it? Because they cling to a truncated gospel. Shorn of sacramental life, their movement has nothing to celebrate beyond its own publishing statistics.

    Colossians 2:16, read in its context, condemns the very posture the Watchtower adopts: it warns against men “puffed up without reason” who “insist on self-abasement” and who “disqualify” the faithful by measures God never commanded (v. 18). It is not the rhythm of the Church year that contradicts the Apostle, but the dreary spreadsheet of Watchtower taboos. Christian tradition, standing on the same Pauline foundation that shattered the yoke of the old law, proclaims the freedom of the children of God: a freedom ordered not to license, but to the worship of Christ in spirit and in truth. This worship naturally blooms in seasons and solemnities, because love loves to remember. The governing body may try to erase those memories, yet Christian joy—like the star that led the Magi—will keep reappearing, guiding all who are not afraid of light to the Infant in the house, to the crucified-and-risen Lord, and to the Spirit who still fills the Church at every Pentecost.

    This, finally, is the scandal that the Watchtower cannot answer. It is not a question of whether one eats shrimp, or observes Christmas, or celebrates a family milestone. It is the far deeper scandal of a religion that has fundamentally misunderstood the Gospel—a Gospel that offers radical freedom from the very yoke of fear and endless rule-making the Watchtower exists to impose. The reason ex-Jehovah’s Witnesses so often cite Colossians 2:16 is not merely because it “permits” celebration, but because it proclaims what the Watchtower dare not admit: in Christ, the machinery of human control is dismantled, and the soul stands free before God. Any religious system that seeks to reimpose the bondage of the law, or to set itself up as the final judge in matters of conscience, has declared itself the enemy of the cross. This is why, in the end, the text does not simply refute the Watchtower’s rules; it exposes their entire reason for existence as a monstrous fraud on the freedom for which Christ set us free.

  • slimboyfat
    slimboyfat

    Just out of interest, does anyone read these AI posts?

    Try giving this post a thumbs up if you do read the AI posts and a thumbs down if you don’t read the AI posts.

  • NotFormer
    NotFormer

    I like posts of a few paragraphs or so, not pages and pages that could have been distilled into those few paragraphs that I like to read (and try to restrict myself to; not always successful there! 🙄) AI generation could well explain the sheer volume of content.

    Speaking of which, to go off on a tangent, does anyone read/listen to those AI generated stories on YouTube that purport to be taken from Reddit? My rule of thumb for identifying them: they are ridiculously long; usually forty minutes where the story could have been told in five to ten minutes. My favourite identifier is: "Something inside me snapped! I didn't yell; I didn't cry".

    Waiting for something to snap inside our favourite verbose poster, then we'll have him, dead to rights! 🙄

  • vienne
    vienne

    Slim,

    I stopped reading his messy posts. I can get better and more concise from others here.

  • vienne
    vienne

    I listen to many sci fi stories. I don't know which are ai generated, but the writing is usually very poor, repetitious, Invariably the stories contain "precise" at lest once. There are storyline conflicts. Their best use is to show my students what not to do. I have them analyze the stories, even rewrite them.

    Aq's writing is a bit more grammatical, but equally artificial and verbose.

  • NotFormer
    NotFormer

    The human written sci-fi stories are fun to listen to and are rarely much more than ten minutes long. The AI ones are always thirty or more minutes long and incredibly repetitive. A while back they always featured an Admiral or Ambassador Chen, a Colonel Rodriguez and a token English name like Jackson. The alien general usually had the same name as well. 🙄

    I prefer Agro Squirrel's narration. He at least tries to find non-AI stuff.

    AQ probably spends more time tidying up the results than the other AI dependent generators of content.

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