Keeping up with new light

by stillajwexelder 8 Replies latest jw friends

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  stillajwexelder

  Keeping up with new light is not easy. Consider this. As most of you now know, the WTBTS has published an article in the Awake March 2002 about Earthquakes and admitted that there has been no increase in them since 1914. However, the Reasoning Book and other publications have not been updated with this information. So when a JW gives a talk from the platform they still give out old light ? even elders. I actually find it amusing. Most witnesses have still not grasped the generation change and can not speak about it from the platform or door to door. The Greatest Man book is also way out of date. There is a page with missiles and stuff like that. In the gospel of Luke it talks about the signs of the heavens and also the roaring of the sea and its agitation -this once meant not that long ago ballistic missile submarines being stationed in the Atlantic Ocean. New light says the signs in the heavens are from God not from man. Roaring of the sea and its agitation now means the turbulent sea of mankind.

  Yet I still here most JWs talking about old light from the platform and on the doors.

  Why is this so? My take is that the religion is so confusing that very few but the most serious students can keep up with it ? also very expensive for the society to publish new publications updated with new light. It also gives the society plausible deniability and a good way out I f problems occur ? BTW it is elders also who struggle to keep up. I still know loads who say vindicate his name rather than the official sanctify his name.

  What do you all think?
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  Maverick

  I agree. This new light is like present truth. So is the old light really darkess? Or the old truth a lie? What source material does one use? If you gave a test on the WTS doctrines about these things you'd get a whole range of answers. And the WTS would dismiss it all and say, "The faithful wait on Jehovah!" What was it Jesus said about blind guides? Maverick
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  Narkissos

  Just an old memory: when I was a translator in the French Bethel (nearly 20 years ago) I was just the kind of "serious" JW you mentioned. I wanted to be always up to date with the Society's teaching. Once I had to translate a study article in the Watchtower, where I found some detail discrepancy with the usual teaching (I just don't remember the subject). It was not presented as a "new light", though. Seemed rather to result from a lack of attention from the author. As we were already in simultaneous publishing, so the article had not been published in English yet, I suggested we ask the Brooklyn HQ about the matter. I was amazed to see kind of a panic among my superiors when they realized the article had the signature FWF (Fred W. Franz, then president of the WTBTS). No question was to be asked, a very vague "translation" was decided by the Branch Committee members, and a few weeks later I was discharged of the Watchtower...
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  mustang

  Yes!!!! For a real change of pace, how about a TMS session where 3 or 4 talks are given ON THE SAME SUBJECT from source material from DIFFERENT DECADES??? Now, that might be interesting enough to attend...

  Mustang
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  RandomTask

  Exactly, they really don't want you to be a serious bible scholar. Oh they talk a good game about knowing the bible more than anyone, but really, if you're DOING the things they require, thats much more important, isn't it? The specifics aren't important in just making people 'feel good' about the religion the belong to.
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  ESTEE

  I'm gonna git nailed for spamming 'cuz I've said it before...Me thinks there is an insane religion among us..

  ESTEE
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  Leolaia

  That reminds me of what happened in the late '80s when i went out in field service. An elder and his wife took me to a Bible study of theirs, and the main book at the time was the Live Forever book. During the course of the study, they went over the part about it being easier on the Galilee cities than Sodom and Gomorrah on Judgement Day. At issue was whether the people of Sodom and Gomorrah would be resurrected. In the car after the bible study, I had to tell the elder that he was giving our "old light" to the poor study. He was totally unaware of this and felt very distressed that he wasn't aware of the change and that he was giving out wrong information.

  Leolaia
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  hamsterbait

  Leo - When we did the yetanother study of the Liveforeverbook, I still had the ORIGINAL edition.

  Why pay good money for another one. The night Sodom and Gomorrah came (in the mundane sense of the word) up (in the mundane sense of the word) It was my turn to read the paras.

  The atmosphere turned gelid. Everybody froze. Was i reading Apostasy??

  I had not read the noolite on this (it has gone each way since then) and did not know it had been retroactively changed.

  If I could have bothered to go to the study on the new "sheep and goats" I would have asked what happens to those who died with "no hope of a resurrection" under the oldlite?

  The witlesses of course have had a field day laughing at the Roman Church admitting that Purgatory never existed, that people sent to hell for eating meat on Friday never were, They love to quote the contradictory explanation of Christs Deity in the "Tome of Damasus" and the papal declaration by Pope St Celestine (400 years apart by the way!!)

  They don't laugh if you point out that two editions of the Witchtower only five weeks apart give contradictory explanations of the "alpha and omega" AND of course the now notorious revisions of the "Rebbelayshann Climak". (anti climak)

  HB

  PS watched "weeping angels" again last night. I was soo scared I had nightmares!!!!!
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  hamsterbait

  The other hilarious thing I found was the claim in the Live Forever book that the word for soul is translated in different ways in the target language, because in the bible languages they all mean the SAME THING??

  HB