by ballistic 5 Replies latest jw friends
and that's apart from "shit happens"
The Jehovah's Witness "organisation" is a religion you can be brought up in and live your whole life and still not know God.
Is this true of other religions? I don't know. I can only tell you of my own experience.
Hi ballistic,
You are absolutely right about the WT org. It's the same way for religion in general. Religion will tell you about somebody's perception of what God it like. But know Him??? No. You'll only know Him when you approach Him personally and He reveals Himself to you.
Or maybe there are no supernatural beings, and therefore "knowing" God is impossible..
I agree with PointBlank. It's not about where you go to church. Church is just a tool - a place to worship, meet others that have the same goals/ideas as you - and a place to organize charity for the community.
God exists outside of all of religion.
I found precious little in common with my Jehovah Witness experience and even the Jesus of the Bible. I went back and re-read the Gospel accounts of Jesus with ex-JW eyes and came to a fresh and more appreciative understanding of who Jesus really was.
I also came to another conclusion that surprised me. JWs have no real faith in God that I could tell. I didn't realize this until I began to have serious doubts and began sincerely looking for help by the smartest and spiritually strongest JWs I could meet and who would talk to me.
To my dismay I met with panic, fear, anger, but not one time did I EVER meet anyone who could rationally answer my questions without becoming emotionally distraught. Dismantle their doctrines with a few well chosen questions and they become angry or frightened. I've seen it happen time after time. Where is their great love of God, their great love of truth, their great faith? If you can turn a long-time JW in a quivering blob of cowardly jelly with a few simple direct questions it proves beyond a shadow of doubt that they have no real faith in God. It's only in a man-made religious institution that long ago left off pursuing the values they claim to hold dear. It's all about maintaining the corporation. You begin to take their faith in the corporation apart and watch the JW's demeanor crumble like a dry cookie.
The JW God is a corporation disguised as Jehovah. And a corporation makes a very poor God.
I knew Jehovah (in all His magnificant dichotomous fearsomeness) as well as anyone I've run across "knows" their god. I knew Jesus almost as well as any "christian" knows Jesus, and in fact, when I became an "ex" JW, my actual *knowledge* of Jesus didn't grow that much, rather, my *attitudes* about that knowledge are what changed.
