Posts by zen nudist

27

Troublesome Trinity Verses Part 11

by hooberus in

colossians 1:15 who is the image of the invisible god, the firstborn of all creation;.

colossians 1:16 for in him were all things created, in the heavens and upon the earth, things visible and things invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers; all things have been created through him, and unto him;.

colossians 1:17 and he is before all things, and in him all things consist.. colossians 1:18 and he is the head of the body, the church: who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead; that in all things he might have the preeminence.. colossians 1:19 for it was the good pleasure `of the father' that in him should all the fulness dwell; asv.

zen nudist

the parallel often ignored is first born of creation, first born of the dead. seems clear enough that protokos [firstborn or pro-type] has the meaning of the very first one raised to immortality and thus first born of all creation would mean first of all creatures. as to all things vs all [other] things, this is not an unusual construct, in another verse Paul says that God subjected ALL things to Jesus, then he clarifies with the obvious exception of the ONE who subjected all things to him.... and then he makes the conclusion that once Jesus has brought all things back to perfection he will turn it back over to God so that God may be all things to everyone... which is complete non-sense and idiocy if Jesus already IS GOD.

as to other god[s], the bible calls Jehovah the El Elyon, the GOD of gods and angels were viewed as part of the Elohim or gods.

note too that trinitarians often overlook that they claim God is three who[s] but ONE what... yet the bible clearly says that Jehovah is God alone, that HE [not THEY] is the ONLY TRUE GOD and Jesus called him the very same thing in John 17:3.

When Jesus said I and my father are one -- I and the SOURCE of me are ONE... the jews assumed that he was claiming to be either EQUAL to GOD or GOD incarnated....[john10] yet the response of Jesus was not to acknowledge their claim and agree with it... far from it, he turned it on them and showed them according to psalms, all those who seat themselves upon the judgement seat are called God[s] because they are acting in the authority and power of God to judge life and death... here they were accusing Jesus of blapheme because of claiming to be one with GOD yet they were not doing anything different by claiming to be Judges of life and death and thus making themselves guilty of what they falsely viewed as a crime in the first place.... so if Jesus were guilty of a crime, so where they... but Jesus goes further and says, he never claimed to be GOD, but only God's son. [which all Jews thought themselves to be as part of Israel, my first born]

--beyond that, check out EVERY vision of heaven given in the bible, like Daniel, Acts, and the Revelations... three witnesses from heaven which agree-- that there is always ONE upon the throne called Ancient of Days, God and THE LORD GOD...and another [not two others] with him.. the son of man, Jesus and the lamb, the lion of Judah who is Jesus.... there is NO vision of heaven which says different, NO vision which has the holy spirit as a person, infact revelations has it as 7 bowls of fire and seven angels who carry out the will of God... acting as his eyes and hands... it is even called the finger of God in the gospels.

this also agrees with John 1:1 which has ONE GOD and the WORD [no Holy spirit person] and 1Cor8:5-6 which showed that in comparison to all other god[s], there is to us [chrisitans?] but ONE GOD, the FATHER and one LORD Jesus.... again NO holy spirit mentioned as a co- anything.

Personalizing the HOLY spirit makes sense in context with Revelations which again shows that it is seven angels which act as the eyes and hands of GOD, but are NOT themselves GOD but speak for him and in his name, as in the ANGEL of the burning bush who spoke AS Jehovah.

25

When does it become a cult?

by SpiceItUp in

jw
friends

matty and i have gotten several books lately.

right now we are both reading "30 years a watchtower slave" and "awakening of a jehovahs witness".

both we highly recommend.. anyway in the midst of it all he asked me: when did it turn into a cult?.

zen nudist

It becomes a cult when the members view ideas are more important then the people who hold them. Ideas may seem to have a life of their own but they are nothing without the host who carries them.... and seeing it the otherway round is where all human groups go wrong. when ideas are more important then people it become very easy to justify all sorts of horrible acts including murder and torture for those who do not contain the right ones.

Numbers 31- Duet 21- Luke 19:27 Luke 14:26

few religions on earth value all people above the ideas they hold, those which do have a much nicer history.

50

How do we stop feeling like exjws?

by Brummie in

i dont know.

today i had an episode of dissociation, the feeling of being totally disconnected from everything and everyone.

as if all of a sudden i knew no one or wasnt connected to anyone.

zen nudist

your past can only bother you if you reject it. if you think, my life SHOULD have been what it was not, you are basically claiming to understand how reality actually works better than it does... which would include a lack of trust in any god[s] which might exist who allowed such a past to be the real one. Those who were borg have become who and what they are because of passing through that experience and there is nothing anyone can do to change that absolute... no one can change a single step which has brought us all to the living present where we find ourselves always dwelling, so you are always EXACTLY where you must be, not where you think you should be which is only a fantasy of partial understanding and incompletely knowledge. The universe has an unborn, uncreated nature, call it god call it ultimate reality, we are all the unfolding of that nature... the first lie adopted with ease is that reality is flawed in comparison to our own ideals.

28

How do I find God if I want to find him?

by Singing Man in

yes, i have many times asked this of my self.

after leavening the witness's its been hard, i think ewww i am no good cause unless i am attending the kingdom hall i won't have gods grace and he won't hear my prayers or anything.

boy they sure had me, being raised a witness sticks with you long after you leave in ways you think it never would and in ways you just can't can't flush.

zen nudist

I could explain it to you but you might not be ready for it... this is not the place for such matters.

28

How do I find God if I want to find him?

by Singing Man in

yes, i have many times asked this of my self.

after leavening the witness's its been hard, i think ewww i am no good cause unless i am attending the kingdom hall i won't have gods grace and he won't hear my prayers or anything.

boy they sure had me, being raised a witness sticks with you long after you leave in ways you think it never would and in ways you just can't can't flush.

zen nudist

**I believe Jesus existed/exists. Why such efforts to refute him?

Zen has taught me to challenge all ideas and ideals which I formerly simply accepted with barely any evidence. doing so showed me that people do not do much research and rely mostly on hearsay rumors myths and legends for their view of reality.

** It takes faith.

faith is basically a gamble on a rumor which goes against the odds... most long shots don't pay.

** I don't neccessarily believe in the Jesus of organized religion, and what they have turned him into, but I believe a **'Christ' was sent here for our salvation, which was needed because of the original seperation, or misguided **perceived seperation, from God.

assuming there is a god[s] which I no longer do, that too has proven to be an idea which upon challenge shows itself to be not much more than irrational hope perhaps invented to combat irrational fears.

** I don't understand how a person who practices Zen (which I assume you do by your name) a practice that has **absolutely no historical or archeaological basis of fact behind the legitimacy of the practice

if I tell you how to have an orgasm and you follow my directions and have an orgasm what more do you require? do I really have to dig up something or show you some ancient manuels after that? that is how zen is... no one needs to tell me that it is real since I can experience it for myself.

I cannot nor do not refute the existence of a Christ I simply challenge its validity.

28

How do I find God if I want to find him?

by Singing Man in

yes, i have many times asked this of my self.

after leavening the witness's its been hard, i think ewww i am no good cause unless i am attending the kingdom hall i won't have gods grace and he won't hear my prayers or anything.

boy they sure had me, being raised a witness sticks with you long after you leave in ways you think it never would and in ways you just can't can't flush.

zen nudist

**There is plenty of evidence to show that Jesus existed. This issue has been discussed here before.

that depends on what you count as evidence.

1stly, there is NOT ONE historian who was alive at the time of Jesus who recorded a single word about him

2ndly those historians often quoted were not born until at least a decade after the supposed events and their words recorded decades after their birth amount to nothing more than hearsay of believers. not much different than claims that the book of mormon came from real golden tablets which magically vanished just like Jesus magically vanished into the heavens.

3rdly Paul believing anything does not matter, from my view he hallucinated a risen christ and made the rest up from his beliefs and gnostic teachings which may have influenced him heavily from his greek upbringing.

4rthly, there were originally over a dozen gospels mostly gnostic in origin. the only signed gospel was by luke and he was not even an eye witness...

5thly the gospels all seem to be made of shared quotations which may preceed Jesus supposed time by decades.. some times they use the same quotations in opposite ways which indicates that they were making up the stories around the quotes not the other way.

its a lot easier to fulfill prophecies if you are making a story specifically to do so.

as to actual fulfillments of prophecies, most of them are completely out of original contexts and the original contexts are easy to see as being about someone hundreds of years earlier... read just a bit further and you will see.

9

soulless souls

by zen nudist in

many years ago --around 1984-6-- my youngest brother asked me why i would waste my time persuing a religion which only promised that a copy of me would inhabit paradise if i died now.. at the time the full impact of his question escaped me... .

years later in a spiritual time of crisis that question reared its head and bit me hard... it suddenly made sense.. jws teach that the soul is you, all of you, alive or dead.

there is no immortal soul for the jw, only an impersonal spirit which animates the body and like electricity is cut off and symbolically returns to god who gave it.

zen nudist

What I have come to believe since my escape from the Borg collective known as JWs, is that everything I have ever known has been within my mind as symbols not realities. maps not territories. what the territory actually is I cannot know since I have no ability to get outside the symbols to see the reference sources... but I have reasons to believe that our true nature is nothing like what we believe it to be by living in this symbolic world. From buddhism and other sources I came to understand the indescrible nature of our true reality, they call it emptiness, not because there is noTHING there, but because all things we can discuss are only symbols in our minds and its easy to see that the reality must be something other than symbols. Consciousness gives science a really hard time because there is no easy way to show that anything we know can be responsible for making it... and I have come to see that the answer to that is obvious, they are examining elements of the dream trying to see which one of them makes the dreamer which cannot be... the dreamer cannot be made out of dream elements. Dream elements include matter and energy and so the dreamer must be something other.

I dont believe any new souls ever arise, but that we have always been ONE and MANY together and just not always able to remember our true nature, just as we are always conscious while asleep yet unable to remember most of it.

we are as drops of water in a single ocean only conscious of the ever changing waves.

9

soulless souls

by zen nudist in

many years ago --around 1984-6-- my youngest brother asked me why i would waste my time persuing a religion which only promised that a copy of me would inhabit paradise if i died now.. at the time the full impact of his question escaped me... .

years later in a spiritual time of crisis that question reared its head and bit me hard... it suddenly made sense.. jws teach that the soul is you, all of you, alive or dead.

there is no immortal soul for the jw, only an impersonal spirit which animates the body and like electricity is cut off and symbolically returns to god who gave it.

zen nudist

when it finally bothered me, the first thing I thought of was the star trek transporter which I recall Dr McCoy always worrying about. pondering if the person dematerialized was really killed and a copy was made on the other side... I tried to reconcile my doubts using this...but I kept coming back to the notions of being killed on one side and what would make the copy me?

what I see as myself is my conscious awareness... if that is snuffed out, the thing which makes me me and not you, then how is that part of me going to be installed into an exact replica? JW theology provides no means of doing this.

if our awareness is just a function of our body in motion, then a new body no matter how perfectly copies from the old will still generate an awareness from its own parts, having nothing to do with the awareness I currently enjoy... more disturbing is that if our awareness is only a function of biological processes, what happens when we go into dead sleep? did I wake up this morning as a new person with no connection to the awareness which inhabitted this body yesterday? if that were true, why would I be held accountable for what he did?

it leads to a whole lot of questions and no really good answers... I figured out something that worked for me, and when I discussed it with some JWs, I got a meeting in the back room which told me to drop it.... which left me accepting what I found but never mentioning it again.

9

soulless souls

by zen nudist in

many years ago --around 1984-6-- my youngest brother asked me why i would waste my time persuing a religion which only promised that a copy of me would inhabit paradise if i died now.. at the time the full impact of his question escaped me... .

years later in a spiritual time of crisis that question reared its head and bit me hard... it suddenly made sense.. jws teach that the soul is you, all of you, alive or dead.

there is no immortal soul for the jw, only an impersonal spirit which animates the body and like electricity is cut off and symbolically returns to god who gave it.

zen nudist

READ IT

it really does not answer the fundamental question as it cannot really address it with physics.

after all no one has been able to pin down how consciousness actually works and whether it is a function of matter and energy or the otherway round.

9

soulless souls

by zen nudist in

many years ago --around 1984-6-- my youngest brother asked me why i would waste my time persuing a religion which only promised that a copy of me would inhabit paradise if i died now.. at the time the full impact of his question escaped me... .

years later in a spiritual time of crisis that question reared its head and bit me hard... it suddenly made sense.. jws teach that the soul is you, all of you, alive or dead.

there is no immortal soul for the jw, only an impersonal spirit which animates the body and like electricity is cut off and symbolically returns to god who gave it.

zen nudist

many years ago --around 1984-6-- my youngest brother asked me why I would waste my time persuing a religion which only promised that a copy of me would inhabit paradise if I died now.

at the time the full impact of his question escaped me...

years later in a spiritual time of crisis that question reared its head and bit me hard... it suddenly made sense.

JWs teach that the soul is you, all of you, alive or dead. there is no immortal soul for the JW, only an impersonal spirit which animates the body and like electricity is cut off and symbolically returns to god who gave it. so when dead there is nothing left of the believer but the memory of him in the mind of Jehovah.

so who is this person raised from the dead? me? hardly, I died. its a copy made from memory. there is nothing that links the current me to that copy of me at all, just a memory transcribed onto a new body.

being that Jehovah can do anything there is actually nothing to stop him from taking his memory of me right now and making a duplicate or as many copies of me as he wishes.... yet if I am alive I will without doubt know that none of them are THIS ME.

there is nothing that will make any one of them me if I should die while they are alive...

so what would change if they are made after I die? I see nothing at all... so there seems to be no reason to believe that I would be raised from the dead... only a copy of me.

many JWs never give this a second thought... think hear things like being asleep in the dust of the ground and simply assume that some part of them will persist to wake up... but that is NOT JW official teaching the ONLY thing left over is memory in the mind of god and I dont think its possible for that part of me which makes me me and not a copy of me to hide in a memory which can be mass produced at god's will....

what say you?