Hillary ---
Marjorie: If someone tells me that his religious organization is the only true Christian body on earth today, and that I am not a true Christian because I have not accepted that Jesus returned in 1914 (and I have therefore not associated myself with the WTS), all I need to show is that 607 is wrong (and I have done so on many occasions).
Hillary: ....And that is the crux of the matter. Scholar has openly admitted to Marjorie that he does not view her as a true Christian because she is not one of Jehovah's Witnesses. This is of course part of a cultist theology that depends on isolating its adherents and making them feel 'special' and superior to those around them.
What's ironic is that I'm apparently scheduled to be annihilated for believing in a date which can be established solely through WTS literature. As I showed in the KISS thread, using ONLY WTS literature and starting with the WTS's date of 539 BCE, one arrives at 586/7 BCE for the destruction of Jerusalem.
Neil won't answer me with a direct "yes" or "no" when I ask him if he accepts the chronological data in the 1/1/65 WT as true.
I, on the other hand, DO accept what the 1/1/65 WT says about the names and regnal lengths of the neo-Babylonian kings.
Using only WT literature and counting backwards from 539 BCE, I can show that Jerusalem was destroyed in 586/7 BCE.
So having used nothing but WT literature, with no appeal to higher critics or wiley 'poztates or secular scholars, I am nevertheless condemned for not believing in the WT's OTHER date of 607.
Scholar has also admitted, very courageously I might add given its implications, that the WTS has stepped beyond its authority by shunning those who question the 607BCE date.
So if someone is already one of Jehovah's Witnesses, he/she shouldn't be penalized for questioning the 607BCE date, according to Neil. But if someone is not one of the Witnesses, that person IS penalized for not accepting the 607 date.
Scholar is living in a thick jungle of cognitive dissonance, one from which all of us who have been Jehovah's Witnesses once lived, and from which many of us painfully hacked our way out into the daylight. Some of us found life outside the jungle hard to bear after believing for many years that we owned the world, only to emerge from that world and discover that we were not special at all, and that we were just another person among billions, struggling to find some sort of meaning in our rapid journey from the womb to the tomb. The disappointment and bitterness is evident on this Board among many of its posters as we rail at the WTS and bicker with each other, but this is not suprising given what we have come from. Many of us expected to be living on 'Paradise earth' by now, but find ourselves weary, broken and defeated by the shattered fairy tale that we once lived in.
It takes real courage to face a life without certainty, but it is a life that should be lived with a sense of honesty for it to have any meaning. Perhaps one day Neil will take the first courageous steps out of the jungle and learn to stand on his own intellectual feet without the aid of a self-serving agenda manufactured by a group of less well informed men, a hundred and fifty years ago.
Very well said, Hillary.
I applaud all of you who have had the courage to do that very thing. It took real guts and a lot of heart to step away from something which had been your life. The disappointment you so poignantly describe must have been fierce.
I admire all of you and wish you the very best.
Marjorie
