I think wills can affect shunning. But so do a lot of other reasons. My mother and my aunt could care less what I’d done and they would never, ever stop speaking to me or showing me affections. My siblings, on the other hand, have not only avoided me but have taught their children (my nephews and nieces) to do that same. I recently re-wrote my trust to not leave them a dime when I kick the bucket. I really feel it’s not me doing it but that this the way they chose for me to do it. What I really should do is leave them the money on the condition that they leave the Organization with an official written statement. Otherwise, zip, nada, niente, zilch.
Posts by Etude
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19Do Wills Ever Affect Shunning?
by Cold Steel ina man has several sons and daughters who are active jehovah's witnesses.
so was his wife, who died two years ago.
he has since lapsed into apostasy and has been openly critical of the governing body.
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NASA Identifies The Hand of God
by Perry init even has what looks like blood flowing from a palm wound.
article.
world-renowned astrophysicist robert jastrow, founding director of nasas goddard institute for space studies, explains the fear of faith many of todays scientists experience.. there is a kind of religion in science, it is the religion of a person who believes there is order and harmony in the universe, and every effect must have its cause; [but] there is no first cause.
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Etude
I was picturing the middle finger of that cosmological hand as the most prominent thing reflecting back at us. But I looked really, really close (with a certain degree of disgust) at the ass of your dog and made out the image of Jesus. I think that if you blow that up into a large canine asshole and post it in a desert, you will have the faithful from all over the world coming to kiss it. You guys realize that if you were to look at that nebula from another totally opposite direction, like from Alpha Centauri, you would actually see someone having a bowel movement.
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28
How was Adam Perfect? He sinned....Duh
by DS211 inwell an elder brought this up with me and said he didnt understand how adam sinned if he was perfect.
i said i dont see how he couldve sin ed if he was perfect....but he had free will to choose.
i then told him that i thought if god wanted us to obey him the worst thing he could do was create us to have free will.....a side thought i had was:.
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Etude
It’s difficult to address this subject without mentioning the relative nature of “perfection” and of “sin”. I’ve always used the following example: If a parent forbids a 2 or 3-year old to go near the top flight of stairs, the parent is dictating for the child what is good and bad. In fact, that is the case for a good period of a child’s development. Rules are set and there is punishment for disobedience. Does that mean that going near the top flight of the stairs is bad? No. The parent does it. It’s only bad for the toddler because the parent says so.
The point is the relativity of the act. I’m sure that someone put a lot of thought into existing arguments about what happened to Adam and Eve and it seems much of it make sense (in a limited way). The fruit was inconsequential. It could have been a rock upon which they were forbidden to sit on. The point was the act of choosing and deciding to determine for themselves what set of rules they would go by. To choose their own would automatically be a rejection of any other. Obedience would no longer be an issue. Maybe the designers of such a story had something, a very fundamental principle to illustrate.
The question of perfection is also relative. What is perfection? I think an instrument such as a piano is perfect. There’s very little room for improvement in it, even after centuries. It fundamentally remains the same. Some other radical change would probably render it NOT a piano but some other new instrument. That means it’s perfect for the reason it was designed. If a being is designed to have the ability to choose using free will, then the possibility for choosing a detrimental course is built in. Otherwise, to prevent certain outcomes would be to pre-program the entity with limitations and less than free will.
The problem I see with all of that is that if there are consequences to choices not sanctioned by God, the serpent or the Devil seems to have received very little by way of results. Yeah, he was cast out of heaven. But it seems he’s OK with that. On top of it, he seems to enjoy wreaking havoc in the world. It also doesn’t make sense why God would allow all of this to happen (especially the suffering), instead of killing Adam & Eve and the Devil and his fallen angels and start over. Nothing God does, as the ultimate arbiter, would be bad or evil or wrong, just as it is not bad or evil or wrong for a parent to forbid a child from approaching the top of the stairs or any other thing that the parent decides in the interest of the child. But that’s the point. The God of A & E is not acting logically…perhaps because he doesn’t exist.
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42
Could really use some help regarding legal letter to avoid DF
by Comatose ini used to have a webpage saved and i have lost it.
a young man and his wife had faded.
they had a birthday party for their child and were called before a judicial committee.
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Etude
Although I regrettably agree with you (I understand your legal argument), I never would have thought that corporations would in my wildest dreams be considered “persons”. And yet, here we are. I also never thought that in Florida, the stand-your-ground law would acquit someone for killing another person and give another in a lesser offense, but for the same reason, a 20+ year sentence. You must admit that even though such letters amount to a crap-shoot or a poker game with the elders, it is possible that they would be considered sufficiently to make them back off.
I remember a specific story about a guy who crashed his airplane while he had been drinking. His lawyer in turn sued Cesna, the company that made the generator, the plane tire manufacturer and everyone in between. Companies decided to settle for the simple economic reason that it cost too much to litigate the growing number of suits.
I came from a time when in IT, companies would send each other “cease and desist” letters just because their product was "infringing" on the “look and feel” of some other product. We think that’s ridiculous now. But it worked then.
On the other hand, I don’t believe that one should send out such a letter without the intent and the means of at least dragging their sorry asses into court. The danger is that the WTBTS may decide to make an example of one such case and back the elders with some of the money we have all so blindly contributed.
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36
Topics not often discussed now
by jdubsnub inwhen i was a kid in the early 90's there always seemed to be a mention of how demons posessing people or how if you saw a demon or something supernatural occuring mearly calling jehovah's name would rid you of the situation.
rarely now a days do you hear anything of the sort.
that got me to thinking, what are some other topics the society has backed off of?
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Etude
The “anal” and “oral” sex thing has shifted many times in the list of dos and don'ts. Once, I argued with a friend (a pioneer) that the society had not condemned oral sex. This is after he told me that he communicated to his bible study that it was “porneia”. The study had told him that his wife liked it and that it was the best way to please her and that not doing it might jeopardize his marriage. I was shocked that the pioneer would put his study between a rock and a hard place and so I pulled up a Watchtower (or maybe it was an Awake! in the “readers question”) that said it was a matter of conscience. He didn’t care. He accused me of being “un-Christian”. I thought that was over the top and cut him off. Every time we met from that point onward, I would simply say hello. My silence was deafening. I told him that if he ever expressed the un-Christian label again to anyone, I would take him up before a committee. It’s unfortunate, because I think his views were driven by overactive compensation from being a repressed homosexual. If not that, then he was a misogynist. There’s nothing wrong with being gay. But I think he couldn’t live with it and had to go to the extreme of keeping sex traditional and straight.
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Sophisticated Theology is nothing but background STATIC to me.
by nicolaou inprobably won't win any friends with this one but here goes .
.. some of the more thoughtful and intelligent believers here may object that atheists only address 'unsophisticated' arguments about the existence of god or noah's flood or the literal account of creation in genesis.
perhaps you think we ignore the 'sophisticated' arguments that might actually answer our objections.. well in my case your pretty much correct.. my mind turns to mush when 'sophisticated' debate takes over on questions of faith and doctrine.
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Etude
Sophisticated Theology is like masturbation. It's pretty good, but it's never as good as having sex with a lady (or lad if that's your fancy). You can yank philosophically here and massage theologically there but it will never be as good as a decent shot of reality. Sophistry=Mental Masturbation.
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Could you imagine Anonymous targeting the WT ?
by cookiemaster inthey have picked on cults before.
they basically went to warfare with the church of scientology, so what would happen if they would pick on the wt ?
let's say they would release to the public of lot of secret documents that discredit them, or at least attack the jw.org website.
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Etude
Anonymous would have to perpetrate a deep invasion into their network in order to get at any compromising information. That may be tough with an organization (the WTBTS) which thrives on secrecy. If any attack is successfull, it would have to be very subtle and targeted, which might help them track specific information. As rich as the WTBTS is, I'm sure they have retained top consultants to secure their data and network. After all, the whole world is against them. Right? If I were that paranoid, that's what I would do. Yet, like we recently saw with Target, people get careless and then somebody find a hole to get in.
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Etude
I’ve never heard it (the Bible or the message) condensed in such a way, but you’re absolutely right. All that excess fluff is really meaningless. What defenders of it will say, however, is that all the “fluff” acts as a foundation and adds “credentials” to the message; that it establishes provenance for the belief.
However, it is that very “provenance” that falls apart on closer examination, to the point of making the message hollow and meaningless, especially in these times. It also gives the freedom to people to cherry pick and use whatever they want out of the message to do their own thing.
We are humans; that is our nature. Why wouldn’t we invent something that gives us the credentials to be whatever we want to be? Well it seems to me that after several thousand years, we have. But that will never be the end of it. That’s how we hurt ourselves.
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Etude
"If God was a real person, he certainly would have a credibility problem with me and I would be up in his face (while fearing he'd turn me into some sort of disgusting lower life form). I'd still do it. Goddammit, I want answers and he's been confusing the crap out of everyone for millennia." What is your position exactly?
I was trying to be flippant. Obviously I failed to be humorous. If push comes to shove, I’ll take door No. 1. But really, an answer is weak and possibly meaningless unless there is a substantive reason or argument for it. My position is that – given all the problems with religious works (mainly the Bible, i.e. contradictions, omissions, morality, etc); with the manipulation of sincere individuals by religion in the name of God; with the glaring lack of evidence for even an inkling into a Supreme being…I could go on and on – it is impossible to prove or disprove the idea of the existence of God as a real entity. I think that it is not the burden of science to disprove that but the burden of believers to prove it. All Science can do is make no conclusion one way or another. But, since we can’t logically make a conclusion about God, it is perfectly logical to conclude we don’t know and it falls out of consideration. In reality, at least for me, it means there is nothing to know about God because what we can know is simply invented and has no basis in logic or reality. I hope that answers your question.
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Etude
I’ve been very, very free since I stopped depending on something that will never provide answers. I looked deeply into holy books (not just the Bible) and pursued for decades what would reasonably explain the problems I see and would give me hope for a better future. While looking, I did it with deep conviction and trust. I was greatly deceived. I don’t place the entire blame on everyone else who influenced me. In the end, I have to bear the responsibility that I let someone or even myself convince me of things which were completely unsustainable.
Oh, I felt certainty then. I was so damned sure about everything that I gave up my life to the WTBTS. The problem is there’s no logical or evidential way to demonstrate anything about God. If you really look throughout this site, you’ll find prolonged arguments that in the end leave you thinking that if you believe, it is because you want to believe and not because there’s any way outside of your own mind to confirm it. Remember one of the quotes above: “If you talk to God, you are praying. If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia”.
Many people think that most of us who have abandoned belief in God did it over night; that we simply woke up one day and chose a different course. The fact is that most of us were dedicated believers. But after a time we started questioning the validity of our beliefs; not just in beliefs of practice but more deeply in the very source of the beliefs. I’m free to identify with anything I care to identify with. That doesn’t mean I’m doing the right thing or aligning myself with something real. There are too many examples of followers who drank the poisoned Kool-Ade or found a way to exit this world and go to the mother ship because of strong identification with the wrong thing. Credulous acceptance is not the road to freedom. It’s just another type of enslavement.