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.
Posts by Etude
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36Topics 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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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.
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Etude
I'm holding my belly laughing because of your comment and while at the same time realizing how true your statement is on it's face. 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.
I make a strong distinction between the sense of spirituality that many people experience and which seems to be anthropologically universal. Unfortunately, many people confuse that with religion or with some sort of supreme entity. They are not the same. While I respect your feelings, I'd welcome them more if they were accurately guided and not founded on the belief system that cannot reasonably be sustained, no matter how hopeful they are.
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Etude
"It is an insult to God to believe in God. For on the one hand it is to suppose that he has perpetrated acts of incalculable cruelty. On the other hand, it is to suppose that he has perversely given his human creatures an instrument—their intellect—which must inevitably lead them, if they are dispassionate and honest, to deny his existence. It is tempting to conclude that if he exists, it is the atheists and agnostics that he loves best, among those with any pretensions to education. For they are the ones who have taken him most seriously." Galen Strawson (b. 1952), British philosopher, literary critic. Quoted in: Independent (London, 24 June 1990).
"With God, what is terrible is that one never knows whether it’s not just a trick of the devil." Jean Anouilh (1910–87), French playwright. The Archbishop, in The Lark.
"If we really think about it, God exists for any single individual who puts his trust in Him, not for the whole of humanity, with its laws, its organizations, and its violence. Humanity is the demon which God does not succeed in destroying." Salvatore Satta (1902–75), Italian jurist, novelist. The Day of Judgment, ch. 15 (1979).
"To place oneself in the position of God is painful: being God is equivalent to being tortured. For being God means that one is in harmony with all that is, including the worst. The existence of the worst evils is unimaginable unless God willed them." Georges Bataille (1897–1962), French novelist, critic. “Bataille, Feydeau and God,” interview with Marguerite Duras in France-Observateur (1957; repr. in Duras, Outside: Selected Writings, 1984).
"If you talk to God, you are praying; if God talks to you, you have schizophrenia." Thomas Szasz (b. 1920), U.S. psychiatrist. The Second Sin, "Schizophrenia" (1973).
"God will provide—ah, if only He would till He does!" Yiddish Proverb.
"If God lived on earth, people would break his windows." Jewish Proverb. Quoted in: Claud Cockburn, Cockburn Sums Up, epigraph (1981).
"I find it interesting that the meanest life, the poorest existence, is attributed to God’s will, but as human beings become more affluent, as their living standard and style begin to ascend the material scale, God descends the scale of responsibility at a commensurate speed." Maya Angelou (b. 1928), U.S. author. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, vol. 1, ch. 18 (1969).
"It is only the impossible that is possible for God. He has given over the possible to the mechanics of matter and the autonomy of his creatures." Simone Weil (1909–43), French philosopher, mystic. “A War of Religions” (written 1943; published in Selected Essays, ed. by Richard Rees, 1962).
"The dice of God are always loaded." Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82), U.S. essayist, poet, philosopher. Essays, “Compensation” (First Series, 1841).
"God is indeed dead.
He died of self-horror
when He saw the creature He had made
in His own image."Irving Layton (b. 1912), Canadian poet. The Whole Bloody Bird, “Aphs” (1969).
"Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee
And I’ll forgive Thy great big one on me."Robert Frost (1874–1963), U.S. poet. Cluster of Faith.
"I admit that the generation which produced Stalin, Auschwitz and Hiroshima will take some beating; but the radical and universal consciousness of the death of God is still ahead of us; perhaps we shall have to colonize the stars before it is finally borne in upon us that God is not out there." R. J. Hollingdale (b. 1930), British author, critic, translator. Thomas Mann: A Critical Study, ch. 8 (1971).
"If God wants us to do a thing, he should make his wishes sufficiently clear. Sensible people will wait till he has done this before paying much attention to him." Samuel Butler (1835–1902), English author. Samuel Butler’s Notebooks (1951, p. 116).
"Man appoints, and God disappoints." Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616), Spanish writer. Sancho Panza, in Don Quixote, pt. 2, bk. 6, ch. 22 (1615; tr. by P. Motteux). [That is a clever twist on the old saying: “Man proposes and God disposes”.]
"If God is male, then male is God. The divine patriarch castrates women as long as he is allowed to live on in the human imagination." Mary Daly (b. 1928), U.S. educator, writer, theologian. Beyond God the Father, ch. 1 (1973).
"God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos: He will set them above their betters." H. L. Mencken (1880–1956), U.S. journalist. Minority Report: H. L. Mencken’s Notebooks, no. 35 (1956).
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Etude
"With God, what is terrible is that one never knows whether it’s not just a trick of the devil." Jean Anouilh (1910–87), French playwright. The Archbishop, in The Lark.
I guess this is why some religious people think it is best not to know...ANYTHING!
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Etude
I think the JWs gave this to the Baptist.
