Posts by yaddayadda

36

New Light at DC?

by zack in

jw
friends

the gb will announce in a series of talks in two symsposiums that:.

all anointed will die and depart the earthly scene before armageddon.. the resurrected anointed will aid christ in directing all his belongings from heaven.. christ said "i will be with you until the conclusion of the systems of things" and he has done so invisibly; and shortly.

shall come the time for his co-rulers to be gathered to him to rule (just as christ has) invisibly.

yaddayadda

WT: "A key to understanding the vision is this: Jehovah’s great spiritual temple represents his arrangement for pure worship."

Notice how they try to put an organisational (arrangement) spin on it.

Ephesians 2: 19-22 says explicitly what the 'spiritual temple' is. It is all spirit-begotten Christians - nothing more, nothing less. It's individuals, not any 'arrangement'.

17

Justifying Gods Organization Against All The Facts

by The wanderer in

jw
friends

justifying gods organization against all the factsregardless of how many facts a person has standing against .

the watchtower society it is still gods organization.

eyes that cannot see, ears that cannot hearmy friend knows of the watchtowers involvement with .

yaddayadda

Avidbiblereader said: "Hows come it when ever the Society is exposing someone it is for everyones benefit to get out of them but not them, why is it that no one else can be imperfect except them? The measuring stick they have used on others will be used on them according to the JUDGE Christ."

The above logic is perhaps the best and most powerful way to deal with persons like that. Persons who insist that it is still God's organisation no matter how many faults, hypocrisy, etc, you point out to them are susceptible to the above argument. Why should not severely judge persons belonging to other Christian religions, because equally, they are also imperfect and perhaps just 'made a mistake'. The JW defender can only defend against this by resorting to distinguishing 'true' religion from 'false' religion by means of subjective degrees/scales of doctrinal 'truth', measuring one set of doctrines against another. The way to refute that defense is to then point out that there are quite a few other religions and many thousands of worshippers who teach very similar doctrines as JW's (The Bible Students, Christadelphians, Herbert Armstrong derived groups, SDA's, Biblical Unitarians, etc). So why are all these other groups rejected by God when they have the same 'framework' of doctrinal truth as JW's? The JW apologist can then be helped to be more reasonable about assessing their own religion in contrast to others.

The thing is, you cannot prove that JW's are NOT the true religion. You can only prove that ALL religions are teaching falsehoods in various degrees, and they all have hypocritical religious leaders, legalism, etc, and therefore NONE of them can logically be the single, one, true religion. Getting the loyal JW to see that God and Christ are more interested in what is in a persons heart is more important than adherence to a set of creeds does a lot more to break down their defences than arguing over specific issues.

29

Shunned by the congregation for not performing

by truthseeker in

jw
friends

as many of you know, i am a witness who still attends for the sake of my wife.

my meeting attendance has dropped to about 50% and i make maybe 1 hour a month in field service, although i report more than this to keep the elder's off my back.. after several months of this, the result has been noticeable.. those who used to be friendly and greet me no longer do so.

some even avoid me.

yaddayadda

Its pretty obvious that JW's are not fulfilling John 13:35. As long as you are still a baptized JW, you should be shown love, no matter how irregular you are in meeting attendance, etc. They imagine they are fulfilling John 13:35 through going door to door. Hardly. They totally miss the point. They do not show love to the 'weaker' ones amongst their own and do not show any genuine love for those in the world either. Compared with Jesus great pity and concern for the downtrodden, ostracised, poor, sinful, etc, JW's abysmally fail to follow in Christ's footsteps.

It really is just a completely performance based religion. There is practically no difference to how JW's treat each other and how employees of a sales company would treat each other (field service = door to door sales; meetings = team building meetings/pep talks; answering up = enthusiastic comments to other employees at team meetings/pep talks). The more you perform and brown-nose the more popular you are and the more you rise up the ranks and get 'rewarded' by management. There's no difference.

The 'publishers' are not so much Christians as Watchtowerites. They are little sales reps for the Watchtower Society. That's all. They've been collared by a religious publishing house to do their sales work.

85

Is Faith Dangerous? A Question for Believers...

by AllTimeJeff in

i hope this will be as respectful a debate as possible.

here is the premise: many of us (most) seem to be ex jw's on this board.

that means, whatever your motivation, for a time you bought into the theology of jw to one degree or another.

yaddayadda

deleted (posted twice).

85

Is Faith Dangerous? A Question for Believers...

by AllTimeJeff in

i hope this will be as respectful a debate as possible.

here is the premise: many of us (most) seem to be ex jw's on this board.

that means, whatever your motivation, for a time you bought into the theology of jw to one degree or another.

yaddayadda

Posting this from another recent thread, as it is relevant to this topic:

"Whatever labels you want to put on it, it takes just as much faith (more in fact) to believe that all life in the universe is the result of blind chance than to believe in a great mind behind it all. Atheists are keen to argue that there is no evidence for God's existence (using simplistic analogies with unicorns and fairies) but equally, there is not the slightest shred of evidence to support the crazy notion that everything came from nothing.

To hold to the belief that chance, through a process of random shuffling, brought about our world, is just as much in the realm of 'metaphysics' than objective science. The problem is particularly acute in respect to the beginnings of life itself.

Belief in a personal God or belief in impersonal forces of blind chance: they're both articles of faith. You choose based on the available evidence. I personally believe, based on the evidence, it is only a small step to believe in a creator, not a giant leap. It takes a much bigger leap of faith, across a giant chasm of improbability, to put your faith in the astronomically odds associated with blind chance as an explanation for everything.

It is mindlessness, more aking to rank credulity rather than faith even, to assert that amino acids just randomly strung themselves together to form the protein chain, to take just one example. Our tightly-knit and intelligible universe is simply not sufficiently explained by a random chance process. Whatever the alternatives are, that simply doesn't cut it.

I recommend you read "The Quantum World" by Theoretical physicist John Polkinghorne to learn more about alternatives to the unsatisfactory explanations of naturalistic atheism . Polkinghorne is a colleague of Stephen Hawking and the former president of Queen's College, Cambridge, and has been at the forefront of high energy physics for over thirty years. Interestingly, even Stephen Hawking, at the end of his book "A Brief History of Time" humbly acknowledges that science can only describe the "what" of human observations and that only God can answer the "why." "

19

Why I must be Agnostic and not Atheist.

by OnTheWayOut in

jw
friends

the wts has this nice little explanation for everything.

how can man be .

only six thousand years old, how could a global flood have actually taken.

yaddayadda

Whatever labels you want to put on it, it takes just as much faith (more in fact) to believe that all life in the universe is the result of blind chance than to believe in a great mind behind it all. Atheists are keen to argue that there is no evidence for God's existence (using simplistic analogies with unicorns and fairies) but equally, there is not the slightest shred of evidence to support the crazy notion that everything came from nothing.

To hold to the belief that chance, through a process of random shuffling, brought about our world, is just as much in the realm of 'metaphysics' than objective science. The problem is particularly acute in respect to the beginnings of life itself.

Belief in a personal God or belief in impersonal forces of blind chance: they're both articles of faith. You choose based on the available evidence. I personally believe, based on the evidence, it is only a small step to believe in a creator, not a giant leap. It takes a much bigger leap of faith, across a giant chasm of improbability, to put your faith in the astronomically odds associated with blind chance as an explanation for everything.

It is mindlessness, more aking to rank credulity rather than faith even, to assert that amino acids just randomly strung themselves together to form the protein chain, to take just one example. Our tightly-knit and intelligible universe is simply not sufficiently explained by a random chance process. Whatever the alternatives are, that simply doesn't cut it.

I recommend you read "The Quantum World" by Theoretical physicist John Polkinghorne to learn more about alternatives to the unsatisfactory explanations of naturalistic atheism . Polkinghorne is a colleague of Stephen Hawking and the former president of Queen's College, Cambridge, and has been at the forefront of high energy physics for over thirty years. Interestingly, even Stephen Hawking, at the end of his book "A Brief History of Time" humbly acknowledges that science can only describe the "what" of human observations and that only God can answer the "why."

13

Is the "Kingdom" a "government"?

by Doug Mason in

my understanding is that the wts says the "kingdom of god/heavens" is a "government".

where do they get that idea from in scripture?

i presume that by "government" they mean "a system of exercising authority through an executive policy making body".

yaddayadda

This is a very good question and a very important one that deserves much more attention.

I think the WBTS is right to identify a 'heavenly governmental rulership' in relation to the Kingdom; however, where they go wrong is by restricting the meaning of the kingdom to this.

It is apparent in scripture that the kingdom is much more than just a 'governmental rulership' in heaven made up of supposedly 144,000 only.

The Kingdom is basically: God's entire dominion (rule), both in heaven and on earth.

According to scripture Satan rules the world, so the world is not presently a part of God's dominion, ie, is not included in God's kingdom. But individuals in the world who have been reconciled to Christ enter into God's kingdom, ie, they come under God's rule or dominion.

Matthew 25:34 is just one scripture that gives the lie to the Society's very narrow interpretation. There the 'sheep' (who the Society says are an earthly class) are said to 'inherit the kingdom'.

5

The Scholors who have approved the NWT.....

by A-Team in

i wonder how the faces of the gb and the pioneers will look like once they see this......

http://www.forananswer.org/top_jw/scholars%20and%20nwt.htm

yaddayadda

There are a fair number of scholars on that list who offer comments that tend to support the NWT rendering of John 1:1 just as much as oppose it. But the author of that webpage tries to shape or mitigate the scholars words in just as much a biased way as the WBTS is accused of.

I think the comment below sums up the equally biased attitude of the author:

"Dr. Danker is certainly a recognized scholar and he has been quoted accurately. It will be noted that his lukewarm comments about the NWT are with regard to the Old Testament. Few scholars have complained about the Watchtower inserting its dogma into the Hebrew Scriptures. Indeed, since the OT contains far fewer explicit Scriptures teaching the orthodox doctrines that the Watchtower denies - Christ's deity; the existence of the soul; and hellfire - it is not surprising that the NWT Hebrew Scriptures are relatively bias-free."

It's hard to respect the opinion of someone who says that the WBTS denies 'the existence of the soul', and who upholds the 'hellfire' doctrine.

12

NOTICE TO TED JARACZ: "We're coming out, guns a blazin'!"

by sf in

jw
friends

"the gig is up, the news is out...".

"lyin', cheatin', hurtin', that's all you seem to do....your time is gonna come".

"when the walls, come tumbling down...".

yaddayadda

cut down on the coffee sf.

22

The Watchtower Official Page of Hypocrisy

by Vinny in

this link is directly from the "official" watchtower website.

it's a short reading.

now, imagine somebody trying to apply this very same advice to their own jehovah's witness faith.

yaddayadda

Wow. The points in that article (and the gross hypocrisy of the WBTS in relation to it) are pretty much exactly why I can no longer remain a JW in good conscience.