yesterday evening my wife and i were invited to friends house for new year's eve.
we met them when i was a christian and we have kept in touch.
they had a few other friends there as well, including the new church pastor and his wife.
Cofty, I am glad you brought up the Golden Rule.It is foundational to virtually all cultures in all ages. Not even original to Jesus or the Jews.
The god of theism has trouble fitting into the skin of Jesus. It was an uncomfortable fit for Jesus as well.
I suppose I am not a-------------(sorry gotta stop here , pipe brokewater spewing. will finish later. It froze.
yesterday evening my wife and i were invited to friends house for new year's eve.
we met them when i was a christian and we have kept in touch.
they had a few other friends there as well, including the new church pastor and his wife.
You said it true, EdenOne: no one can answer for God in the matter of suffering.
Even the one OT story comparable to the disaster of the tsunami (of the OT God showing mercy and giving warning before a (possibly?natural) disaster) was the Jonah story.
But in this case God sent a man to warn the bloody Ninevites of impending doom unless they repented. But even though in that solitary episode when God's mercy outshone Jonah's, the account only confounds us in the present discussion.
Jonah who wantedthe city destroyed, has God reprove him saying,"And for my part, ought I not to feel sorry for Nineveh the great city, in which there exist more than one hundred and twenty thousand men who do not at all know the difference between their right hand and their left, besides many domestic animals?"
Why didn't God do it Boxing day 2004?
The stories in the OT do not add up to a coherent whole so why wouldn't I struggle with the NT sories that people tell me grew out of it?
Eden, I personally have this dilemma: without buying any of the dogmas attached to Christianity, I still confess my own experience of Jesus' life that made a new person of me. I was "saved"--but without any hope of heaven. I was saved in a practical and real way that has given me and, by extension,those around me a better life. Jesus rose above the OT dogma.
Cofty, You have done me (maybe others) a service forcing a hard look at our biases. But I hope you allow that having established that the OT God teachings do not add up to anything you can hang a hat on you will allow that there still is the intrinsic need for love and fairness.
The universal currency of love and fairness is so imbedded that it is the cause of the outrage on this thread...
Where does that currency come from? I wish you would frame a thread along that line, cofty.
i have been inactive for a couple of years.
he has too, but wants to go back.
he has never researched anything about jws.
Let him marinate as someone else suggested.
And after a while ask him what have been some trying moments or troubling issues that seemed to conflict with his conscience. There will have been some--we just were taught to repress them.
Gently encourage the loving part of him to bond with you and the generous feelings that the WT represses in us:justice, openness, good fun, etc.
All the best!
with the polar vortex swirling further and further south and breaking records how cold is it where you are?.
.
here in gettysburg pa last night night we hit a low of -4 degrees but we were blessed with some wind that dropped the wind chill down to -22..
It's the southern part of the U.S. where I live. N.W. Arkansas. The past few nights were in the single digits for us.
One of our water lines froze.
Our red hen was so cold that she sat down at my feet when I fed them yesterday. I took her in by the wood stove and warmed her. That evening she reported in for an overnight bed in the house. When the rooster saw her this morning he warmed himself with some hot chicken-love as soon as her feet hit the ground.
SHEESH! Not cold enough to stop some things.....
It's 23 f. now. Looking for it to get above freezing today.
yes thats my situation.
some where along the path of life the wt guilt trip was dumped on our marriage and we havent had sex for years.. anyone else?
the hearts and flowers and gifts and doing the cleaning, the house work and paying the daily accounts never being drunk on drugs playing the horses or screwing others yep its all there but nothing coming back due to the wt guilt trip.. they made so much of 'oral sex' and 'pornea' incorrectly quoted at that and ventured thereby into areas they were patently very ill equipped to comment on.
TD--
when i left the jw's, close friends and some elders discussed my desicion with me,without fail they all concluded the same thing.... "but where else is there to go?!".
at the time, the question just confused me, i could not see why it confused me or the very telling nature of such a comment.
i never thought that once.. firstly, this indicates that many jw's remain jw's simply because of this tunnel vision perspective... everything in their periphery is valueless, but the wt on which they focus is everthing.
Right on, Snare,
So many remarks in OP reflected the last comments the elders had for me--and I didn't have an answer. I just knew that shutting down one's conscience was spiritual death any way...
Good to review the fear that used to govern our 'choices' inside the Halls of so called "Truth"--
Maeve
yes thats my situation.
some where along the path of life the wt guilt trip was dumped on our marriage and we havent had sex for years.. anyone else?
the hearts and flowers and gifts and doing the cleaning, the house work and paying the daily accounts never being drunk on drugs playing the horses or screwing others yep its all there but nothing coming back due to the wt guilt trip.. they made so much of 'oral sex' and 'pornea' incorrectly quoted at that and ventured thereby into areas they were patently very ill equipped to comment on.
I've been married 38 years, my husband is 19 years older than I am. I was a JW for 22 years. He and I have 7 children.
We have had PLENTY of trouble in our marriage. But I think it wrong to use sex as a weapon in marriage. If troubles are not being dealt with and you need to address them--don't withhold sex and think you will maake a point.
I had a legal separation from my husband--no sex then, of course. The matters we had to deal with went beyond sex.
I know non-JW couples who do not have sex. It causes a level of tension and sadness. They work together and are admirable in many ways--but in all three cases the women have shut it down.
I think it is fair to say that even if a woman is not "into it" that much(and maybe more especially)a man appreciates/needs your gift.--Get a bottle of scotch or some wine and say "Welcome home, baby" and turn off the lights.
i've been here forever.... this site still gives us some of the most up to date info about jws .
it keeps evolving.
sometimes it is the place to be and i think that's especially true for newbies.
Approaching 4 years. I joined the moment I found the site. I never looked for information outside the Borg until I divorced the WBTS for unreconcilable differences.
My first name here was Not a Captive.
No internet for @ two years, then, much humbled, I reappeared as Humbled.
The people on this site have nursed me through many different phases. I have learned and explored through discussions here. I have researched and read. I have thought and lived through so much since leaving the soul-bruising WT. And I have said things here that were hard to say, things hard to admit.
I love this community. Yes, I do.
Maeve Courteau
yesterday evening my wife and i were invited to friends house for new year's eve.
we met them when i was a christian and we have kept in touch.
they had a few other friends there as well, including the new church pastor and his wife.
The events of 26th Dec. 2004 raise a difficult question for theism. I want to investigate possible answers.--cofty
Although you might not be investigating along the fairly broad range that I am exploring, here are my thoughts:
Increasingly I am attracted to the simple theism the Jarawa tribe has found: the sea god tries to eat them. Apparently they don't have theologians clever enough to talk them out of this point of view.
That said, they probably would get a kick out of hearing Job argue with his Theo about a particular natural event--a cyclone.
The book of Job (the fellow wasn't an Israelite, btw) seems to have had somewhat the same uneasy feelings of Theo after the cyclone. After all, he had grown up with conventional views of Theo (though, when pressed on the matter, he confessed to certain observations of Theo's unfairness). But Job didn't find Theo to be very kind even though Job was very considerate of Theo. A cyclone killed all his children and left him with a wife that was even less impressed with Theo than he was. We all remember her advice: "Curse God and die!"
The book is a paean (sp?) to the power of Nature--and the unknowable-ness of Theo.
I have read that the ancient editors of the OT in David's court didn't touch the Book of Job. The old story is cryptic and misfit. Although it looks to me that the editors went ahead to ascribe motive to Theo's actions, talked about the courts of heaven, Satan, etc. But all we hear from Job is that his family's the disaster left him speechless after the event.
That was honest.
I would love to know what he said to his wife. and that is the problem, isn't it?
I would love to know what the Jarawans would say about this story.
I search for that answer myself.
i have had very few mentors in my life.
i love each of them dearly.. one such was a man a bit older than me named tollie padget.. .
tollie was the rarest of rare birds.
Good of you to reach out to him--since he is still "in prison".
I,too, wrote to an old mentor. She couldn't/didn't write back. but I still love her for her kindness. she was in so many ways contrary to the Organization--even hurt by it.
I'm sorry, Terry.
