Cold Steel: I don't know that the organization is "evil" as much as it is ignorant.
CS, It is evil. The higher ups just use ignorant people as their lackeys. There is a very sinister group behind the WT. It's much more than just your "governing body". It springs from a well much deeper. And the water is poison.
CS: Sometimes one gets locked into a doctrine and can't back out of it without looking like there's some sort of spiritual disconnect. It's very much like the blind leading the blind.
It seems like you are apologizing for them. There is no excuse. When you make up a lie and make up club rules and present them as the real truth right out of god's mouth because god himself told you so....yeah, I could see where one might end up in an eventual bind. These liars will get what they deserve one day soon. There is no excuse for the nightmares they have put families through. A place of eternal torment for them would be satisfactory to me.
Cold Steel: Some strange sects today still forbid photographs because they can be seen as "graven images."
And some aborigines believe that a photograph will capture and steal your soul. They won't exactly be engraved images until The Number is written on your forehead. (j/k)
Cold Steel: And I had a friend who would drive fifty miles out of his way to visit a kosher restaurant on travel. At home he kept two sets of china. It wouldn't have been so bad except that he didn't believe a word of the Old Testament. The kosher stuff was just what he'd been taught; it was part of the culture.
Part of the culture? You mean superstition? Yes, all religions are based in unfounded superstition. The whole deal about the separate dishes is another misinterpretation of scripture. The leaders of these religions have no true spiritual understanding and so they make up these rituals instead. The no blood transfusions is a ritual, too. The excess china is a ritual based on a scripture about not boiling a calf in it's mother's milk. There is something insensitive about doing something like that. It's the same sort of sensivity that vegetarians have about not eating meat because of having seen how inhumanely the animals have been treated and slaughtered. They have feelings for the creatures.
This illustration of boiling a calf in it's mothers milk was most probably meant to instill a sense of reverence and respect for what animals give us and not to be taken to excess. The way most people today live, animals are nothing more than a commercial meat farm. It is to such an excess that they are now given hormones and milked so constantly that their teats crack and the milk contains blood and pus. Today, animals suffer in making production and before slaughter, they often travel miles without food or water in cramped unsanitary conditions on the way to the slaughterhouse. What other culture eats meat at least three times a day?
Having two sets of dishes doesn't even come close to what was meant by that scripture. Religious leaders are fucking idiots. Yes, they are blind leading the blind. But that still does not excuse their arrogance because they deliberately misled ignorant people and used them for commerce. It was not a "sincere" mistake of misunderstanding scripture. It was more a case of making up rituals to appease the masses in order to shake out their pockets.
