i was at work over the weekend finishing up a project with my boss.
we needed the weekend because he had to take off a few days during the week for a funeral.
on saturday, he asked me what jw's believe about death.
Returning to dust is what our bodies do...I'm sure people have observed that from the beginning of time.
What happens to our consciousness is another story. Humans are so self aware they can't really conceive of not being conscious of anything at all, because we never are. Even under deep anesthesia, you get some very vague imput. That's why some doctors won't let anyone in an operating room talk negatively about the procedure...patients actually respond in minute ways to that.
dubs - paradoxes from hell.
jesus said his yoke was kindly and light.. dubs brag their religion is the "hardest religion in the world.".
the bible tells children to honor their parents.. the wts tells children to betray their parents.. if dubs really live in a "spiritual paradise," why do their lives have to be threatened to stay in it?.
Got that...swearing, masturbation and watching R rated movies=UnChristian
Wishing 99% of humanity were brutally slaughtered by Jehovah so you can have the planet=Christian
small things from our recent elder visit keep popping up in my mind .
one thing we discussed was how much pressure we felt in the congregation to keep doing more , more ,more .......i said that it caused us to never feel we were ever good enough !
if you are not meeting the national average you were treated like a slacker .
I never once remember being asked if the elders could come over and "encourage" me without it making my stomach tighten except once. And that was a just what I call a "tea and sympathy" call after our daughter died.
We just ate cake and coffee and chatted about the weather and such.
Usually, it was what my husband called "elders gettin their righteous on with you". Means "getting chewed out like you're 8 years old, for being naughty".
He finally would tell them "no thanks" when they asked to come for the obligatory sheparding call, which we only got when the CO was in town.
moses brought 10 plagues upon egypt to change pharoah's mind about letting jehovah's people go.. the 5th plague is to destroy only the egyptian livestock:.
6 and the next day the lord did it: all the livestock of the egyptians died, but not one animal belonging to the israelites died.. .
a few days later the 7th plague is described:.
A lot of the reshuffle of information in the Bible comes from the fact that it had at least a couple of different versions of all the stories, which were originally all oral, compiled without terrific editing.
The result is a lot of double dribbling, such as in this account and in the Genesis creation account, were things are duplicated out of order.
That's all...considering the state of non technology at the time, it's not a bad re telling of Jewish folklore and myth, but hardly flawless.
some atheists like to use the analogy of religion being like a "crutch.".
dr. david eller suggests, below, that this is a poor analogy.
in my own, limited experience, his words ring true.
Actually, you can see better if you squint, because it temporarily adjusts your corneal pressure, but it's rather hard on your eye muscles to do it for very long. LOL
The thing that asking questions and finding the answers cures is ignorance, or a lack of information, not stupidity. Stupidity is inherent and caused by not having a family tree with enough forks in it.
some atheists like to use the analogy of religion being like a "crutch.".
dr. david eller suggests, below, that this is a poor analogy.
in my own, limited experience, his words ring true.
Religion does a few good things too, so it's all or nothing thinking, a kind of which is cognitively inaccurate to say that all religion is bad and all religious people do bad things. And spirituality, well, that's not a bad thing at all. It's part of what makes us a higher creature. It comes from our creative and intuitive side, which is where we have it all over other creatures on the planet.
The only analogy I can think of is this: I like sweets, like most other people, it's a normal and natural craving (our bigger brains need a ridiculous amount of fuel, 20% of the glucose our livers process out of our food goes to the brain alone, and we also need it for bursts of energy) but some people eat way too much of it and the food industry caters to our love of sugar even though they know too much is bad for us.
Does that mean that sugar is inherently bad? Of course not. It means that some people abuse it and the food industry, unless regulated by something that has power over them, would feed us Twinkies all day long if they could because their bottom line, like all business, is making money, not what's good for us. We're supposed to be smart enough to eat what's good for us, but well...another debate entirely. You make money by giving people what they want.
When spirituality became the business we call religion, with it's need for a paid clergy, big expensive, impressive and imposing buildings to worship God (or gods...the pagans and Buddhists and Hindus and Druids are just as guilty of the "big fancy expensive building to worship God in" syndrome) it also became, necessarily to get the money for all that, a business. A very big business, and since money is power, pretty soon, they were influencing and controlling politics and government in many places too.
Business getting in bed with spirituality to give birth to religion, and then politics getting in bed with them to have a threesome has produced some very bad things, no doubt, but I don't think we can justify impugning some basic human need like spirituality to curb the excess of materialism and political machinations associated with big organized religion.
You know, I think the Witnesses think they are the only ones who believe that Politics, Religion and Business gang banging each other is a very bad idea, but a few historians of the 19th century proposed that very idea long before I read it in the Watchtower.
H.G. Wells (he was a historian before he wrote science fiction, also a proclaimed atheist) wrote in his history of the world that it was the secularization of the priesthood in Christianity and other earlier religions, which produced this need for churches amassing great wealth and power, and which has been a very bad thing, in general. It has created all sorts of conflicts and abuses of power.
Any one entity of civilization going for all the toys is a pretty bad idea actually. It's just that because of the power of belief, people gave that power to rule nearly everything in the Western World to religion first, and then after creating this monster, had to fight to get it back, i.e. democracy and a few other of the more modern governmental forms all saw the danger of what was created by marrying politics to religion.
We're still doing that, politically speaking. Unfortunately, America is behind other places in the world in kicking religion out of their political system, we still are worshipping the golden calf here and if you don't believe it, just look at the Wreligious Wrong and the power it wields, still. Too many people are still ignorant of the dangers of voting their religion, in other words.
But, I still don't blame innate human spirituality for that. It's just a basic human element or need that's been highly subject to corruption in most of human history.
i was at work over the weekend finishing up a project with my boss.
we needed the weekend because he had to take off a few days during the week for a funeral.
on saturday, he asked me what jw's believe about death.
The idea of something that survives death is as old as Homo sapiens, so I do think there is some innate need to believe that.
But even Stone Age graves have offerings in them that seem to suggest that the earliest modern humans had some belief that death was not the end of things.
Regardless of whether you think it's denial or a a trick of the mind or whatever, people have been thinking that for a long long time.
It's interesting that anthropologists seem to concur that religion or spiritual transcendence began about the same time that man developed art and music.
They seem to come from the same needs and parts of the brain, from what we can tell. Language had to come first, but there's some evidence in the genetic sequence that language ability increased dramatically in early humans when they began to think imaginatively, in other words, visualizing beyond mundane existence. To express that, music and art developed. It's not an accident that some of the worlds most reknowned art and music express spirituality. Of course music also is a huge factor in sexual attraction and pair bonding too...nature doesn't do anything without a driving biological reason. The side effect of needing to "romance" our mates as we became more and more socially and emotionally complex was apparently the need to express ourselves creatively. Spirituality is an offshoot of that.
So, if we weren't so horny we wouldn't have religion. LOL Oh, god, is that ironic or what, seeing as how religion (that bastard offshoot of spirituality) often seeks to control sexual behavior, either promiscuously or restrictively. But, that may also be because they're connected somehow in our brain meats.
this is the very end of a compelling debate.
if it grabs you go back and watch the whole thing.. .
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzxkqz8xx1e&feature=related.
I find the Bible useful, but hardly the last word on everything and certainly not free from error.
Does everything connected with the Big Sky God have to be perfect or it's crap? Can't it just be useful for some things and leave it at that?
Even IF God is perfect, that hardly means that humans and the stuff we write about him has to be. My testimony in court to what I've seen will inevitably be flawed and from my own point of view, but still has some value.
I hate it when everything has to be in absolutes! Aside from most mathematics, so few things are.
i'm trying to fade away, but i sometimes find myself in discussions or arguments with jw family/friends/white haired virgin elders.
now, i usually have them beat on things but i'm not very experienced, so i was thinking if you guys could help me put together a list of completely unanswerable questions to pose to my jw friends/family/elders so they can stop bugging me.
if i keep asking them questions they simply cannot answer, then they might leave them alone.
It depends on if the power of the ransom lies not in the actual death of Christ, but of his death as ultimate proof of his obedience and the willingness of Christ's sacrifice.
I think Witnesses miss the point in their literalism, which is one of my main problems with many of their teachings, of thinking it's the ACTUAL blood of Christ that has the power of ransom, or that he was balancing some scale of perfection that Adam lost and that Christ can restore. They still believe it's actual BLOOD that we should revere, rather than the life it sustains. They miss the point so badly that it defies my ability to describe at the moment.
The power of the ransom is the same proof that God demanded of Abraham if the demand was for obedience. There would be no actual benefit to Isaac's literal blood to God. But, there is great merit in proof of obedience and not only obedience, but WILLING obedience as evidenced by great sacrifice freely given.
Teaching humans that life is valuable and not to be sacrificed lightly or taken for granted may well be one of many lessons here.
I think you can get out of these accounts many lessons, but the literalism of the Witnesses prevents them from learning most of them.
all the earthquakes, mudslides, and now volcanic ash in the sky of europe grounding air-travel.. the end is nigh!.
jeff.
Yes, the JWs all hope to be tap dancing on our bones and picking out their mansions soon as they're cleaning up the world nearly destroyed from earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes, famine, disease and those big cracks in the earth little kids on bikes and other evil ungodly people fell down into....well, Hey, wait a damn minute, that's some shitty sounding paradise!
Not enough Spic and Span and Lysol on earth for that job, are you kidding me!???
