Half banana

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Posts by Half banana

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  47

  Did Jesus actually start a church to himself?

  by TTWSYF in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  with some 30,000 different christian denominations, how would one know which one was for real?

  some folks think jesus did start a church, others think no.

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  Half banana

  Thanks for the scholarly leads FTS.
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  96

  Is the religion of Jehovah's Witnesses really an inferior form of Christianity?

  by nicolaou in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  seems to be quite a few posters recently pulling down the beliefs of jw's as not biblical or truly christian.

  maybe you're right, maybe you're wrong, i really don't care.. in some important ways though mainstream christians often behave better than jehovah's witnesses; most don't practice shunning or impose lethal medical prohibitions on their members.

  many are far more tolerant of the lgbt community and a few even make the awkward attempt to square the fact of evolution with their faith.. please note that i'm saying some, not all.. so i suppose it's fair to say that differing forms of christianity can be better or worse for individuals, families and the wider community.

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  Half banana

  @Paul from Cleveland, it is no more likely that there is true religion any more than it would be to find true politics.
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  96

  Is the religion of Jehovah's Witnesses really an inferior form of Christianity?

  by nicolaou in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  seems to be quite a few posters recently pulling down the beliefs of jw's as not biblical or truly christian.

  maybe you're right, maybe you're wrong, i really don't care.. in some important ways though mainstream christians often behave better than jehovah's witnesses; most don't practice shunning or impose lethal medical prohibitions on their members.

  many are far more tolerant of the lgbt community and a few even make the awkward attempt to square the fact of evolution with their faith.. please note that i'm saying some, not all.. so i suppose it's fair to say that differing forms of christianity can be better or worse for individuals, families and the wider community.

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  Half banana

  To evaluate JWs in terms of Christianity has many difficulties because it means different things to different groups. In a way I think that JWs take all the worst aspects of primitive Christianity such as unthinking belief in supernatural revelation and they run with it. In many respects JWs do appear to maintain the credulous cult enthusiasm of the early centuries but that certainly does not make it better than others. You cannot deny that the early church was also a doomsday cult yet JWs unquestioningly borrow those same doomsday scriptures to justify their own existence. The fact is that Jesus got it wrong in the first century so how can repeating the same failed prophecy have any relevance now? This contrasts with the established churches which try and serve the welfare of the communities in which they operate and don’t worry about the fairy-tale nature of the Bible.

  The essence of Christianity is the focus on the saviour figure, as it was for all the other father and son Christ cults before it, but the Jesus cult offered a new twist on the old story which claimed that the Christ figure had become blood and flesh! The written word of the legend they taught; had become a breathing man... what a story! You would have to have been illiterate and desperate to believe that in the first place, however later on, Roman Catholic propaganda sanitized the hoax and not only made it acceptable but demanded that it was holy truth.

  (The Gnostics, David J, as I have read... but can’t remember where... recognised that Jesus was the same religion as the former Christ cults and appreciated the idea without partisan judgement as all of them being a positive expression of human hopefulness).

  So JWs inferior? No, I don’t think so since the whole of Christianity whilst giving comfort for the downtrodden is all based ultimately on folk myth and not on testable evidential truth. In other words Christianity including JWs, proclaims what it cannot deliver, they preach a false hope.
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  38

  Your Jehovah’s Witness Is Showing

  by David_Jay in

  1. jw
  2. experiences

  since i just signed up and posted a few times without doing this yet, here is my story..

  i think that i became a jehovahs witness because of my immaturity.

  i had some quirky personality traits, and i joined finding that i fit in because, as i said to myself: these people get me.

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  Half banana

  David Jay, in my best JW grammar; you done good bro!
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  475

  What is the alternative to JW?

  by Formerbrother in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  i mean this with all due respect, i would like to hear from genuine people who think jw have it wrong and then what is the truth?.

  im not talking about silly little quibbles here and there.. is jehovah real?

  the the bible is word?

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  Half banana

  Former brother, I’m glad you are hanging in here. What you don’t recognise as a witness is that you have lived, often for a lifetime, with your mind skewed towards interpreting everything in the black and white JW manner. Real life is not like this. Real life questions are not answered with such simplistic reasoning. It never could just be God or Satan could it? This is transparent 'cult talk' to create fear and obedience.

  However I sense you are beginning to see the difference since you are asking which is the best religion.

  There is a pattern of change which takes place in the mind of someone who has once been under the authoritarian control of Watchtower thinking. Nearly everyone on this site has experienced it. The penny drops; the JW religion is just another money grabbing business (or some such realisation). After a short while the usual thing is to cling onto the things we have cherished such as the paradise hope or the emotional security felt from believing in God. As time goes on we challenge all of our fundamentals, something never permitted in JW land, and often question the Bible’s truthfulness... for example if Adam did not live how could Jesus buy back the life Adam lost? If Adam was a myth, there is no need for a saviour, this sinks the need for salvation.

  Inevitably we begin to realise how much more complex and fulfilling life is when we unlearn cult dogma and see evidence for what is true rather than hanging loyally onto unfounded “beliefs” promoted by the Watchtower org or other earnest religions. The unlearning take a surprisingly long time since we have been well and truly programmed... but in time we get both our independent identity back (we are not Watchtower drones) and we are able to think freely for ourselves.

  I hope this gives a little insight into the process which will be going on...and may I say that the JW idea that there is such a thing as a ”true religion” is yet just another piece of cult talk.
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  27

  Had the C.O visit this week...went out on service and Wow

  by MrsR-Awaken in

  1. jw
  2. experiences

  this is my first post here (not being comments) but i still have to tell my story but for that i need to get my mind together in other to give as much detail as possible to be able to share it.

  will do in a future post.. anyway i had to share this.. so i went out on service this morning (i never do i always end up excusing myself because i hate field service) reason i did was to see what the new c.o had to say and he sure did say something.

  he was saying what we had to present and he went over the watchtower magazine.

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  Half banana

  Wow indeed! a false smile is bad enough but an anaesthetic...ridiculous!

  Your CO is a true cold-bloodied Watchtower zombie.

  Welcome Mrs R, happy to hear that you have awoken.
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  47

  Did Jesus actually start a church to himself?

  by TTWSYF in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  with some 30,000 different christian denominations, how would one know which one was for real?

  some folks think jesus did start a church, others think no.

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  Half banana

  In the words of the song “What it says in the Baable: it aint so relaable”. It is not what people say or write in a book which is “necessarily so” in telling the truth of a matter. After all it could be just wishful thinking or religious spin couldn’t it? Instead of immediately believing the truth of a text, the better question to ask is not, ”What does it mean?” but “Why was it written down?” Remember the Bible was written by men in authority for the instruction of illiterate people to support the cause of those in power.

  As evidenced by Paul’s writings and those books written in his name in the early centuries of what we now call Christianity; there were many cults vying for dominance. That is why Paul gets his knickers in a twist when others came up with private doctrines at odds with his own formulas. (1Tim 6:4,5) It is significant that christ-cults were legion back then, declaring their own christs as the true one such as Attis, Dionysus, Orpheus and Mithra for example. The Jesus brand came late on the christ scene and there is not much evidence for the name of Jesus in the extant texts from before the third quarter of the second century). It is worth noting that Jesus Christianity kept evolving and insertions of key names and events were made into the standard hand-written texts over many subsequent centuries.

  Christianity as a Church is essentially a fourth century phenomenon, consequently all organised Christianity today stems from what emerged out of the Roman Catholic bottleneck of belief. The idea of a divinely ordained primitive and pure Christianity existing before then is largely fiction. It was Emperor Constantine’s empowerment of his Roman Church to serve his political objectives which was the real birth.

  It was by chance that Constantine had a lowly born mother the daughter of an inn-keeper who had adopted Jesus Christianity in the late third century. Constantine had no religious scruples himself (he had his son murdered and his wife thrown into boiling water) his interest was, not surprisingly, in power and the retention of power, lessons he learned from his mentor Diocletian, the systematic persecutor of Christians. Constantine’s endorsement of Christianity was purely for superstitious reasons and prompted by maternal sentiment.

  A key to understanding to how Jesus Christianity trumped the other pagan cults is to be found in the politics of Rome under Constantine with its religious tolerance, at least up until the death of the Emperor. There was political capital in having Rome control all of the cults under the one state umbrella...total control is after all the most useful ploy for tyrants. Fusion of the cults, otherwise known by the process of syncretism, meant the acceptance into the fold of virtually all prevailing pagan doctrines. This has a significant precedence, it was the same method used by the Roman Empire to enlarge its sphere of influence by subduing its enemies, adopting them and assimilating them and their gods into Roman culture.

  It was no mean task, but the bishops of all the pagan cults were bribed and given privileges to join the Catholic (meaning all embracing) Roman Church. In turn they contributed their dogma and personnel. In the quest for orthodoxy one of the most popular Roman cults, that of Mithra (Mithras) had to be assimilated without loss of face since it held a prominent role in the religious milieu . Bearing in mind there was no fierce partisanship among the non-Jesus cults, the Roman church needed to subdue and eliminate the ever popular Mithraism. How could it be done more diplomatically than by saying that the Jesus figure will build his Church on the ’Rock’. Easily explained away in Roman Catholicism today as an explanation of the first pope but in reality a cryptic promise to Mithraics to build the Catholic Church on their foundations. Which it did in the most literal way at the Vatican City on top of the great ‘mithraeum’ (Mithraic church) of the catacombs and metaphorically so by using their principal doctrines; notably the last supper and the eschatology (end times) as taught by Mithaism. Of course Saint Jerome would say they had different beliefs because he was right they did (he was the son of the Christian writer /forger/ biographer Eusebius by the way) but in the great syncretism all accommodation of all politically useful beliefs were eventually absorbed into the Catholic melting pot. Surprising it is that Jerome might talk about the hopes after death being different in Mithraism when yet again one of the many Catholic borrowings was from their belief in heavenly reward for the righteous and hell-fire for the damned.

  Jerome lived in the post Constantine period when a state sponsored blanket condemnation of “paganism” began which deliberately set out to destroy and obscure the rustic folk origins of the Christ cults and their unholy fusion. This policy of distancing itself from its true origins is critical in understanding the authority the Catholic Church awarded itself as the all embracing holy and exclusive Church.

  It would be implausible that Jesus (a literary figure) or any of the other cult figureheads could announce the establishment of their own church, being the ones who were the object of its worship! If it was written so, as it is in the case of Jesus, it exposes the mythical nature of the text which contains the information.

  (sorry for the length)
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  47

  Hello, this is my first post

  by noralee in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  hello, this is my first post, i would like to introduce myself and say thank you to every one on this forum, you have been a lifeline to me these last few years.. i had been a jw for 30 years when i walked away a few years ago disgusted by the treatment victims of child abuse, domestic abuse and rape receive from the wtbts.. at first i thought it was a local problem, elders personal opinions, the way they handled the situations, imperfect men etc., until i checked out jehovahs witnesses and child abuse/domestic abuse online.

  that's when i realized they had the same modus operandi worldwide.

  that led me here, tbuo this forum, and then to crisis of conscience, jw facts, watchtower documents, jw survey, old watchtower literature and cd s, reading a couple of steve hassans books, and more recently exiting the jw cult.. the feelings of shock, betrayal, anger at the wtbts, angry with myself for being so gullible, depression, reflection, loneliness, have taken their toll.

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  Half banana

  Yep, as Cha ching says it's the joy of new posters having woken up to the real world which is so heartening. All of us having lived under the mind control of the disgusting JW organisation with its deluded leaders...may it soon implode! Welcome Noralee.
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  16

  Un shunning

  by zeb in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  with change looming large on the horizon what will those people do who make a wt/career of shunning should it become just a 'conscience issue'.

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  Half banana

  Zeb, are you making the suggestion that some easing up on the strictness is coming because some specific statements have been made--- or is it the from the defensive and ambiguous comments made by the GB in the Aussie Royal Commission?

  Either way, to lessen the pressure on both the shunners and the shunned would not I think do the Borg any favours. The reason being that it would inevitably allow the light of apostate thinking to shine into their dark lives.

  Let's hope it happens.
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  39

  Hello, I'm new here too!

  by redpilltwice in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  hi everybody, 1st post here.

  20 years jw, elder for 6 years, regular pioneer for 3 years, have always been following the 2012 candace conti abuse case with much interest, especially since the case suddenly disappeared from www.watchtower.com's news section (thanks brother j. r. brown, office of public information, because it led me to "worldly" websites for more info), leading to more and more dissatisfaction , leading to jwfacts, jwsurvey, ad1914, wtdocuments etc., leading to my awakening about 4 months ago, now fading faster and faster to zero meetings and zero field service...and you know what?

  it feels good!.

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  Half banana

  Well done 2redpills for climbing out of the Watchtower swamp and a star for your clever daughter.