thanks to bu2b and splash who mentioned this quote in another thread!.
but i thought it deserved a thread all of its own, such is the impact of this:.
the very best example of going beyond the things written comes from a 2008 watchtower.
Have you ever thought how limiting this idea is in the first place: " not going beyond what is written". It is a crafted expression of the early Christ-cult leaders (Paul and his ghost writers) to induce obedience to them.
The acceptance of this instruction narrows an individual's thinking and falsely assumes that written text is sacred. Nothing is sacred except life itself.
Assumptions are always foolish principles to live by.
JW Rogue I think the JW religion would have continued on a similar track with or without WW1 starting in 1914.
The prophesied date of 1914 according to Russell (who borrowed his ideas from others) was to have been the latest date for the destruction of all God's enemies and the restoration of the Earth under Christ's rule. Most significantly though, and with great financial consequences, it was also promised to see the visible return of Christ.
By the end of the nineteenth century The Russellites had been just a local affair around Pittsburg but so I have read, announcing the actual date for the "second advent" of JC was Russell's special baby which began after the turn of the century. It was publishing this prophecy which brought fame and attention for Russell from the whole world as a syndicated preacher.
It was a great disappointment for Russell and co and a public failure of his credibility but he postponed the date, as all doomsday merchants have to, to 1915 and as ever , to no effect. He did announce to Bethel that the world had in fact ended...like you do.
It was only later probably in Rutherford's gloss on Russell's predictions that the mention of 1914 was seen to be a divine insight. Rutherford's WT in the twenties, I believe began the idea...and the Watchtower always builds castles on its own myths.
i've personally never met any of those who claim to be anointed but the other jw's who have are always unanimous in their praise of how lovely and what wonderful people they are.
and i don't mean the gb i mean common or garden anointed.
i was told that when they speak about being in heaven that they almost "seem to glow".. is this right?
My experience was with elderly JWs who took the emblems in the late nineteen sixties to the eighties. To outsiders they certainly would have been considered odd or nutty but then people born at the end of the previous century were not socially homogenised by television and the other media in the subtle way we are induced to conform today. The other consideration is the fact that old people are often losing their mental sharpness, if they ever had it.
I am actually very glad to have known a local old 'partaker' in London UK who in the 1930s had worked with Rutherford himself in New York. He was at the end of his life and losing his memory a bit, also he was treated shabbily by the elders in the cong. When I began to see gaping flaws in the JW vision, I broached the matter with him and he replied confidentially for me to keep my own counsel, which I did... and accelerated the long fade.
so why is celebrating mother's day wrong according to witnesses?.
is it not an opportunity to show respect to the giver of life (mother) and therefore god, the originator of families?.
does it not give an opportunity for members of the family to give a hard working mother a day off?
I wonder if the time will come with declining membership, when they will start listening to their critics and accept Mother's day and birthdays and all sorts of commonplace traditions just in an attempt to retain numbers?
It is a possible future for the cult to be a more easy going, chummy thing with laid back "conscience decisions" on the above matters. The key to WT success is not doctrinal truth which is an impossible ideal for any group but to control a large membership which equals income and power for those at the top.
more light for our ex jw members.... http://www.extj.com/showthread.php?27719-the-show-of-apple-jam-by-president-s-brother-the-accounting-chaste.
in patterson there is a group of brothers, all of them baptized after 1975, a group of them are candidates to all new gb membership, as soon as new places will be included or some members will passed away.
clear details and info tell us that a new gb will be a us citizen with mexican background.. really funny to see that we can give light to our ex jw family months before it comes public :).
with the newly released homophobic video by the wts, it gets clearer that those people can't stop shooting themselves in the foot.
they are already under examination and de facto trial by the australian committee; more and more people and officials in western democracies inquire into their abusive tactics and put them under the microscope, and what do they do?
they release a video which confirms those worries.
The reason for the condemnation by the JW org is that the Bible plainly discriminates against homosexuality.
Jehovah's Witnesses are duty bound not to reason for themselves or question what is written in the Bible. JWs are superficial thinkers, they just blindly follow the text and quote scripture as if by doing so it will buy them their ticket to paradise.
When something does not accord with rationality and fairness and people's well-being; well that's too bad for them! and with a smug superiority they will be pleased to inform you..."That's what the Bible says".
That will be the day when JWs start to think deeply and realize it is this infantile reliance on the foolish, bigoted Bible text which is at fault--- not homosexuality.
so why is celebrating mother's day wrong according to witnesses?.
is it not an opportunity to show respect to the giver of life (mother) and therefore god, the originator of families?.
does it not give an opportunity for members of the family to give a hard working mother a day off?
it has been 21 years since the 1995 article that pretty much buried the idea of the '1914 generation'.. remember those guys?
the ones born in 1914 that would still be alive when the end of the system arrived.. i'm glad i'm old enough to remember going from door to door, preaching this belief.
the reason i say that is because i have a lot of 'still in' jw friends and family.
What an enormous red-herring? Perhaps more than 20 million people have believed the ever evolving teachings of the Bible in the JW manner. According to Pew research, about 20 million still believe this but less than half are active in following through.
My thought is that all this talk of "generation" is misleading. The statement in the gospels is only about Jesus' generation not any other...and Jesus words did not come true. It's childish nonsense like all prophecy is.
For goodness sake the Bible is just a book, it is not holy unless you are fool enough to believe it is. Little of it makes sense for the twenty first century and Jehovah's Witnesses, hanging on every word, are living proof that Bible teachings cannot be taken literally nor for that matter do they have any significance at all.
How can anyone believe that all mankind will be brought back from the dead? This is ridiculous...
There is a real life awaiting those who give up this stupidity.
...right from a pro-jw site in response to a post about the relative seriousness of homosexuality.
all you can do is reason from the scriptures, which you appear to have done.
homosexuality is as serious as bestiality, or adultery and fornication.
All you can do is reason from the scriptures (JW post on another site)
This defeatist mentality is at the root of the JW belief. Instead of thinking there is only one set of rules by which we must organize our lives it makes greater sense to take a leaf from reality and not run your life on hocus pocus from the ancient world.
We are born with undifferentiated sexual proclivities and usually early on, sometimes after a little experimentation we realize where our natural interests lie.
Homosexuality exists, not from choice or by design, it is simply a fact of mammalian life on Earth. Religious people fear things which do not accord with their childish concept of what an invisible spirit creator decreed, i.e God made man and woman and they had sex and the woman gave birth to children. No room for homosexuality or bi-sexuality there.
How crushing this must be for those of the minority who do not fit the Biblical prescriptions. How disgusting for Jehovah's Witnesses to blindly follow the Bible and each other in asserting their hurtful ignorance.
https://www.jw.org/en/publications/books/teen-questions/1 who am i?2 why do i worry about my appearance?3 how can i talk to my parents?4 how can i fix my mistakes?5 what if i’m being bullied at school?6 how can i resist peer pressure?7 how can i deal with the pressure to have sex?8 what should i know about sexual assault?9 should i believe in evolution?10 how can the bible help me?basically a compilation of previous wt articles.let's take chapter 9 on evolution:statements as quotes below are really going to help jw teens defend creation: [quote]“if you were walking through the forest and discovered a beautiful house, would you think: ‘how fascinating!the trees must have fallen in just the right way to make this house.’ of course not!
it’s just not reasonable.
sowhy should we believe that everything in the universe just happened to come about?”[/quote][quote]“imagine that someone told you that there was an explosion at a printing plant and that the ink spattered onto the walls and ceilings and formed the text of an unabridged dictionary.
Absolutely Xanthippe, not only do the WT conflate evolution with the arrival of life but they entirely miss the point of the theory, deliberately so, which is that evolution occurs in small increments with the organism utilizing a small variant which favours its reproduction. Big changes come very slowly.
So the illustration of a house in the woods arriving by the fall of trees and the tired one of an explosion in a print works is so inappropriate as to be laughable. Unless of course you are a JW with a mental age stuck at the level of a 5 year old. Four year olds might buy magical creation illustrations but perhaps not so many six year olds?
(I have to admit though because there is nothing in everyday life like evolution, a simple illustration of the process is very hard to find.)
Naturally teaching as if to a five year old is desirable in a doomsday cult as having your audience unquestioning and unsophisticated like children are makes it easy for mind manipulation.
Sad and vile at the same time.
