Posts by Anony Mous

Good for you, many do find their way out if you can cut ties completely. I was hoping to be on that way, but then I seem to keep getting pulled into the painful and disastrous results of their policies through close and extended family that are still ‘in’.

I’m probably going to be around here for another decade or so, hopefully after that I can make that same transition and just have it as a bad history.

Their flawed interpretation starts at Genesis 1:2 as they already rewrote that chapter to fit their theology and it continues until Revelation.

Genesis 1:2 NWT says and God’s active force was moving about over the surface of the waters.

Whereas the Bible says: the Spirit of God (a separate entity within the Godhead) was hovering over the waters.

Given their re-interpretation of the deity of both God, Holy Spirit and Son (Jesus according to Christians), they basically reject all scripture and simply pick and choose select verses that seem to fit (and even then they may have multiple interpretations of the same verse or use the same verse to support multiple beliefs).

Great:

God recreates/re-forms the person in the heavens as a spirit - with their memories, personality, etc

How is that entity not a soul and how does it transfer to heaven. They must be transferred somehow, purely physically speaking some 'energy' must go from here to there.

Here is the problem with the non-immortal soul/spirit belief of the JW

1) The belief is that your body and your spirit and your soul are just different names for the same thing (your physical body and your personal attributes; the soul is not immortal; spirit is your life force and also not immortal). Physical bodies cannot enter heaven, when you die, your life force and your soul dies with you. Let's assume that is a true statement.

2) God recreates a "body" for you in heaven with your personal attributes, it by JW standards is considered a "soul". Since your "spirit" is your animating life force, you cannot be created a "spirit" since "spirits" have no personal attributes or will (eg. the Holy Spirit according to JW interpretation is not a person, but God's force and has no will).

3) Per the Bible and according to JW the body dies and cannot enter heaven so it cannot be the 'same thing' that was on earth, yet, JW believe the body = the soul. Thereby statement 2 and statement 1 cannot be true at the same time, it's a logical contradiction.

You can extend 2 to include people resurrected. If God did not preserve your soul, spirit or body, how will he resurrect you the way you were. "From memory" sure, but then God DID preserve an aspect of your soul or spirit if not your body. Just like converting a letter with a signature from paper to digital and then printing it out again, is still legally considered a valid signature, just because you converted it into something different, doesn't mean it is no longer "the thing".

@journeyman: What you describe as JW theology, very few people actually know how to answer those 'difficult' questions. So if a kid asks a logical question, then parents often don't even know WHAT they believe because they've been trained that asking questions is wrong, and looking up answers to those questions on yourself is hard.

Unlike my kids in church, they go to Sunday school, have a pretty good knowledge about what they believe and what the Bible says. My other kid is raised with her JW mother, doesn't go to Sunday school, doesn't know at all what to believe, especially because we do go to church, she hears the things and it makes sense but in some places conflicts, she has a very hard time right now because the JW tell her a parody of what "Christendom" believes about hell and souls, then she goes to church and it actually all seems to make sense and not at all the parody that JWs hold other Christians to be.

It's a really weird thing, and something a lot of ex-JW's either experience or "don't want anything to do with religion" they'll never experience it and keep a really wrong JW idea about what churches are and do. Most churches are not at all like JW, they are not at all like what the media or the JW parodies them to be. And that is the same for most other religions, I have a Buddhist friend and when I first left JW and met him, we talked about his believes, all I knew was from that WTBTS conversion literature which I knew backwards and forwards because I was in the foreign language field for years. So I asked him if that is what he believed and he looked really weird and said, no, that's actually a really old and anti-Buddhist propaganda that people like Mao used to prosecute them. That was eye opening to me, he invited me to Temple and yes, it is not at all what the JW books told me about. So as an ex-JW, if you're interested in other people's religions and having conversations with them about it, first re-learn everything you know by visiting their 'churches' and talking to them.

So yes, the question is valid, if you don't have a soul, then 'what' goes to heaven if you're anointed. It can't be the fleshly body, which the explanation of God will just reconstruct a body, although not supported by the Bible, is a possibility, but if your body doesn't have a soul and the spirit is just your animating energy which dies when you die, then "what" goes to or becomes created in heaven, because even the JW believe that there is no 'flesh' only 'spirit' in heaven. The explanation that at the very end, God converts their soon-to-be-dead body/spirit/soul (which they claim is all the same thing) into something like a soul that then goes to heaven is a valid explanation, that actually fits within the Biblical interpretation of souls/spirits.

Makes sense, honey has healing/antibiotic properties and can preserve things for really long times, even thousands of years (practically infinity/forever for humans). Other cultures will have other plants and animals depending on availability - eg deer and rabbits frequently occur in Western European mythology because they procreate so fast, they are a practically infinite food source or pine trees in northern areas that don’t lose their needles and have healing properties.

The WTBTS since COVID has had the same issue many large corporations have: people noticed that sitting at home and doing nothing had the same result as going into the office and ‘doing work’. Guess which is easier. That is why they stopped hammering on service, first they had to comply with their WEF and UN cronies to keep the money flowing, then they realized nobody wants to go ‘back to the office’. Problem is they can’t lay off their funding source, if they found a way to keep the money flowing without the cost, they would do it in a heartbeat, like they have been doing merging building use.

As with real (large) employers like the Federal Government or Microsoft, both parties know they can’t live without the other and both sides just have to figure out the minimum amount of mutual benefit that is acceptable. Some smaller companies and those with existing funding issues have been having mass layoffs for several years now (eg Twitter, Dell and HP) which doesn’t at all impact their service.

I’m thinking we will end up with something similar eventually, where participation will be a ‘subscription benefit’, you have then 2 classes of JW, those willing to pay for the ‘club’ that will have access to even smaller KH or some kind of country club resort (temples like other cults eg scientology and Mormons have), they’ll get visits from CO and even GB members depending on level of subscription and those that just kind of show up to the ‘free web version’ on Zoom.

I don’t have a problem with the churches (or anyone really) not being taxed, but since we all do pay taxes, I do think these kinds of ‘benefits’ should be accrued towards their personal income and they or the org should pay employee taxes on it.

The IRS has been very keen on prosecuting individual pastors the Biden and Obama admin didn’t like and making sure any private use of church property, even accidental was treated as tax evasion, yet these assholes live fully on the dime of their ‘flock’ and NYS and the Feds both don’t seem to care at all.

Note that pastors CAN have both income and benefits that are “reasonable” for their position. Income however should be taxed and benefits cannot be “personal”, my mother living in the house and paying a fraction of the mortgage is considered taxable income for me, if I got a Rolex from her, I would have to report it as income, yet the GB lives like kings in private hotels and don’t pay a dime in taxes, get Rolexes and don’t consider it paying ‘income’ (the state publishes the annual tax records of all non-profits).

Once again I don’t agree with the fact that the government either supports or opposes any religion, but people have to understand that with support comes financial benefits and with financial benefits there should be responsibilities or expectations that need fulfilled. Also with proven issues of child abuse or neglect, the parents should be held responsible, not some higher up societal or group level of responsibility assigned by the government.

As proven time and again, Europe does not have a right to freedom of religion as guaranteed in the US constitution, so people should look at it from that perspective as well. The WTBTS will make it seem they have been granted certain rights when they have not, they’ve accepted the cash, they need to be aware of what their benefactors want, whether that is religious, political or societal.

That’s what I agree with as well, although I think a lot of the scholars still look through the lens of Christian apologetics. So a lot of scholars are theologians rather than archeologists.

People here often quote scholars like Ehrman that even defend the JW interpretation without realizing that scholar is likely a JW or at least models his belief system according to it. Thus I have to discount their interpretations for clear bias. Likewise theologians often believe the story is the important part rather than the facts surrounding.