Jack C., you are spot-on. It is one of the great ironies of the JW teachings that they teach a doctrine that is really only a good fit with Greek-style substance dualism. If they only knew...
Posts by Sulla
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28after 14 years out i think ive finally found "the truth" reincarnation !
by looloo ini have read many books on reincarnation recently and no longer fear death , or the death of loved ones anymore , there are so many childrens stories of past lifes , children who have no knowledge of reincarnation etc that have come out with things like "mummy you were not my mummy last time i lived were you ?
" a 3 year old child coming out with such a thing is amazing and the reason i started looking into it was because my own 7 year old casually told me that" we have all been here before mummy but we just forget " i asked who told her that and she replied "nobody told me mummy i just know " it all makes sense now and is much more fair than jws "truth " any one else here looked into reincarnation ?.
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Theological Arguments, Human Realities
by AllTimeJeff inas i have sunken to a new low in condescending posts (according to botchtowersociety, who truthfully is an expert on all things bullshit), it did occur to me that discussions, debates, and mud slinging insult matches on this board often have a common root.. let me put out there that i am not an atheist, nor an agnostic.
frankly, i respect your right to believe that god is a trinity.
that he is jesus.
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Sulla
The Gladiator, I don't know what you are talking about. I snarled at designs, who has gone out of his way to dish out his own personal attacks. But AllTimeJeff and I have, well not exactly kissed and made up, but had something of a rapprochement. But even if I was too mean, what does that have to do with my argument? Or are you just trying to point out mean people suck?
S&G, I think you are correct. And it is worth considering that the earlier attacks were from the side that insisted Jesus couldn't have really been a man since, as designs has so thoughtfully pointed out, God can't suffer and die. That said, PSac makes what I think is a valid point about the influence of the Greek thinking on the language used to frame the debates and to finally make the doctrine explicit. There is, after all, the weird fact that we distinguish between natures and persons, but the Latin term is personna, which means mask (like what an actor wore) and the idea of a sequence of masks is what they are explicitly trying not to say.
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161
Theological Arguments, Human Realities
by AllTimeJeff inas i have sunken to a new low in condescending posts (according to botchtowersociety, who truthfully is an expert on all things bullshit), it did occur to me that discussions, debates, and mud slinging insult matches on this board often have a common root.. let me put out there that i am not an atheist, nor an agnostic.
frankly, i respect your right to believe that god is a trinity.
that he is jesus.
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Sulla
Tec, I don't doubt your experience for one minute. And I don't mean to say your experience was something other than what you say it was. And if you think I did say it, then I won't say it any more.
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161
Theological Arguments, Human Realities
by AllTimeJeff inas i have sunken to a new low in condescending posts (according to botchtowersociety, who truthfully is an expert on all things bullshit), it did occur to me that discussions, debates, and mud slinging insult matches on this board often have a common root.. let me put out there that i am not an atheist, nor an agnostic.
frankly, i respect your right to believe that god is a trinity.
that he is jesus.
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Sulla
I don't disagree with you in any of those comments, PSac. I might quibble with the idea that the doctrine is not needed. If I were to quibble, I would say that any true statement about God is necessary. But that would be a quibble and I'm not in much mood to quibble.
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161
Theological Arguments, Human Realities
by AllTimeJeff inas i have sunken to a new low in condescending posts (according to botchtowersociety, who truthfully is an expert on all things bullshit), it did occur to me that discussions, debates, and mud slinging insult matches on this board often have a common root.. let me put out there that i am not an atheist, nor an agnostic.
frankly, i respect your right to believe that god is a trinity.
that he is jesus.
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Sulla
designs: From one Cult into another bigger Cult 'how do you explain that'.
It's a mystery, designs, but our world is filled with mystery. How does one explain why your head is filled entirely with dog shit? For that matter, how does one explain how your head is filled only with dog shit? Science can't explain it, but the fact is indisputable, stinking up the whole house.
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161
Theological Arguments, Human Realities
by AllTimeJeff inas i have sunken to a new low in condescending posts (according to botchtowersociety, who truthfully is an expert on all things bullshit), it did occur to me that discussions, debates, and mud slinging insult matches on this board often have a common root.. let me put out there that i am not an atheist, nor an agnostic.
frankly, i respect your right to believe that god is a trinity.
that he is jesus.
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Sulla
PSac, I agree in part and disagree in part. The teaching is not explicit in the NT, though the habits of the primitive Church were clearly Trinitarian in nature. The term obviously post-dates the NT, but that is not the same as saying the doctrine was imposed as a late addition.
PSac: it is NOT required for believing Christ to be our Lord and savour, Son of God, and that he was resurrected.
People can believe lots of amazing things without any particular reason. I do think that the early Councils were correct to observe that the core Christian claims about Jesus being the Son of God, that he was raised, that his death was in order to fix creation, must necessarily imply the Trinity. Logically, then, if P implies Q, then denying Q means denying P.
So, I think it really is necessary. Which is not to say that someone could not accept the Christian premises and still reject the Trinity. But that's a different sort of question, I think. They couldn't do it logically. -
161
Theological Arguments, Human Realities
by AllTimeJeff inas i have sunken to a new low in condescending posts (according to botchtowersociety, who truthfully is an expert on all things bullshit), it did occur to me that discussions, debates, and mud slinging insult matches on this board often have a common root.. let me put out there that i am not an atheist, nor an agnostic.
frankly, i respect your right to believe that god is a trinity.
that he is jesus.
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Sulla
I don't know, Tec, sounds like the reason you aren't a JW is because you found them to be arrogant. Or maybe there is some other reason associating with them made you, as you put it, judgmental. They encouraged you somehow to look down on others, you say?
Jgnat, I'm aware that Nicaea was focused on the divinity of Christ; subsequent Councils defined the relationship of the Spirit. However, Christian prayer and worship was Trinitarian in nature from the very start.
AllTimeJeff, it shouldn't come as a surprise that I find myself in substantial disagreement with you. First, I don't think the gospels are as focused on the type of Jesus you think they are. Many have pointed out that the gospels are Passion narratives: it is the Passion that is the point of the gospels, the other information is there to tell us who it is that suffers the Passion. How many times do the gospels say that something happened so that you would believe Jesus is the son of God? or some similar comment. How do we miss the use of irony in Mark: only Jesus' enemies worship him, for example: the Roman soldiers mockingly worship Jesus after they whip him. Etc. & etc.
So, I'm not convinced we can read the gospels the way you do, shearing off the claims about who Jesus is. The gospels were written primarily for the Christian community; these people had long before decided that the worship of Jesus was what they were about. So, if we walk away from an encounter with these books thining that Jesus was a nice, really spiritual guy, we are entirely missing the point of the writers. It's like reading Moby Dick and coming away thinking it was a story about a whale.
I also think you are quite hasty in supposing I don't care about the "lowly." You certainly don't know what I give on a weekly basis. Also, and while I wouldn't speak of this except you've made an issue of it, I do give time to helping people who are not well-off. In June, I spent an entire day painting a house, clearing out a garden, and building a handicapped-accessable ramp for people who are elderly and unable to perform these tasks themselves. Tomorrow, I will spend all day working in a kitchen as part of our parish's fundraising efforts to provide need-based scholarships.
I am absolutely aware that many other people, including some who read this, devote significantly more time and effort than I. I am, in fact, quite convinced that my level of volunteering is too low and should be considerably more than a day each quarter. But it's not nothing. And, given that I clawed my way up from no education or prospects (thanks to the JWs) to arrive at a reasonably good situation, I tend to put a premium on my free time. So, I'm selfish. And I am pretty certain that I am unmoved by the nicey-nice comments of some Jewish teacher from a couple thousand years back, especially when he was so prone to make stupid comments like 'turn the other cheek' and 'pick up your cross and follow me.' Seriously, who needs that shit?
Oh. Well he is God, you say? And God himself suffered, died, and was buried not only for winners like me, but for losers like some old bastard who can't even afford to hire somebody to paint his house? The Lord of all things took flesh of the Virgin and became a man for some kid whose parents can't even afford to rent a place in a decent school district? Well, then, I guess I can spend a couple days sweating my ass off for them.
Actually, I am called to do much more than that, it turns out. But it's a start, Jeff. It's a little, baby step. And it is taken because I accept the Christian claims about Jesus and the theological reflection that follows from those claims.
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Field Service time wasters
by xelder inlast saturday morning, i ran to the hardware store.
a former co (retired in a circuit provided house) was in the hardware store.
i stopped at starbucks....more jw's.
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Sulla
Good to hear. Seems like lots of JWs have finally understood that the door-to-door work is colossally ineffective. The point, really, is to display your in-group credentials by showing up. So, all these time-wasting activities are really more efficient activities: literally everyone is made better off with JWs going to Starbucks instead of knocking on doors.
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161
Theological Arguments, Human Realities
by AllTimeJeff inas i have sunken to a new low in condescending posts (according to botchtowersociety, who truthfully is an expert on all things bullshit), it did occur to me that discussions, debates, and mud slinging insult matches on this board often have a common root.. let me put out there that i am not an atheist, nor an agnostic.
frankly, i respect your right to believe that god is a trinity.
that he is jesus.
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Sulla
Jeff: I do not reject Christianity because of the Trinity.
Of course not. You reject the Trinity because you reject Christianity. It's the same everywhere: if you accept that Jesus really was raised bodily and that his death really did save us, then the Trinity follows. Not easily or obviously, but inexorably.
Jeff: I, as many here on the forum, became JW's in a flurry of teenage excitement and were baptized as minors. Speaking for me specifically, I was 13.
Well, then, it wasn't much of a choice for you.
Jeff: I agree that there is a difference when an adult who has never been exposed to the Witnesses agrees to become a JW. It was my experience with those that they in some way were emotionally damaged/fragile and were thus easy prey to the tactics of JW recruiting. Do I think that the majority are intellectually lazy? I think you underestimate the power of a cult in that case, esp when they influence a person to not consider outside sources of information. Arrogant? No. Some are for sure. But many are humble, scared, would rather gnaw their own arm off instead of knocking on a strangers door, and absolutely think they are doing it for Jehovah. That doesn't sound like arrogance to me.
When I say "signal," I don't mean to suggest all JW converts are particularly arrogant and intellectually lazy. I mean to suggest that the idea of converting to the JWs has a special appeal for arrogant and lazy people; if you want to say that it also has special appeal for damaged or fragile people, I guess I wouldn't disagree.
On the other hand, I don't see why one couldn't be both arrogant/lazy as well as fragile. I mean, we are talking about people who can't be bothered to go to a library to check out the date for the fall of Jerusalem. We are talking about people who willingly accept that the entire Christian project has been irredeemably corrupted by guys who are morally less than they themselves. We are talking about people who think they have secret knowledge about the End and that they were granted this knowledge specifically because of their moral superiority back in 1918. We are talking about people who tell strangers that they will die by the direct action of God unless they change their religion and become JWs.
That does sound like arrogance to me.
Jeff: Whether you realize it or not, you are implying that those who have rejected the Trinity are either/or intellectually lazy and arrogant. That is a ridiculous premise that should rejected out of hand.
No, I don't think so. I think people reject the Trinity because they reject the Christian claims (Jesus was raised, his death saved us) and not because they are lazy and arrogant. What I think about those who would debate the Trinity is that most who reject it are not generally competent to have the discussion.
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161
Theological Arguments, Human Realities
by AllTimeJeff inas i have sunken to a new low in condescending posts (according to botchtowersociety, who truthfully is an expert on all things bullshit), it did occur to me that discussions, debates, and mud slinging insult matches on this board often have a common root.. let me put out there that i am not an atheist, nor an agnostic.
frankly, i respect your right to believe that god is a trinity.
that he is jesus.
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Sulla
Tec: Sulla, some (many, I believe) are drawn to the JW's at their door because of the message of unity, lack of war, and lack of hell doctrine. They're searching for truth, understanding that these things cannot BE, and then here comes a group that has none of these things.
Well, like I said before, why not just look for your local Unitarian Univeralist church, then. Plenty of nice people and none of that war or hell stuff. What's not to like? I would think that pacifist, Universalist churches are a dime a dozen. But our folks didn't wind up there, did they? Instead, they chose the JWs and all the JW exotic beliefs. We have to have some sort of theory for that.
Tec: People don't have to research every christian sect to see the hypocrisy of christian fighting/killing christian. Or to see leaders 'beating' their followers. They see it, think 'this' can't be the truth, and search for somewhere else that can be the truth.
Which is merely to say that they actually believe that JWs are somehow better than the rest of humanity and not, therefore, prone to exactly the same limitations, temptations, and weaknesses as everybody else on the planet. There must be some word for that belief...
Which is why we keep reading letters like Marvin Shimler (sp) keeps posting from these 60-something poor bastards who simply cannot understand how the organization could possibly turn on them merely for expressing their honest opinions about some problems they see. What are we supposed to think of some loser writing a heartfelt plea to be left alone: these groveling letters that include scriptural references and promises of respect and fealty. This last one he posted even had some guy try to disassociate himself without disassociating himself. Sheesh. You spend a lifetime acting as an enforcer for this bunch of thugs and imagine they're going to just let you do your own thing one day?
How do we explain that? Who knows how many guys he's disfellowshipped -- lives he has seriously disrupted -- because these folks couldn't convince him they were sorry? Now, at the end of his life, he finds something he feels like he must assert and he thinks they're going to go easy on him? How do you explain that? I know how I explain it.