this just in from the 2017 annual meeting:.
1. watchtowers and awakes won't be released regularly, at least three watchtower and awakes per year.
6 magazines a year.. 2. a new book is being released: remain in god's love, more of an update like how they did for the what does the bible really teach book.
Jules,
A couple years ago, maybe about 10 years ago, I came across a recording of a talk via the internet given by a Bethelite I believe, who claimed that Matthew 24:14 had already been fulfilled from back then (maybe you could do an internet search for this talk).
i think the watchtower is the only organization that can promise a product (everlasting life) and never deliver it.. what fools we've been to believe this nonsense..
No other denomination teaches that persons will escape death. This is how everlasting life becomes a carrot on a stick.
Other denominations accept that death is inevitable, it's a fact of life but their soul will live on in heaven after their physical body dies.
During my childhood indoctrination I recall the JW sister who studied with me quoted Job 33:25 from a WT publication:
"let their flesh be renewed like a child’s; let them be restored as in the days of their youth".
As I recall, the publication (possibly a WT magazine) had a picture showing the aging process of an old man being reversed. The sister claimed that this is how it will be in Paradise. After leaving the JWs I realized that this scripture was not describing the reversal of aging during some future Paradise.
It was interesting that when I told persons in FS that God's plan is for them to live forever on a Paradise earth, some would remark that I was speaking nonsense and being unrealistic because as far as they know, you live and then you die at some point, that's just the way life is. I thought they were mistaken, too blind to see, because as per my JW brainwashing, this is what God's original plan was for mankind.
It is said that religion satisfies psychological needs. Young people, especially, are given to idealism and this was true of me. My idealism, among other things (dysfunctional, stressed family life) made me easy pickings for the WT's live forever on a Paradise earth ideology.
so i've been a protestant for most of my life, it's how i was raised, but recently i started questioning my faith more and more and now i feel like my beliefs resemble that of a jehovas witness rather than a protestant.
i don't know any jehovas witnesses, so i was just wondering how a lot of you found the religion and adapted to it?.
Lewis1998,
So that we get a better idea of what you mean, what is your understanding of the word "Protestant" ?
As far as I know, anyone who is not Catholic is Protestant.
i think the watchtower is the only organization that can promise a product (everlasting life) and never deliver it.. what fools we've been to believe this nonsense..
All religions, not just the WT, promise everlasting life and that everything is better at that time.
The hope of everlasting life and peace only comes after you die when the hope/promise cannot be confirmed.
Outside of religion, most people would consider such unverifiable "promises" to be fraudulent.
The promise of everlasting life helps people to feel good about death.
some people believe that stealing, lying and killing, is not moral.
some people don't.. does morality exist?
if so, prove it..
In unprecedented case, Swedish man on trial for ‘raping’ Canadian girls - over the internet.
No one in Sweden has ever been convicted of rape for deeds that occurred over the internet - let alone on another continent - but prosecutors are hoping to set a precedent, she said.
A rape conviction could send a message to the growing number of predators who might not have the nerve to assault a child in person, but are willing to victimize them in the digital world, said Wennerström.
___
Goes to show that morality is an ever evolving facet of human society. We created it and we will continue to refine it ad infinitum. The development of morality will only stop once all scientific knowledge is attained and all human progress and evolution has been expired.
some people believe that stealing, lying and killing, is not moral.
some people don't.. does morality exist?
if so, prove it..
Ooopsie CORRECTION.
In my first comment Morality is objective should read Morality is NOT objective.
some people believe that stealing, lying and killing, is not moral.
some people don't.. does morality exist?
if so, prove it..
Another interesting article:
https://thoughtcontrol.wordpress.com/various-musings/a-question-of-morality/
Religious people often want to treat morality as though it is an absolute truth, however while absolute truths exist, morality is relative. Morality is relative to human beings. We are the only creatures that have our own morality, and our morality was constructed over tens of thousands of years of social development.
Everybody knows that killing is wrong. But if morality was absolute then killing would always be wrong. And we know that it is not. If someone tries to kill you and you kill them, then killing is not wrong. If you go to war and kill someone, killing is not wrong. If you were leaning over a cliff holding onto a person with each hand but you knew that you didn’t have the strength to pull both of them up so you had to let one go in order to save the other then you would not be wrong. So we can see that killing is wrong, except when it isn’t.
The other important thing to remember is that absolute truths are true for all creatures, but morality is not true for all creatures.
When an animal kills another animal it does not have a lack of morality. Animals kill each other all the time for food, for territory and for mating rights. These animals are not bad, they are just acting in accordance to their survival instinct. Animals also steal and rape, but we don’t consider them to be evil for doing so. But these animals are still subject to absolute truths.
Gravity still applies 100% of the time for animals as well as humans. This is the distinctive difference between an absolute truth, or a scientific law, and a moral value which is relative to species. But as social creatures we have developed a way of getting on and a set of rules that allow us to organise ourselves into societies.
For our purposes these moralities are “true,” but they are not real truths, they are true only in relation to human beings. And only because we have formulated them over time and mutually agree to consent to them.
It is not always convenient for us to not murder or steal, but the laws of the land are constructed based upon our ancient humanistic principles in order to hold us to these values.
Christians will often talk about natural moral law, an idea that God has placed an understanding of morality inside human beings so that every person knows right from wrong. No real evidence exists for a natural moral law, but even if it did it would only suggest that human beings carry a genetic predisposition towards the sociological behaviour that has been pounded into us over generations. For this reason I don’t take particular issue with the idea of natural moral law, just with its origins.
The idea of natural moral law is just another example of religious people putting the cart before the horse. All religions like to identify their own deity as being the source of human morality. But indeed, if religions were constructed by humans, and I believe they were, then it is fair to say that the religions were simply injected with the morality of humanity. This was then passed off as originating from their favourite deity.
Morality originated with humanity as we developed into social groups, it was necessary for our survival. In order for social groups to function properly there must be trust, and morality, a way of acting and treating one another, provides that trust. Over time these practices became more and more ingrained not only in our social groups but in our thinking.
We developed laws around these morals, fixing them into our societies. The morals also became more refined and detailed, in order to deal with the massive variety of moral based issues that arose.
And morality has not stopped developing either. As we create genetically engineered crops, cloning technology and soon artificial intelligence, we must also develop a morality around their use.
Morality is an ever evolving facet of human society. We created it and we will continue to refine it ad infinitum. The development of morality will only stop once all scientific knowledge is attained and all human progress and evolution has been expired.
some people believe that stealing, lying and killing, is not moral.
some people don't.. does morality exist?
if so, prove it..
Interesting article regarding the OP:
https://thoughtcontrol.wordpress.com/the-evil-god/god-or-evil-part-5/#_ftn13 :
Absolute morality does not exist.
According to the Bible, morality is absolute but also malleable, depending upon what God wants to do at the time.
God commanded rape, murder and genocide in scripture. They would not only be not sinful, but in fact moral, because God had commanded them.
This means that there are no absolute moral values, according to Christianity. Instead, morality is only what God commands at any given time.
If you consult scripture you can see that this is quite arbitrary. The Ten Commandments are supposed to provide an absolute set of moral rules according to orthodox Christianity. However, God both ignores the breaking of these rules in scripture on numerous occasions, and in fact commands people to perform sins from this list on numerous other occasions:
- In Exodus 20:16 God says “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.” But in 1Kings 22:22 we find God lying: “And the LORD said unto him, Wherewith? And he said, I will go forth, and I will be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets. And he said, Thou shalt persuade him, and prevail also: go forth, and do so.”
- In Exodus 20:13 God says “Thou shalt not kill.” But in Exodus 32:27 God commands men to kill: “And he said unto them, Thus saith the LORD God of Israel, Put every man his sword by his side, and go in and out from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbour.”
If something is right because God commands it then murder is both wrong and right depending on whether God had commanded it or not.
In the Bible, God has both condemned killing in a general sense but commanded killing on numerous occasions. One can only presume by this reasoning that murder is neither wrong nor right. It is only the specific and “relative” circumstances under which God commands it that determine whether it is right or wrong.
In this reasoning there is an obligation that comes with God’s moral commands. This obligation swings both ways. In the above instance a person is both obligated to not kill under certain circumstances and obligated to kill under other circumstances. So by this reasoning the foundations of morality become arbitrary.
Biblicists would say that for any particular action that God commands, he commands it because it is morally right. But this approach offers a new problem: “If God commands a particular action because it is morally right, then ethics no longer depends on God in the way that Divine Command Theorists maintain. God is no longer the author of ethics, but rather a mere recognizer of right and wrong.” The implication of this is that God discovers morality rather than inventing it. God is no longer the foundation of ethics but rather a subject of an external moral law. This would take away his sovereignty.
Morality is objective. Morality is quite conceivable as a construct of biological social development. It can be identified in all mammals. Morality would seem to be associated with the development of the mammalian brain, and in particular found in those creatures that have developed to interact socially.
It is not unexpected that human beings, as the highest form of intelligence on the earth, would have the most sophisticated form of morality. But this in no way suggests that the morality is objective to some external force.
Morality seems to be based upon a collective agreement of what best benefits the individual and the social group.
The Bible makes all sorts of moral claims, some of them good and a lot of them ridiculous.
Why is it that most people seem to be able to differentiate between which biblical commands to follow and which ones to reject?
This is because we read the Bible through the filter of our own morality and are able to determine which statements are acceptable and which ones are not. The implication of this of course is that we do not get our morality from the Bible or God, we bring our morality to the Bible and in effect evaluate and judge the Bible’s legitimacy based upon our own morality. The claim that the Bible is the source of Christian morality is rubbish. Christians bring their already in-tact morality to the Bible and then conveniently filter out the parts of it that don’t fit into their morality. Excuses are made for the presence of these contentious verses and they are typically dismissed without too much thought.
Almost universally Christians who read the Bible accept at face value the command “thou shalt not kill.” But at the same time there seems to be a universal rejection of the biblical command to stone a woman to death at her father’s door if she is discovered not to be a virgin (Deuteronomy 22:21).
Different religions frequently give opposing religious commands, and even within the framework of one religious writing it is easy to find contradictory commands. A good example of this has to do with the biblical injunctions around women teaching in the church.
Therefore the Divine Command Theorist must decide for themselves, using reason, which God or religious concept to follow, and then which understanding of the divine commands to follow within their adopted tradition.
This behaviour is no different from that of any secular person in determining their own moral code. They may draw their foundational moral conceptions from any source but must ultimately determine themselves which to follow and which to reject. In many respects a church or organised religious set is simply a group of people that has determined to follow the same moral code as one another more or less. They have determined to interpret their particular writings in a specific way and agreed to follow them collectively.
But the problems only start here, what if you are following the wrong religion? It is only those who follow the correct religion, and also the correct interpretation of that religion, who are moral. This is because morality seems to shift and undulate with God’s, apparently, ever-changing moods - killing is bad in most circumstances, but it is good when you are trying to eliminate tribes who are occupying your land. An obvious implication of this is that God changes his mind and therefore is not immutable.
so this is a topic that seriously boggles my mind and please correct me if i'm wrong.
to me, the jw definition of the overlapping generation teaching is that the lives of the anointed from 1914 overlap with the lives of the anointed right now.
david splane used the example of fred franz and how he finished his "earthly course" in 1992 but while he did, he had a lot of "contemporaries" that outlived him and are currently living today.
Preterism claims that Jesus returned in an invisible manner at the destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70 CE by the Romans.
The gospels do not say that Jesus will return invisibly, but that “all the peoples of the world.......will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with great power and glory” (Matthew 24:30); "Every eye will see him even those who pierced him" (Revelation 1:7).
Nor could he have returned spiritually because it was promised during Christ’s bodily Ascension into heaven, that at his Second Coming “he will come the same way as you have seen him go”, that is, bodily on the clouds (Acts 1:11).
If Jesus came invisibly in 70CE and is to come again for the final judgement then Jesus would come THREE times and not TWO as the Bible claims.
so this is a topic that seriously boggles my mind and please correct me if i'm wrong.
to me, the jw definition of the overlapping generation teaching is that the lives of the anointed from 1914 overlap with the lives of the anointed right now.
david splane used the example of fred franz and how he finished his "earthly course" in 1992 but while he did, he had a lot of "contemporaries" that outlived him and are currently living today.
Matthew 24 is not the only passage where Jesus promised that he would return before his own generation passed away.
One of the clearest statements of this promise was made in Matthew 16:27-28:
“For the Son of Man will come in the glory of His Father with His angels, and then He will reward each according to his works. Assuredly, I say to you, there are some standing here who shall not taste death till they see the Son of Man coming in His kingdom.”
Jesus was describing the final judgment when he would come with his angels and reward every person according to his works BEFORE the people who were standing there listening to him died.
This did not happen.
Preterism is just an attempt to explain away the obvious failure of Jesus’ promise to return during the lifetime of his generation:
http://web.archive.org/web/20070301122226/http://www.theskepticalreview.com:80/mainmenu.html
(See “Preterism: Phase 1 to Phase 3)
https://infidels.org/library/modern/farrell_till/prophecy.html
