Posts by Carmichael

47

Why Do Intelligent People Still Believe In The Jehovah’s Witness Religion?

by minimus in

jw
friends

i understand it’s a cult.

but what makes an intelligent person actually believe they have the “truth” as taught by jehovah’s witnesses??

?.

Carmichael

Minimus:

That's a good question. I don't know. As a woman, I never had the "privilege" of being an elder. I was a regular pioneer once and had many privileges and was looked up to in the congregation, but I still left when I suddenly woke up and realized that it wasn't the true religion it claimed to be.

As far as opinions go, I can only guess that some people might stay in it for the power and privilege, but from what I experienced, that isn't really worth it. Unless you are the top dog in that organization, there is always another dog taking a piss on you from above, and, as you know, it isn't pleasant. So no one truly enjoys the ride as elders in the Org.

How about the Governing Body? My guess is that they are really, truly duped. They have great power and wield great power, and in their instance that great power has them drunk believing that God must have given it to them--how else would they have become members of the Governing Body? Thus they believe in the fairy tale. (No dog to piss on them as they are all top dogs. So pleasant the feeling that the high makes them believe Jehovah must be in charge of their lives--blessing them especially.)

It is sort of how the kings and queens in the past believed in the divine right of kings. The Governing Body members believe the religion is true because their positions of authority have been "bestowed" upon them by Jehovah, or so they believe. This "legitimacy" is the root of their belief system, what they believe about themselves and how they see the universe. They have bought into it completely. They thus truly believe they are subject to no earthly authority (and thus can do things like protect child molesters in their ranks or avert from paying taxes, etc.). But challenge them and in those heels go into the dirt of denial....

People can be hypnotized by those who believe they are instruments of the gods. My secret hope is that the Armageddon or Return of Christ they preach does come to face them in some way and that during it they find out how wrong they were:

On the Judgment Day, many people will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, didn’t we prophesy in your name and expel demons in your name and do lots of miracles in your name?’ Then I’ll tell them, ‘I’ve never known you. Get away from me, you people who do wrong.’--Matthew 7:22-23, Common English Bible.

47

Why Do Intelligent People Still Believe In The Jehovah’s Witness Religion?

by minimus in

jw
friends

i understand it’s a cult.

but what makes an intelligent person actually believe they have the “truth” as taught by jehovah’s witnesses??

?.

Carmichael

LongHairGirl:

The problem is that people did not think they were joining a cult when they got involved with the JWs...
I was young and made a wrong detour. I didn’t fit in because (thankfully in retrospect) I would not make the stupid concession that I quit a decent job to pioneer..I lingered a little longer than I should have but at least I got the hell Out.

True, a lot of us didn't know what we were in for when we joined. If the Witnesses were honest and upfront, even with their children, with born-ins, who would get baptized as one?

But the point of this thread is why do intelligent, thinking people choose to keep the faith of the Jehovah's Witnesses?

As the two articles I highlighted at the beginning point out (Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds & Why People Ignore Facts), people don't keep their belief system--especially under challenges--because they are logical ways of thinking. No, we keep our belief system because they make us feel safe. No.

Then why do they do this? Because they are all we have. Even when you leave the Witnesses, you develop a new belief system, even if you become agnostic or atheist. Your belief system is your new identity. If someone challenges your new belief system, you will act just the same way you did when you were a Jehovah's Witness: unreasonable, blind to facts, and leaning to confirmation bias. Why?

Because intelligence has nothing to do with the exercise of belief systems, per se. Intelligent people might have more critically designed belief systems, but how they are exercised comes under the realm of emotion, not intellect.

This is not a bad thing. In fact, it's an important thing. It's psychological survival. We are what our psyche believes we are. And what we are, what our psyche believes is based on what we believe about the universe.

So that stubborn response by Jehovah's Witnesses who refuse to believe facts is not always a sign that they lack intelligence. It is more often than not a normal survival response, self-psychological preservation. True, Witnesses believe in some pretty screwed-up doctrine. But a nominal Jew or intellectual atheist or average Protestant will act exactly the same when their belief system is threatened because we are what we believe.

It's emotion, not intelligence.

47

Why Do Intelligent People Still Believe In The Jehovah’s Witness Religion?

by minimus in

jw
friends

i understand it’s a cult.

but what makes an intelligent person actually believe they have the “truth” as taught by jehovah’s witnesses??

?.

Carmichael

Another way to look at this...

We are not automatically intelligent or brighter thinkers because we woke up and left the Jehovah's Witnesses behind.

Leaving a cult behind does not automatically make one intelligent. I've seen some people act illogical after leaving the cult of the Watchtower--and I don't mean by joining another religion (they became atheists). Intelligence is not necessarily measured by what religious or non-religious views a person might subscribe to. If you were an idiot as a Jehovah's Witness, leaving the group won't guarantee any raise in IQ.

If we are talking about common sense and smarts, people shouldn't listen to any of us when it comes to religion if we freely joined a cult and later left. I mean, we may have the left the cult, but we joined it, to begin with. I wouldn't recommend people who chose cults as experts on religion to anyone--myself included.

Flipping the argument back to the way it was originally written--there isn't IQ involved. Religion is mostly emotional. A lot of people don't want to believe that. Some who leave cults want to believe that leaving a cult made them intelligent or is proof that they are more intelligent somehow than others that are left in the cult. That's not true.

Like those in cults, you won't convince people who now believe that intelligence is the earmark of Watchtower exiting. But the phenomenon of "waking up" is multi-faceted and is not limited to logic or intelligence.

47

Why Do Intelligent People Still Believe In The Jehovah’s Witness Religion?

by minimus in

jw
friends

i understand it’s a cult.

but what makes an intelligent person actually believe they have the “truth” as taught by jehovah’s witnesses??

?.

Carmichael

Cognitive dissonance is the state of having or being presented with inconsistent and/or contradictory thoughts, beliefs, ideals, and values.

It can occur when someone comes to the conclusion that the facts about themselves and their beliefs and lives do not match up with their preconceived ideas. The dissonance can be momentary or constant for a significant, but limited time and the subject deals with it in one of either two ways: either they accept the facts that their preconceived ideas were wrong and now act on the facts as they are or they fight off the facts by digging themselves deeper into their falsehoods.

The fictional character Harry Potter is a good example of someone who, in each book, comes face-to-face with a moment of cognitive dissonance--realizing that everything he believed in the story up to a certain point was false--and acting on the newly-learned facts to change himself and the current situation.

Harry Potter is fictional. Most people cannot and will not change so quickly. People hate to be told they are wrong and change often takes time, years often, before we change ourselves and situation, not moments like Harry. Just think of how long most of us took to leave the Witnesses behind.

47

Why Do Intelligent People Still Believe In The Jehovah’s Witness Religion?

by minimus in

jw
friends

i understand it’s a cult.

but what makes an intelligent person actually believe they have the “truth” as taught by jehovah’s witnesses??

?.

Carmichael

Two news articles come to mind: Why Facts Don't Change our Minds from "The New Yorker" and Why People Ignore Facts from "Psychology Today."

The general answer is a little more disturbing than we might want to admit. Basically our identity or self is composed of a belief system. In order to survive with appropriate self-esteem, we must protect this identity. Composed of beliefs, our self is not necessarily built upon an accurate understanding of our true place in the universe and what we actually are.

Should we be confronted with facts that disturb this sense of self--and we are the type of person who is not welcome to change or ready to agree that we might be wrong about ourselves and perhaps even everything we know--in order to preserve our sense of self, we dig in deep into the belief system that built ourselves and choose to embrace falsehoods and fiction instead of fact.

Confirmation bias is one way people preserve this state of false self. Another is to become an expert and more zealous promoter of our false doctrine. Doing this allows the false teachings that make up the false state of mind to act as a blocker against thinking about doubts that cause cognitive dissonance.

Religious cults and politics, as the article in Psychology Today demonstrates, have a lot in common. People may wonder how "intelligent" people get involved in religious cults, yet on a regular basis, people get involved in the same type of thinking patterns, ignoring of facts, and mental sweeping of erroneous claims "under the rug" using the same techniques that keep smart people in false religions.

People let this type of mental influence happen to them in various parts of their lives (commercial, medical, exercise, entertainment, fashion, etc.). The fact is that we are too ready to be sheep, too often begging to be lead astray without even knowing it.

12

REVISITING Awake October 1968 and the "THIS GENERATION" in association with OVERLAPPING GENERATION and THESE GENERATIONS

by Longlivetherenegades in

the former image was obtained from a topic in the humor and joke section of this platform and it seems to carry a underground information that is equally powerful.. since a food company had been producing a particular product for four generations since 1914, how come the wtbts publishing company are still producing for a one generation since 1914?.

awake october 1968 stated............ even if we presume that youngsters 15 years of age would be perceptive enough to realize the import of what happened in 1914, it would still make the youngest of "this generation" nearly 70 years old today(year 1968).

so the great majority of the generation to which jesus was referring has already passed away in death.

Carmichael

In a future publication, the JWs will revise their current understanding of "generation" as follows...

How, then, may we understand Jesus’ words about “this generation”?
There was a time when we limited Jesus’ use of the word “generation” to merely two overlapping groups of anointed ones—the first made up of anointed ones who saw the beginning of the fulfillment of the sign in 1914 and the second, anointed ones who for a time were contemporaries of the first group.
But after some consideration, we realized that there was no Scriptural reason for saying there were only two groups. Where did the number 2 come from? Why not say 3 or 4? In reality, a generation consists of many overlapping lives and groups, not just two.
Therefore it has become clear to the Governing Body that Jesus was saying that multiple lives and groups make up “this generation,” and therefore many true Christians will live during the symbolic “generation” of 1914 before the end comes.

27

November WT study article

by Gorbatchov in

jw
friends

in one of the study articles from the november 2020 edition, is mentioned (free quotation):.

"don"t get disturbed if your kingdom hall will be sold".

food on the right time, i asume?.

Carmichael

In the not so far away future...

"But how do we react when God’s organization makes a change that affects other aspects of our life? For example, in recent years the cost of building and maintaining your homes and computer equipment used for Zoom meetings has increased dramatically. So the Governing Body has directed that some of your families be merged and houses be sold. The funds are being used to help build houses and maintain Zoom computer equipment for others living in areas that need them the most. If you live where homes are being sold and families are being merged, you may find it a challenge to adapt to the new circumstances. Still, cooperating with this new arrangement should be commended." -- Page 2-3, November 202? WT

10

How Long Is Forever?

by HiddenPimo in

imagine you have a spoon and you dig out one scoop of soil from the ground in central new york.

then you put that soil in a bag and carry it with you as you travel from there to the grand canyon.

you repeat these steps until you have created another grand canyon in new york and filled the original one in arizona.

Carmichael

Jehovah's Witnesses talk about living "forever" and even place God in our own experience of time. This is not the same for other religious people, especially for those who are members of non-Witness Christianity.

For them, God transcends time on a plane known as "eternity." On this plane, God is, was, and will be forever from our point of view, but in reality, it was from this plane that, according to religionists God "created the timeline."

Imagine drawing a line in the sand. You can see its beginning, its middle, and its end all at once. In this same way, it is taught, God sees the beginning, present, and future. God doesn't predict the future. God sees what those with freewill do with it. God can therefore tell the future to humans, reporting it from God's vantage point.

Forever isn't an eternity. You got the two mixed up. Let me explain.

Forever is the constant flow of time. Time is the constant change of things and the measurement of that change.

Eternity is not time. Eternity is where God is, says theology. Time is that "line in the sand." Forever would be a line that "went on forever," something that would only be if God drew such a thing, so to speak. Eternity would always, from this standpoint, transcend time. There is no change or time in eternity, there is just "is."

The Jehovah's Witness concept of forever is flawed in that the Witnesses never look close enough at what is eternal and what is the change of time. The Witnesses teach that God is a timekeeper when in reality God is not under the same constraints of time. They often speak of God living forever and God is eternal in the same breath when, in reality, God is eternal, not "living forever."

You are right that "eternity does not exist for mortals," but it does exist for immortals. That is why the apostle Paul said that mortality had to be swallowed up by immortality for death to be done away with.--1 Corinthians 15:53.

3

Early Jerusalem - Not Such a Big Deal - Archaeological overview of Archaeological Discoveries in Early Jerusalem

by fulltimestudent in

jw
friends

this overview is from dw news*, a german public broadcasting service.

i thought it may be interesting to know that early jerusalem was not as large as some have thought.. .

https://www.dw.com/en/ancient-jerusalem-smaller-than-believed/a-54671258?fbclid=iwar3svoex_h_2yru0t-wnmnvweyujoxactz-jgglgmdr16vcjoahvl_e8ow4.

Carmichael

While we always have to be careful not to embrace each new conclusion made by archeologists (remember these people are sometimes out to make a name for themselves by proving the previous generation or a rival wrong), we should never be so naive as to believe that the Hebrew Bible narrative ever draws a picture far from mythos, even when it reports on history.

The First Temple (Solomon's Temple) was definitely not as grand or colossal as the narrative found in the Tanakh, and neither was the Davidic dynasty. The worship of YHVH seems to have always been competing with other national favorite deities, even though worship of YHVH had been made the state religion under the Davidic monarchy. A state religion that did not find full footing until after the Babylonian captivity would never have had a shrine or monarchy or state or capital as grand as written in its mythology.

Being of Jewish stock, I find myself startled again and again how little non-Jews really know about Jewish history. They see it through Jewish mythology--and as a Jewess, I can say without disrespect to my people or Judaism (because Judaism teaches this)--mythology is what the Hebrew Bible is. It teaches truths as in ethics, but not facts as in reporting on history. It is teaching what the Jews learned from history and not the history of the Jews.

The only time Jerusalem was massive was when the Herodians made it so. The great building projects of Herod, and the production of Herod's Temple was the momentous Jerusalem everyone remembers. The construction of the Bible was always looking backward, always trying to make the past bigger than Jerusalem under the Hasmoneans or Herodians. So David's Jerusalem was written to be bigger and better--but it probably wasn't.

Again, be careful. As a Jew I read so much from Jewish newspapers, and there is always another scientist or archeologist discovering this or that disproving this latest discovery or that latest finding--it's endless. It takes about 10-50 years after a finding before it becomes established as a proper theory.

34

How do JWs view the Ransom?

by Vanderhoven7 in

looking for a simple explanation of the ransom from a jws perspective..

Carmichael

The teaching of "the ransom" is not universal among Christians. It was made popular among some Christian movements that came out of the Second Great Awakening (circa 1790-1840).

The "theory of atonement" is what is generally taught in Christianity, and it was developed mainly by Origen of Alexandria (circa 184-253). The reasoning behind this is that Christ's shedding of blood "atoned" for the sin of Adam. "Atonement" is compensation or expiation for what has happened, paid either to the Devil, as Origen suggested, to release humanity from Satan's grip or just as an act of God giving up his life as a human in Jesus so that humans can have "a share in the divine life" as Roman Catholicism teaches currently.--2 Peter 1:4.

The Jehovah's WItnesses Ransom Teaching

The Jehovah's Witnesses are about the only religion, along with the Seventh Day Adventists who have this unique "ransom" teaching. This is due to their being originally descended from the same Adventist movement (it is likely that Bible Student groups that also splintered off may share this view too).

The "ransom" teaching is that all of humanity has inherited sin and death as a result of Adam's sin in the Garden of Eden. God's divine law requires that only the sacrificial death of a perfect human can atone for Adam's sin. The death of Christ acts as a sacrifice or "ransom" that can release those who have faith in it. God's justice requires such a perfect victim to set matters right and that all who are to be ransomed to exercise faith in that victim's death, otherwise all or any of the offspring who don't take advantage of it are doomed to perish at the hands of God's judgment forever.