b) teach conditional salvation based primarily on faith in christ?.
c) refuse eternal torment in a literal fiery hell?.
d) refuse the immortality of the soul?.
EdenOne, it sounds like you're in the market, shopping for a new religion that fits your thinking?
In the past, you relied on your 'horribly-flawed' moral compass to choose the JWs (and God didn't help you on THAT decision, despite prayers asking Him for direction on that decision), so why do you think you stand any better chance of picking the "right" religion now?
did you ever wonder that as a jw?.
if all the trouble on this planet is down to satan and the demons, why not just get rid of them and then leave humankind alone and see how we go from there?
wouldn't a god who "is love" (1 john 4:8) full of mercy and justice at least try that first?
DD said-
Perhaps "evil" came into existence when Satan sinned. Perhaps he did not know the consequences of his actions, but an omnipotent creator would. That would mean that God allowed "evil" when he could have nipped it in the bud, so to speak.
That's the question I asked as a 12 y.o., and never got a satisfying answer: where did the concept of 'evil' come from, i.e. in Genesis 1/2 when God was creating inferior beings, why would God create them with the capacity for angels or humans to piss Him off, to violate His Divine will (the definition of sin)?
The old mantra, "God wanted to give beings the capacity for free will, so they didn't HAVE to love and obey him; He didn't want to build robots" is hogwash, since God didn't waste any time expressing His Divine Will, where per the story ALL humanity has to pay the penalty for the pair's sin of disobeying God's Divine Will! They HAD to do what God wanted, or face the consequences: He'd have been better off building robots, if that's what God wanted, and only starts in with the "Do what I say or else...." nonsense threats.
So God comes off as the Designer of flawed beings, which Judaism has NO problem with, since God's and humans' "perfect" trait is a later Xian interpretation of the account. Jews don't think of A&E as "perfect beings" but as flawed beings who possessed a 'yetzer hara' (an evil inclination), and God wanted them to control their urges by developing their inclination for good to counter.
If anyone needs to get beyond Genesis to see Xian theology has major logical problems, they're really not trying to think critically but are allowing their desires to color their minds.
did you ever wonder that as a jw?.
if all the trouble on this planet is down to satan and the demons, why not just get rid of them and then leave humankind alone and see how we go from there?
wouldn't a god who "is love" (1 john 4:8) full of mercy and justice at least try that first?
FWIW, the Universal Sovereignty Issue is not unique or novel to the JWs: they didn't come up with the idea, but it's been around for thousands of years in apocryphal Judeo-Christian writings.
Syme said-
The official doctrine of the Watchtower is that God can destroy Satan but doesn't want to, for the time being (meaning, for the past 6,000 years). So, how can he be benevolent?
PON said-
The very fact that we question it all proves it's a load of crap. If it made sense and was obvious there'd be no questions.
Ahhh, but that's the rub, the point some are overlooking:
Per JWs, the humans who say God fails on the all-loving trait are the same individuals destined for destruction, defined as 'evil ones' who've fallen under Satan's influence! The 'evil ones' cannot be (and don't need to be) convinced of God's all-loving trait, since Xians believe God cannot allow a few hard-headed foot-draggers to interfere with the Divine master plan, so He'll just wipe them out.
So each person is essentially forced to choose between complying with God's will or take the highway to Eternal destruction with Satan and his minions (who also balk at God's all-loving trait). That's the work of 'separating the sheep from the goats', and the goats will never consent to being labelled a goat or accept the omnibenevolence claim: in fact, by pointing out how God fails to be all-loving, in the eyes of a JW, such persons are only certifying their own death warrants. self-identifying as being worthy of destruction...
That's the problem of getting into theology/theodicy (presuppositional apolegetics): once you get past the presupposition of accepting God's existence without any evidence, the rest of theology and theodicy actually offers an answer which makes sense to believers, since apolegetists have over a thousand years' head-start to 'shot-gun' multiple answers and work out the kinks.
i received an email from a jw that got married, but the wife never had sex with him.
they were together for a period of years.
he told the elders, but they said there was nothing that could be done.
RR said-
Here's the flawed logic used by a traveling brother, when brother jones found his wife had sex with two other ministerial servants, he got drunk that night and she came in and gave him oral sex begging for mercy. The Meeting continued with our Circuit Overseer invovled in this case, he said "Did you really allow her to perform sex on you?" He said "I was drunk, she took advantage of me", CO and elders agreed the brother even though he was drunk has accepted his wife back and could not divorce her without getting disfellowhiped and he was not free to marry.
Sounds like the CO was fishing for a 1st Cor 6:9 violation ("men who submit to homosexual acts") to nail Brother Jones, who avoided the charge by claiming he was drunk and defenseless (like "righteous" drunken Lot was.... Although it sounds like Brother Jones got drunk voluntarily, whereas Lot's daughters schemed to get him drunk by forcing wine down their father's throat against his will, just like Brother Jone's wife forced his.... Eh, never-mind...).
recentley i read ray franz book " christian freedom" and it occurd to me if he had lost his faith and become athiest the society would have delighted in that.
i think had ray turned athiest it would have been more easily " justified" in the mags what a " evil man he was" ....but maintaining his faith left the possibillity the society could be wrong.. .
i am athiest but i kept this to myself when i left... any comments?.
Yeah, you're on to something, since if Ray Franz wanted to get revenge against those who pushed him out, what better way of doing so than offering the stepwise-approach to erode their membership, and not taking the path from JW to full-bore atheist? He seemingly wrote ISOCF exactly to make that point, to draw active JWs out.
Fact remains, we never really know what other people believe in their deepest thoughts, and that goes both ways, applying equally to those who claim to be believers or non-believers (and also to those who publicly claim to be agnostics: they may announce their indecision for very pragmatic reason of not wanting to experience the blowback if they came out of the closet, either way).
the recent topics addressing the shamefully bigoted talk by jw gb member, anthony morris, on the subject of homosexuality got me thinking.
what the heck is up with the gb's obsession with this subject?.
as far as i can determine, jesus never said a single thing in reference to homosexuality.
There is no "gay gene" that has been found.
Instead, some researchers have a hypothesis that explains the biological basis of homosexuality via epigenetic mechanisms (epi-marks), where the fetus is sensitive to hormonal influences in the womb.
http://healthland.time.com/2012/12/13/new-insight-into-the-epigenetic-roots-of-homosexuality/
“It’s not genetics. It’s not DNA. It’s not pieces of DNA. It’s epigenetics,” says Sergey Gavrilets, a NIMBioS researcher and an author on the paper that outlines the new theory of homosexuality, published in The Quarterly Review of Biology. “The hypothesis we put forward is based on epigenetic marks,” he says.
Jesus talked out of both sides of his mouth, saying he didn't come to change the (laws found in the) Torah, but to fulfill the prophecies found in it; so Jesus then turned around and CHANGED OR MODIFIED THE LAWS by doing it (eg failing to stone the women caught in adultery, or Jesus in Mark 10 claiming that Moses was 'all wet' in Deut 18:23 for allowing divorce for reasons other than adultery, etc).
Adam
i viewed this tv series recently and found the information interesting to say the least.. here is part 2 which got my attention the most.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyd0lzmile8.
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galaxie, what I said is somewhat of an over-simplication, but generally speaking, it works ('Eloah' being singular, and likely the same name from which 'Allah' is derived: note the phonetic similarity between 'Eloah' and 'Allah'. I like to point that tid-bit out to Xians who say how Islamists are worshipping the Devil: nope, they worship the deity with the same name, except with just a slight difference in pronounciation due to Arabic influence. Also note the similarity between the sound of the name of the Canaanite God, Ba'al, and Al-lah: local variations of the same root concept of god).
Here's the gory details for the difference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elohim
The Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible defines "elohim" as a plural of eloah, an expanded form of the common Semitic noun "'il" (ʾēl). [3] It contains an added heh as third radical to the biconsonantal root. Discussions of the etymology of elohim essentially concern this expansion. An exact cognate outside of Hebrew is found in Ugaritic ʾlhm, the family of El, the creator god and chief deity of the Canaanite pantheon, in Biblical Aramaic ʼĔlāhā and later Syriac Alaha "God", and in Arabic ʾilāh "god, deity" (or Allah as " The [single] God").
"El" (the basis for the extended root ʾlh) is usually derived from a root meaning "to be strong" and/or "to be in front". [3]
Dr Heiser is an OT scholar who has written quite extensively on the subject of Elohim, and created a website:
i viewed this tv series recently and found the information interesting to say the least.. here is part 2 which got my attention the most.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyd0lzmile8.
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galaxie said-
Original hebrew psalm 89:6 .,"Who among the sons of EL (top canaanite god)..is like yahweh." This sounds to me like pokytheism was still around..Modern translations of this scripture seem to deviate from the original hebrew?
'Elohim' is a PLURAL word in Hebrew, referring to the Divine Counsel, the members of which are on Team YHWH and serve under His Command. This is seen in the opening scene of the account of Job, where Satan is seen in Heaven (!) acting in the role of God's henchman, testing humans to see if they're loyal to Jehovah.
The shift to monotheism is based on downgrading the status of angels and other spirit beings, and not counting them as "Gods".
The Hebrews didn't actually believe there WEREN'T other Gods (their Canaanite neighbors worshipped foreign and strange deities, and Jehovah said "thou shalt have no other Gods BEFORE ME", implying there WERE other Gods, just that they were declared as inferior Gods).
Heck, that's the entire point of followers of Ba'al competing with Elijah (who's on Team YHWH), trying to prove which God is more powerful. Once dominance is proven, the final step is to claim the other guy's God doesn't even exist.
i viewed this tv series recently and found the information interesting to say the least.. here is part 2 which got my attention the most.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyd0lzmile8.
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That's no bimbo-headed TV journalist, BTW.
That's Dr. Francesca Stavrakopoulou, "Professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Religion in the University of Exeter's department of Theology and Religion. The main focus of her research is Israelite and Judahite history and religion."
I'd be reluctant to dismiss her, since she's 'dummying down' the topic in order to make for entertaining programming laypersons can understand (she's also published scholastic meticulously foot-noted books on other topics (eg child sacrifice in the time of King Manassah), but she's a favorite "go-to" expert ofBBC for panel discussions and debates for obvious reasons.
You can find the full episodes (60 minutes vs 14 min clips above) for the series on YouTube (BBC doesn't have them up any longer); PBS made an American version of the same topic (Bible's buried secrets), too, but they used other "star experts" (eg Bill Devers) who used their own approach (Dr Devers WROTE a book called, "Did God have a wife?").
i received an email from a jw that got married, but the wife never had sex with him.
they were together for a period of years.
he told the elders, but they said there was nothing that could be done.
Even if they didn't explain their rationale, the elders likely found his story implausible, or pursued the line of reasoning that SOMEONE ELSE in the KH might be stumbled if he wasn't DFed, as if he'd found the perfect loophole (esp if he was obstinate and argued his defense a bit too strongly, reflecting a lack of accepting wrongdoing, and thus being unable to show repentance; maybe the wife told a different story, or they were gunning for him anyway, esp since the guy sounds like he's a bit "too meek").
You cannot win in a kangaroo court...
