@hotchocolate:
So I wrote an email to my brother to tell him that I love him and that it's sad that a religion has come between us. This is the reply I got:
stupid and ignorant. You have no idea what i have been thru in my life. I was living a worldly life and i saw the shallowness of it all so i made my decision based on lots of study to return to the truth. MY DECISION. Things have never been clearer. Don't send me anymore messages.
It might have been illuminating to have seen the email you sent that elicited such a reply from your brother. However, you should respect his request since I would imagine someone with such an unloving mindset is more likely than not to delete any future emails from you without giving any of them a read (unless your brother's curiosity should get the best of him). A lot of people even have emails sent from certain individuals automatically deleted from their Inbox as they do spam, so it's probably not a good idea to just assume that your brother is even aware of having receive any of your emails should you elect to send a reply to his message anyway, since such would likely have been deleted by his spam filter automatically without his explicit knowledge of having received them.
Look: I am not going to try to explain why it is that some folks feel moved to say hurtful, unloving things to others, for I, too, am guilty of having said hurtful things to others in the past (when I was younger). However, if your brother were someone else like you, someone that had expressed a romantic interest in you, and you were to have sent this "suitor" a similar email containing what amounts to a request that he not send you any more email messages, and, just to stack the deck a bit here, that he is no longer welcome to drop by your home for a visit or to call you on the telephone, either at your home or at the place where you work, nor to text you on your cell phone, the moment that you actually did any of these things, I suppose you could conceivably file a police report of some sort complaining of harassment or stalking from this "suitor," seeking a restraining order, and such an order would accordingly be granted.
Now I read @jwfacts' post to you where he suggested that you should reply and add to it the following sentence, which he took out of context from an article published in the July 2009 Awake! ("Is It Wrong to Change Your Religion?"):P
"No one should be forced to worship in a way that he finds unacceptable or be made to choose between his beliefs and his family."
The context of what @jwfacts quotes is regarding whether someone, who is one of Jehovah's Witnesses, should feel forced to worship in a way that he or she finds unacceptable, or whether a Christian should be made to choose between the dictates of his or her beliefs and those of his or her own family.
You went on to refer to this Awake! quotation as being "ironic," and then went on to opine that "[n]o one should be made to pay the price of their family in exchange for truth and freedom...," but Matthew 10:34, 35, indicates that it is on account of the kingdom issue that a division has come to exist between "a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a young wife against her mother-in-law," and, in the case of disfellowshipped Witnesses, this "sword" divides those that do no longer wish to continue 'accepting their torture stake and follow after Jesus' from those that accept their torture stake and do wish to continue follow after Jesus.
Today there are definitely people that are united in the worship of "the god of this system of things," the one "who is misleading the entire inhabited earth" and who is responsible for the spiritual blindness that exists among mankind (2 Corinthians 4:4; Revelation 12:9), but Jesus came to unite families in the worship of his heavenly father, "the only true God," Jehovah. (Jeremiah 10:10; John 17:3) Jesus also indicated that those making themselves enemies of God could be "persons of [one's] own household," because those family members themselves, including those who were formerly Jehovah's Witnesses, have decided to make "those related to [them] in the faith" their enemies over the kingdom issue. (Matthew 10:36; Galatians 6:10)
From the perspective of Jehovah's Witnesses, if a Christian should actually have greater affection for their disfellowshipped family members, who came to decide that they would no longer walk in the truth, than they do for Jesus, if they should actually have "greater affection for father or mother" than they do for Jesus," as Jesus himself says three times at Matthew 10:37, 38, then that person "is not worthy of me; and he that has greater affection for son or daughter than for me is not worthy of me. And whoever does not accept his torture stake and follow after me is not worthy of me."
Your brother's email message strikes me as unloving and even mean-spirited, but I don't know your brother to say if it is either of these, and I believe you would be in a much better position than I to interpret the tenor of his email. I merely wanted to say that you should respect your brother's request. Jesus said that we should "continue to love our enemies and to pray for those persecuting us" (Matthew 5:44), so while your brother may properly view you as being an enemy of God and his enemy over the kingdom issue, and he may regard you as being no longer related to him in the faith, no longer his spiritual sister, you remain his fleshly sister, a member of his family, and you can hope that he comes around.
I read another post in this thread from @I quit!, who wrote --
"Anyway I got over [believing that "I was in the one true religion serving the one true God"] and I hope and pray that some day your brother will also."
-- but to whom exactly does @I quit! or does anyone else that leaves off from worshipping Jehovah pray? No prayer can properly be directed to Jesus; all such requests must be directed to Jehovah through Jesus Christ, so how does one anyone that marginalizes Jehovah by praying to Jesus that your brother will one day 'get over' believing Jehovah's Witnesses to be a part of "the one true religion" that is serving Jehovah? Is such a prayer in harmony with God's will? (1 John 5:14) I mean, you wouldn't really expect Jehovah to affirmatively answer any request that is not in accord with his will, would you?
Jesus told that Samaritan woman, "You worship what you do not know," and then he told her, in contrast, that "We worship what we know," that is to say, we worship a God that is known to us, THE TRUTH, for 'God is looking for suchlike ones who will worship Him with spirit and truth.' (John 4:22, 23) Consequently, anyone whose striving is like that of Christendom that seeks to worship a graven image, whether it be that copper serpent that Moses raised up on a signal pole, which was designed to be a symbol of Jehovah's saving power, but which had become an object of worship before Hezekiah destroyed it, or that cross upon which the image of an impaled Jesus is now being worshipped, apart from Jehovah, Jesus cannot independently save anyone, for Jesus is not God, but the Son of God, Jehovah's means of salvation. (2 King 18:4; John 3:14, 15; John 10:36; Luke 3:6)
Anyone that worships Jesus is really worshipping a nonexistent god, so, in effect, that worship goes to "the god of this system of things," Satan the Devil, who accepts all worship that is not based on truth. (2 Corinthians 4:4)
@djeggnog
