by ruari 72 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
Hi guys,
My name is Ruari Phillips, I'm 21 years old and if possible...I'd like to ask a question.
Jehovahs Witnesses believe the world is getting worse and that as time passes we are approaching armageddon.
But, haven't we always lived in a cruel world?
Since the begginning of time we've been killing each other, there's been diseases, death and destruction. It's nothing new.
Why do you believe NOW is any worse than the times of Jesus?
A reply would be much appreciated.
Cheers.
Ruari
Excellent question and welcome to the board
Can i just point out that most of us do NOT think the world is any worse because unlike JWs we have examined the statistics instead of blindly parroting this misleading and incorrect philosophy.
Next time a JW calls on you maybe you could ask them and have some stats to hand to show that things are not worse. If more people die in a earthquake then could this perhaps be that the world is far more heavily populate than it was etc etc...
Just in case you misunderstood this is a board for ex JWs - ones who have been excommunicated from their families because they no longer agree with the absurd beliefs of JWs amongst other reasons.
JWs rely on the World getting worse. WWI being the favourite starting point. In my opinion, media coverage of tragic events (which are often now televised while they're happening) help give the illusion of constant and escalating bad news.
Welcome to the board ruari
I think that people always go back to personal experiences of "the old days" vs. today. It is true that crime is more rampant now than in the 1950s, moral standards are much looser, etc. Most religious folks, not just JWs will attribute this to people getting more evil in the end times.
But people usually don't consider how things were before their lifetime or their parents' lifetimes..with slavery, ravaging plagues, harsh lifestyles, "decadent" societies, etc. Here's a pretty good article on the subject:
At any given moment, some things in the world get worse, some things get better and most stay the same. Saying that 'everything's
getting worse and worse' is Watchtower nonsense.
Did your ancient ancestors have cars or microwave ovens or central heating or air conditioning or airplanes or antibiotics or television
or video tape or movies or health insurance or refrigerators or credit cards or skyscrapers or much of anything???
For most people in western countries, life is much better than it ever has been!
Even morally, most people are better - we don't permit slavery anymore - our societies suppress beating wives and children
( they didn't used to!) In much of the twentieth century, it was still legal to send someone to prison if you beat him until he confessed!
( a Supreme Court decision changed this). It was common for happy smiling crowds of white Southern people to have a picnic in parks -
to celebrate lynching a black person! ( there are many old photographs of this - does this happen anymore?)
Our society has civil rights and laws - that never existed before. African- Americans hold positions in the government and business
that they never had before - look at Oprah!
metatron
I don't mean to beg the question, but please define "worse". I was watching the History channel this weekend and saw the astoundingly interesting program about the "little" ice age that started in the 1400's or so and went on into the 19th century. Supposedly, the black-death, the Irish famine, the immigration patterns of the US and so on were all fallout from this occurance. But what struck me as unusually cruel was the massive famine that Europe suffered during this time. There were tales of weak, gaunt, boney Irish mothers holding their dead children and begging for money to by caskets for them. Tales of whole families laying in a single bed and slowly dying of starvation together. Now, could a famine like that, of that magnitude, be possible today? The black death is starting to be recognized as some form of ebola, not the Bubonic Plague it has been historically thought of, while, today, the world is gearing up for a chicken flu that has killed a grand total of something like 165 people in two years, but we are trying to be prepared and reduce the affects as much as possible. The last century had mechanized warfare and gases and ovens and bombs that killed bunches and bunches of people in the cruelist ways, but has anybody ever read about what the Romans did to the Gauls, or the Christians did while in Jerusalem during the crusades? Today, our world agonizes and debates and shouts over a single dyckhead in Iraq who ran a "rein of terror" and murder on, what, 200K people? We are human beings, we carry ourselves along in history, and as such, the more we progress, the worse we can be, but, also, the better we can be. The world is what it is, as it always was. The only thing getting worse is the JWs view of it, and, inspite of their BS, their views are for selfish reasons.
It's tough finding good news on the internet, but it's there. India, for instance, has pulled itself out of third-world status. I once argued the "six convincing lines of evidence" the WT uses to tell us the world is swiftly coming to an end.
Just in case you misunderstood this is a board for ex JWs - ones who have been excommunicated from their families because they no longer agree with the absurd beliefs of JWs amongst other reasons.
Crumpet, you are mistaken. This is a board for anyone who wants to discuss JW related topics. You can be an ex-JW, an active JW or even a never-JW.
Personally, I believe the world has become worse although this is not to say that it hasn’t always had its share of terrible things. I know the foregoing is only my opinion but consider the following:
Biological warfare possible on Global scale (this takes age-old problems to new heights)
Nuclear arms and delivery systems (this takes age-old problems to new heights)
Rampant drug use (this is a major contributor to increase in crime and immorality)
Environmental pollution of soil, atmosphere, oceans Global dependence on a non-renewable energy source (petroleum) co-linked with a shift of world population from agriculture to urban settings.
the only real measure is perhaps the human extinction point, which is somewhere close to the midnight hour according to the bulletin
of the atomic scientists, who keep changing that minute hand back and forth due to world events....
there are many extinction events possible, the only one which seems any different than in the past is the atomic war senario and
there is really no way to tell if we will, as a species, survive a full out atomic war or not....or if we would want to.
every other possibility has been with the human species from its beginning....
the caldera in yellowstone is 40k years over due
an extinction event meteor has always been possible
extinction by plague has been more likely in the past than now.
one book I read shortly after exiting JWs made this imporant point--- the news is mostly bad because the world is mostly neutral to good... when the news is good we are all F=@%ed as that would mean the bad was the norm.
Its really funny to me to see them running of at the mouth with this *hit! After the tsunami last year there was a lot of it! Newsweek (or maybe time) put out a little half page "worst disasters of modern times" and my mother-in-law was going crazy with it while I was reading it "Oh that's been since 1914 and so has that and so has that... ) That was great except that there were only 3 of the top 10 that had happened since 1914! and they were numbers 6,7,8 on the list! NONE were even in the top 5!!!! Jesus there was a flood in china in the 1800's that killed almost 4 MILLION people!!!! I can't even IMAGINE that! Thats better than 20 TIMES the amount killed in the tsunami!
I guess the short answer is just NO!
