When religious people use the word ”KNOW” in connection with their faith, they demonstrate in a very clear manner that they don’t know the meaning of that word. In the brochure “Does God Really Care About Us?” published by the Watchtower Society there is an article where the use of the word “know” will give us insight into it all:
Part 9 starts with the question:
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HOW can we be sure that we are living at the time when God’s Kingdom will take action against this present system of human rule? How can we know that we are very close to the time when God will bring an end to all wickedness and suffering?
The appropriate wording of this should have been “Why we believe We are in the Last Days?” The first sentence isn’t much better: “HOW can we be sure…” Faith and belief leaves no room for knowing, no possibility of being sure, so again the use of such words are extremely inappropriate and give a completely false impression of what is being discussed. The Watchtower Society literature, the Bible and all other religious literature is full of things that people BELIEVE. They don’t KNOW any of it, if they knew belief wouldn’t enter into the equation. C.T. Russell was sure; in fact he “knew” that the “Kingdom of Christ” would be in charge in 1914. J.F. Ruteherford was sure that 1925 would bring the same. According to the Bible the Disciples of Christ was sure that he would return in their lifetime. Many Jehovah's Witnesses was sure about 1975. Many Christian sects and churches have been sure of this and that up through history.
As we all know the word “SURE” or “KNOW” is completely inappropriate to use in connection with fantasies and belief. But the Watchtower Society drones on:
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2 The disciples of Jesus Christ wanted to know those things. They asked him what “the sign” would be of his presence in Kingdom power and “of the conclusion of the system of things.” (Matthew 24:3) Jesus answered by detailing world-shaking events and conditions that would combine to show that mankind had entered “the time of the end,” “the last days” of this system of things. (Daniel 11:40; 2 Timothy 3:1) Have we in this century seen that composite sign? Yes, we have, abundantly so!
Yes, the disciples wanted to know, but the “information” they got was clearly quite inadequate or they simply completely misunderstood it. First of all it doesn’t help like the Watchtower Society does here to use fancy words like “composite sign” and such, time alone has demonstrated that this sign was tantamount to saying that “when the grass is green, the wind blows and it rains, the end will come.” What is described is simply how world conditions have always been and keep on being. Then the article starts anew on the usual litany of the “signs”. Jesus foretold wars, wow! That must have been difficult to foresee. Then they make the usual and totally wrong claims that the war in 1914-1918 was the First World War and the first of its kind, which is so ridiculously stupid and ignorant it is a miracle that these idiots get away with it all the time. But hey, they know their audience quite well. Then they exaggerate and inflate the casualties of that war totally ignoring the fact that there had been several very bloody wars long before that. . One local conflict alone, the Taiping rebellion in China 1850-1864 an estimated 20-40 million people died. Wild claims are taken out of thin air: “World War I marked the beginning of the last days. How do they know that? There had been world wars witch lasted far longer and cost just as many lives and even more distress before that time. This is again something that Jehovah's Witnesses simply believe, they don’t know anything really. The number of casualties presented on the Watchtower web page is simply a huge falsification of known facts.
Then follows the good old prune - earthquakes. Yikes, yeah sure those are new ones, eh? Since their old claims that earthquakes has increased enormously since 1914 is well and truly debunked once and for all I am not wasting any time on that one. But they still go on with the same old sorry and completely bogus claims. Just look at this:
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6 Major earthquakes are regular occurrences, taking many lives. The Spanish influenza alone killed about 20,000,000 people following World War I—some estimates being 30,000,000 or more. AIDS has taken hundreds of thousands of lives and could take millions more in the near future. Each year millions of people die of heart ailments, cancer, and other diseases. Millions more die the slow death of hunger. Without a doubt the ‘horsemen of the Apocalypse’ with their wars, food shortages, and disease epidemics have been cutting down large numbers of the human family since 1914.—Revelation 6:3-8.
They even have to include heart failure! When did that become an infectious disease? How do these idiots explain the rapidly growing population we have had the last 60 years? How is that possible if more people then ever before have died because of all the causes they list above? Don’t these fools understand that you can’t have both? How incredibly dumb can you get? The fact of the matter is that since 1914 everything related to most these problems has improved incredibly, fewer people then ever before in the history of mankind die from such these problems as hunger starvation, crime, yes even war. That is something we KNOW, we don’t have to BELIVE it. We don’t have to keep lying about it to make it fit a preconceived stupid religious faith.
The article then goes on with another just as incredibly stupid claim, the “collapse of moral” oh yeah! Don’t you all long back to the good old days when the Christians was running things? I mean what could be more ethic and moral then the Crusades, the Inquisition? The burning of witches, the slaughter of everyone that had the wrong superstition, the suppression of women, blacks etc. Now we have these horrible new fangled immoral notions of human rights, yes even women, children and gasp homosexuals and blacks can’t be strung up at will anymore. Old Christian men can’t fuck 10 year old girls anymore; I mean the moral has clearly gone to hell.
And then the Watchtower Society moves into the real clincher, the real heavy “evidence”:
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9 There is another factor responsible for the huge increase in suffering in this century. Coinciding with the beginning of the last days in 1914, something happened to put mankind in even greater danger. At that time, as a prophecy in the last book of the Bible relates: “War broke out in heaven: Michael [Christ in heavenly power] and his angels battled with the dragon [Satan], and the dragon and its angels [the demons] battled but it did not prevail, neither was a place found for them any longer in heaven. So down the great dragon was hurled, the original serpent, the one called Devil and Satan, who is misleading the entire inhabited earth; he was hurled down to the earth, and his angels were hurled down with him.”—Revelation 12:7-9.
Considering it is a FACT that suffering has decreased enormously in this century the above is as usual completely ludicrous and just another example of the sheer idiocy of religious fantasy and nonsense. It is of course tragic and pathetic on behalf of those ignorant superstitious nitwits that wrote down this baloney, but it really reaches new height’s of absurdity when presumably sane people living in 2006 actually use it as “proof” to tell us that they “KNOW” anything about the future. If anything all this pathetic twaddle demonstrate to us all once again how utterly clueless and out to lunch the leaders of the Watchtower Society indeed are.
But that simple fact doesn’t prevent them and other religious leaders to use language and words that are totally misplaced and inappropriate when they make their far fetched and ridiculous claims. Claims like:
The Bible is the word of God!
How can anyone make such a claim?. What evidence does anyone have for that? Well, the Bible say so, is the answer. Yes, but how do we know the Bible is true? Because the Bible say so of course!
Such “reasoning” might satisfy the mind of the extremely gullible and superstitious but I am afraid we should demand a little more from our leaders or be prepared to be duped big time as history show us so many examples of. It reveals a complete lack of perspective, no sense of reality and priority.
Faith and beliefs only comes in when we don’t really know something. What we know we don’t have to believe. It is really as simple as that. If people who claim to be believers could remember such a simple thing when they feel they have the right to kill people who don’t believe as they do, simply based on some illusion they keep in their head. When they feel they can dismiss each others human worth based on what religious fantasies and ideas they hold, such people has become a menace to mankind and are in reality far worse then any of the unbelievers they so loathe. Religion and faith is indeed a horrible scourge on mankind.
Norm