by JH 18 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
When a person dies, does anything survive? JW's say no.
My mom, who is Baptist now, is sure that the soul lives on. So, just like a good JW of old, I said to her, "the devil wants you to believe that".
Then she said, how about your spirit?
I said, yeah, "I think that when a person dies, the bible says that the spirit goes back to God".
If it was our spirit, then I'd say, something survives, but if it's God's spirit in us, then he is just taking it back....
What do you think?
Romans 8:16 says "The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are children of God"
So, we do have our own spirit, and it's different from God's spirit, so when we die our spirit goes back to God, so something we have survives?
Our Soul this is what survives. Our soul is our personality, it us our existence. This is why St. Peter said that the gospel was preached to the dead. And this happened when Jesus entered to Hades to preach to the spirits there.
Indeed we have a soul, and there are many Bible scriptures to show that. After Jesus broke the bonds of Hades the souls have gone to heaven, because Hades was a place that the Souls were waiting for the Glorious Jesus gospel, when he opened the doors of Hades.
St. Peter said that the gospel was preached to the dead.
But wouldn't this contradict Ecclesiastes 9:5, which says
5 For the living are conscious that they will die; but as for the dead, they are conscious of nothing at all, neither do they anymore have wages, because the remembrance of them has been forgotten. 6 Also, their love and their hate and their jealousy have already perished, and they have no portion anymore to time indefinite in anything that has to be done under the sun.
The bible is selfcontradictory about this subject.
S
At Ecclesiastis we have a PERSONAL opinion of the writter. In one other occasion the same writter said that everything is vanity...so shall we take that as Biblical teaching?
By the way what counts the Old Testamen or the New? Even Jesus said the parable with the rich man and Lazarus. Even if it is a parable why Jesus would say a parable that supposed is demon oriented? Jesus was always in the parables was refering to REAL facts. He never used fairy tail examples( dragons and flying horses)in the parables. It is shown that the righteous will inherit a place in kindom of heaven, while the unrighteous a place way from God.
The impressions you have left on other people, (assuming you dont go down in history for something of course)
Your reasoning is back-to-front here. Because the Bible states that the spirit returns to God after death is not a reason for believing that statement to be true - rather, it is a further reason for realising that the Bible is false.
Nothing can be independantly verified or corroborated. There is no evidence to examine or returnees to interview. You have nothing to go on except for the Bible itself, a closed system which cannot validate itself.
Open your eyes and your minds.
Usually just your wife.....................oompa
We have several problems here.
First, if we are going to define death with any accuracy we have to be able to measure, quanitfy and demonstrate what we are talking about.
Secondly, consulting a six thousand year old book is rather absurd if accuracy or understanding is our goal.
Ancient people made guesses about things based on how they "appeared" to be.
When a person died there was a "death rattle" as the last breath came out of the collapsing lungs. The "breath" went out of them and they were dead.
The primitive intelligence connected what WENT OUT with what kept the person alive. Breath=Life.
The words in the bible which have gradually come to mean "spirit" are breath words.
It was a simple confusion. This invisible something must be what is REALLY the essential thing that makes us alive (it was thought.)
So, sort of logically: the breath is our life and our essential being.
But, reality is different. Breath is not life. Breath is only one part of the processes which signal we are alive.
To be alive we must carry on processes which are no longer possible when our bodily functions break down and our heart stops and the breath goes out of us.
Dead, in other words, means DEAD!
DEAD and SURVIVE don't go together at all. One contradicts the other.
There are people who suffer from the appearance of death (such feeble vital signs that it fools the doctor). They are like your computer in "slumber" mode. Low power, barely sustaining continuity. Such persons can--with interventions--be revived. But, they were not completely and utterly dead for real.
Remember, any modern day "coming back from the dead" is a result of wrong diagnosis in the first place. It isn't actually a total cessation of all functions.
Sometimes people apparently "dead" at the scene of an accident are not registering life--but are--in fact, still maintaining a cohesion of low-battery life. These people sometimes spontaneously awaken to the surprise of everybody and claims of miracles abound.
In the 19th century so many people were buried alive in error that caskets were built with bells on top and the string wrapped around the corpses' hand!! I kid you not!!
The practice of embalming is actually sort of an assurance of no surprises!!
Dead is dead. Nothing truly survives.
