Help Needed for articles involving Re-Creation...

by Tuesday 14 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

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  Leolaia

  *** lp chap. 10 pp. 116-117 Does God Count You Personally Important? ***
  
  In order to resurrect a person, God has to know everything about him. Only with this information can God bring back the same person with the same personality, so that the individual will be himself and recognize himself. This means that God must restore every detail of the person's makeup. This would include his appearance, his inherited traits, the influence that environment and experience have had on him, along with his complete memory. What interest and care this demonstrates!
  
  Someone may say, 'That seems impossible.' But even today men can make a videotape or moving picture of a person. Then, even after he is dead, they can project it on a screen and see the actions and movements of the individual, along with healing his voice. Hundreds of details are recorded. If men can do this, cannot God, with whom "all things are possible", have a record of the thousands of details that make up a personality?

  *** lp chap. 15 p. 175 The End of Sickness and Death ***
  
  As to the resurrected ones, God will accurately "re-create" each individual with his entire life pattern, personality and memory just as it was. The one resurrected will be able to identify himself as the same person. Also, his former associates will know him by his appearance and characteristics. He can then resume life after the interruption caused by his death, possessing the same motivations, leanings and traits that he displayed beforehand.... To the person who is resurrected, the time period that he was dead would be, to him, only an instant, since death is a nonexistence.
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  Leolaia

  These were the passages that first presented the teaching to me when I was a child, and during the book study for this book I raised my hand and asked them to explain this because it didn't make sense to me. I had just seen "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" at the time (the 1970s remake), so it sounded to me that the resurrected person was just a copy and not the same as the original person. A videotape is not the same as the thing it records.
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  Nathan Natas

  39 Note Jesus’ words, “Do not marvel at this.” Even so, how can one long dead be released from death, and brought back to life? Has not his body returned to the dust? Some of the particles that made up that body may even have been assimilated into other living things, such as plants and animals. However, resurrection does not mean bringing the same chemical elements together again. It means that God re-creates the same person, with the same personality. He brings a new body forth from the earthly elements, and in that body he places the same characteristics, the same distinctive qualities, the same memory, the same life-pattern that the person had built up until the time of his death.

  - "Look! I Am Making All Things New!" (1970) page 3
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  Nathan Natas

  Regarding the booklet "From Kurukshetra to Armageddon-And Your Survival" (1983) the Kingdom Ministry of March 1983 said,

  • The Society has produced three new booklets in English for the special purpose of helping people of certain religious backgrounds. The booklet The Time for True Submission to God (sm) is designed to help Muslims to understand the truth. In Search of a Father (sc) has been written for people indoctrinated in the Buddhism of southeast Asia. And, From Kurukshetra to Armageddon-And Your Survival (ku) has been prepared to help persons of Hindu background. Congregations that have English-speaking persons with these backgrounds in their territory may wish to order a small supply of these booklets. As these become available in other languages, announcement will be made.
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  VM44

  Didn't The Watchtower writers when they were writing the above articles realize that what they were describing was not the "resurrection" or "bringing back" of an individual, but rather the re-creation of a body and the imprinting of a "life pattern" onto it? That is exactly what they wrote!

  Didn't these writers ask the question, "How does the creation of this body and imprinting upon it benefit the original person who died?"

  It is a simple enough question. Why has no one in Watchtower Land ever raised it? Or if they have, why hasn't The Watchtower answered it?