Abraham Lincoln was once challenged to a duel to the death when he offended somebody.
As the one challenged, it was his right to pick the weapons and the place of battle.
Lincoln's challenger was a short fellow and an expert marksman. Lincoln was 6 feet 6 inches tall and had been a rail splitter as a youth.
Here is Lincoln's response:
"I choose axes in 6 feet of water." His challenger never showed up.
If you choose the wrong battlefield you fight with your opponent's strengths used to his advantage.
NEVER CHOOSE THE WRONG BATTLEFIELD. Such as.....Doctrines.
Arguing doctrines is like punching a cloud.
You may as well write your rebuttals with your finger on the calm surface of a pond.
A false PREMISE cannot be accepted into evidence as legitimate or you are defeated before you've begun.
Hannibal defeated the formidable Roman army again and again and again. How? He chose the terrain on which the battle would take place.
The Romans finally got wise. They simply refused to engage! Then, they sent their armies to attack his home town in Carthage.
The Romans chose the terrain. They were waiting for him when he arrived. He lost. His first and only defeat!
What is my point?
You have to realize that what Jehovah's Witnesses are doing is a series of Magic Tricks using misdirection.
You won't catch them out palming the coin. You won't see the wires when they float their lovely assistant above the floor.
An audience to a Magic Show accepts the premise and agrees to be fooled. The titillation comes from not KNOWING HOW the trick is done.
You cannot destroy the illusions of the Watchtower Society by reporting about "how the trick is done".
Why?
The audience wants to be fooled expertly. They want to believe in Magic!
You, by believing THE BIBLE CONTAINS CORRECT DIVINE TRUTHS are like that audience. You believe in Magic.
For every trick you expose, the JW's have another way of performing that trick!
There is NO SUCH THING as Magic!
The bible will not stand as evidence of Divinely revealed Truth----IF YOU take the time to investigate.
Jehovah's Witnesses have their own INTERPRETATION of Truth.
You cannot defeat them by pointing out a DIFFERNT interpretation.
All that is MAGIC.
Choose your battleground. Don't fight in Magic land.
The only battle worth waging is against the PREMISE of Jehovah's Witnesess. No, not their Interpretation---the BIBLE ITSELF!
1.Nobody has any original manuscripts of the bible. They don't exist.
2.Nobody has copies from the original autograph bible manuscripts. They don't exist.
3.A fragment about the size of a postage stamp of a copy of a copy of a copy exists. That is all!
4.Actual manuscripts appear decades after the originals vanished. These actual manuscripts cannot be VERIFIED by comparison to ORIGINALS. Why not?
(see #1 above)
5.The manuscripts which do exist, having appeared decades later, have no Provenance. We don't know who produced them, who owned them, who changed them, who passed them along. All we have are unsubstantiated CLAIMS.
6. 300 years after the death of Jesus there were thousands of versions of Jesus stories in existence. Not one ACTUAL conversation in Jesus' own words has been faithfully preserved anywhere to serve as evidence. All we have are redacted "versions" of word-of-mouth stories.
7.Thousands of manuscripts exist which are not original. When you compare them with each other thousands of mismatches can be easily demonstrated.
Are any of the above 7 points cause for FIRM CONFIDENCE we can battle with each other over what is TRUE TEACHING?
What you call THE BIBLE consists of "attributed" writings. None of the writers can be proved in any way. So, how can anybody's INTERPRETATION by considered "The Truth?"
Jehovah's Witnesses, like the Catholic Church, create a fairytale explanation of how TRUTH is channeled through them. But, like the Catholic Church, all evidence testing their True interpretation has DISPROVED those claims!
How many errors does it take to prove GOD did not author a false claim?
If you are God's chosen channel of communication, HOW DO YOU EXPLAIN YOUR ERRORS?
The disease is not the false claims easily disproved. Those are the symptoms of the disease.
The disease is ACCEPTING THE BIBLE as a source of divine evidence in the first place.
Don't fight on that soggy battlefield. You will lose even when you win.
Sola Fide and Sola Scriptura have been tested by history for over 500+ years. These are false doctrines. Every denomination contradicts every other denomination for only ONE reason: THEY ALL USE THE BIBLE to prove their doctrine!!
Study the history of the bible and ONLY fight about that. All the rest of Jehovah's Witnesses false claims vanish after that.
The only defense any christian has ever made about the bible is a lame one: Surely God can preserve His word if he wants.
The Catholic bible was ALL THE BIBLE THERE WAS for 1500 years. It had 7 more books than what we have now. Where is the Corruption disproved? In what is missing or in what has been preserved?
Luther argued against including Hebrews, Revelation, Jude and James. The JW's think Luther was one of them!
Who was right and who is wrong? THERE IS NO WAY TO TEST for/against corruption.
The hard-nosed evangelical Fundamentalists who insist the BIBLE IS WITHOUT ERROR.....only do so.........by cheating! They pull a little dishonest trick, just as the Witnesses do. Do you know what it is?
They affirm Inerrancy in the "originals" only!!
Where ARE those originals?
Nobody has them!
Wiki:
Evangelical inerrantists
Evangelical Christians generally accept the findings of textual criticism, and nearly all modern translations, including the popular New International Version, work from a Greek New Testament based on modern textual criticism.
Since this means that the manuscript copies are not perfect, inerrancy is only applied to the original autographs (the manuscripts written by the original authors) rather than the copies. [1] For instance, the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy says, "We affirm that inspiration, strictly speaking, applies only to the autographic text of Scripture." [22]