How can everything weve learned be a lie?

bats in the belfry

A reporter tracks down the remnants of Harold Camping’s apocalyptic movement and finds out you don’t have to be crazy to believe something nuts.

An excerpt of his write-up:

Another engineer I came to know had spent most of his retirement savings, well over a half-million dollars, taking out full-page newspaper ads and buying an RV that he had custom-painted with doomsday warnings. Even when I pressed, he wasn’t willing to admit any doubts about whether October 21 would really, finally, be it. “How can you say that when you see that all this beautiful information is in the Bible?” he asked me, his voice rising. “How can everything we’ve learned be a lie?”

Report: A Year After the Non-Apocalypse: Where Are They Now? (May 18, 2012)

Isn't that exactly the same mentality the JWs display in conversation?

blondie

I only see it as necessary to re-examine everything carefully.

mrsjones5

Great article. Thanks for the link.

wasblind

" Some who saw the events of 1914 will also see the complete destruction of the present wicked world."___Reasoning from the scriptures book page 200

Changed to an overlapp. What's the difference between Harold Camping and the WTS ??? it is belief

The WTS don't even believe in the mess they teach, but Camping believed in his

breakfast of champions

This could be right out of Festinger's "When Prophecy Fails". The more one has invested in a cult - time, money, broken family ties, dropping out of school, other sacrifices- the more difficult it is to part with a belief system. Almost like a "sunk cost fallacy" situation.

AnnOMaly

Excellent article! The ever-repeating pattern, huh?

One of the comments that stood out to me:

I was struck by how some believers edited the past in order to avoid acknowledging that they had been mistaken.The engineer in his mid-twenties, the one who told me this was a prophecy rather than a prediction [his experience was given earlier], maintained that he had never claimed to be certain about May 21.When I read him the transcript of our previous interview, he seemed genuinely surprised that those words had come out of his mouth. It was as if we were discussing a dream he couldn't quite remember.

Think of all the revisionism among JWs, just one e.g. of many, 1975 - 'the Society never said ... ,' 'it was some brothers who ran away with the idea.'

WTWizard

It makes more sense now than ever to know when to cut one's losses and bail out. No matter what you have invested in a belief system, if it's doing nothing but giving you false promises, it is a bad investment. And, adding more is like adding more money to a bad financial investment in hopes of getting ahead. It never works.

And, with Christi-SCAM-ity threatened with more pedophile scandals (and Judaism not totally exempt--recently there have been scandals with Orthodox Jews stifling the reporting of pedophiles within their ranks), we are all going to have to accept this and very soon. Are you ready to ditch your whole belief system, perhaps even turning to the very Being that your religion vilifies, when you find out that they are involved in this rubbish? And, if too many more Orthodox Jews are busted for harboring pedophiles, it won't be long before that whole paradigm will collapse too. And when it does, the sxxx is really going to hit the fan for everyone involved in those right-hand path religions. No matter what you may have been taught, are you willing to accept that it could all be a lie?

Besides, this is the Age of Aquarius. In which, you are expected to question your whole belief system. Chances are, most of us (on the planet, not just on this board) are going to have major changes in their belief system. New light is coming out. You are seeing new light on pedophile problems where it was formerly believed there were none, and there are many other problems just now coming to light with those religions. There is more good information about the truth on Satan and His Demons now than ever before, and most of it will shock you if you are still a Christian or Muslim. We are now expected to ask the questions, do the deep research, even researching the deepest parts of these religions (monastery, missionary, and the like), and come to unbiased conclusions. In the meantime, more rubbish will come out about the three major mainstream religions--are you ready and willing to cut bait and bail?

Terry

Desire is our most powerful motive force because the deepest roots of it come from our Values.

And where do our values originate? Some are absorbed passively almost from birth. Our mother, family, friends, social network spoon feed our sense of what is most/least important. The pain or the pleasure of contemplating an outcome play an extreme role in our selections.

We want to experience this and not that. The mental scenario we run which brings us to what is best for us looms larger in our selection process.

We diminish the alternative viewed as the least desirable. We inflate the alternative which is most desirable.

Once we've invested our deep desire on an outcome the urge to commit becomes irresistible.

Having the UNwanted outcome pointed out to us is a hateful thought to think about!

We vomit the UNwanted alternative out of our thinking.

It literally is UNthinkable!

Once we absolutely invest..........that UNthinkable alternative becomes impossible.