i would like to explain to everyone on the board WHY i have gone so hard against these three.
I, like many others, have struggled coming to terms with who i am and what i believe after leaving the cult of jehovah's witnesses. it's been so many years, i left around 2004 or 2005...i forget which to be exact, and STILL it is difficult at times. i wish i had come on here sooner. i might have spared myself considerable amounts of heartache. it's sad, but i had no idea about the insane flip flops, the false teachings, i didn't even know about 607 for crying out loud.
recent events have made me reexamine what it is i believe and how i feel. namely, the passing of my grandmother.
my grandmother was japanese. i am 1/4 japanese and 3/4 african american. this means that my ancestors were all pagan by definition.
in fact, my grandmother's family owned a large buddhist(read PAGAN) temple on one of the southern japanese islands.
by definition, she was pagan, she had ZERO interest in christianity whatsoever and her ancestors, MY ANCESTORS, were pagan as well.
for my part, i am an agnostic of sorts, though i don't really care to be boxed in with that label. recently i've questioned whether i even believe in god, some of you may have responded to that topic i started.
that, is the basic backstory. there's a lot more to the story, why the circumstances of her passing are so painful to me, i'm not sure i should get into that, but suffice to say, i don't really have any communication with the rest of my family at this point.
so recently this thread pops up:
http://www.jehovahs-witness.net/jw/friends/230680/1/By-What-Authority
at first i paid no attn to it. i'm not even sure why i opened it. i did and the initial question seemed interesting enough.
turns out it was nothing more than a sneaky and nderhanded method of trying to convert people. fine, whatever. i'm not perfect and i myself tried to use a similar tactic with my mother with the explicit purpose of being able to explain WHY my life had been so up and down after leaving. frankly, if she wanted to stay in, that's her business. i'd prefer she didn't and i certainly don't want to be around it, but whatever. i don't even live in the same state as her anyway.
the conversion tactic used, while rather irritating imo, is NOT why i went on the attack.
as i stated, my grandmother was pagan. her ancestors were pagan. my ancestors were pagan...all of them until slavery at least.
what absoltely pissed me the hell off was this:
ISIDORE:
Are you a hedge-my-bet agnostic?
Agnostics are just cowards that won't commit to anything.
AND THIS FROM ORTHODOX1:
You see things very differently than history does... I see the Catholic Church, over hundreds of years, slowly assuming all of the Roman Pagan world into herself, destroying the Pagan world as it was known, that stood for a thousand years as oppressors. The evil Romans weren't then Evil Roman Catholics, but were converted through the love and prayers of the martyrs and laity of the ChurcH
not only is that absolute BULLSHIT and a flat out stupid twist of reality, it's insulting as hell to boot.
and completely against the tenants jesus himself taught. assuming he was REAL which, given the absolte lack of evidence and the claims of miracles, it's hard to believe he ever was.
and yes we DO know lincoln was real. we have his speeches, eyewitness accountsby both friend and foe made AT THE TIME HE WAS LIVING (JOSEPHUS WAS BORN AFTER CHRIST HAD DIED, LEARN SOME HISTORY), we have laws made to this day signed by him. we know exactly where he was born, exactly where he had died and the last living survivor of the war he presided over died in 1956. jesus christ what kind of stupid argment was that?
i decided to respond. it's not the fact that this is catholicism. it's the god awful nature of those posts, that piss me off.
I'M agnostic.
MY GRANDMOTHER WAS PAGAN
MY CULTURE IS PAGAN (i might be only a small percentage japanese, but my grandmother made sure i was in tune with it)
pretty damn insulting if you ask me.
my response to that was that the pagan comment was pretty distasteful and i pointed out quite a few flaws in the logic that somehow, someway, the catholics were in anyway "better" than everyone else.
then this, not all at once, and there's been nothing but pathetic jstification for the wiping out of whole societies and cultures for no other reason than profits, greed and bigotry:
Maybe paganism was superior to the Bible. When Christopher Columbus arrived in America the Indians were practicing brutal human sacrifices. Maybe they should have been left alone.
Pagan morals are also much more fun than the Christian ones, just don’t expect the same level of spiritual development or even trustworthiness from a temple prostitute, than from a Christian. If you extrapolate this to the type of society they produce, you can see clearly which one is superior to the other.
If it bothers you the fact that Christianity is superior to paganism...
the majority of the population in South America are of Indian descent, it seems the main objective was never to annihilate them or rob them their land. They are still there.
I find atheists silly, strange and weird. Also very intolerant.
to all those catholics NOT named isidore, apostatethnder and orthodox1, i truly am sorry if i have offended you. as an agnostic/atheist, i have no issue with anyone else's religion, but i DO take issue when someone insults my culture and my grandmother in sch a way. that's too much. absolutely too much.