Railing on publishers with two-door cars has subsided somewhat but rejecting the New Covenant for forgiveness of sins is still in vogue.
Topics not often discussed now
by jdubsnub 36 Replies latest watchtower bible
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BU2B
Apographanos, there was even more light in an 83 WT saying it is a perverted practice.
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LongHairGal
jdubsnub:
I think that they backed off these topics mentioned because they were embarrassed and felt it made them look too petty and too lunatic-fringe. These topics are the dirty laundry of the religion that they don't want talked about.
They want to give a balanced, businesslike appearance to the public.
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Bloody Hotdogs!
Blood in hotdogs.
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jam
Eve creation. After 1975 came in went they forgot to figure in
when Eve was created.
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Etude
The “anal” and “oral” sex thing has shifted many times in the list of dos and don'ts. Once, I argued with a friend (a pioneer) that the society had not condemned oral sex. This is after he told me that he communicated to his bible study that it was “porneia”. The study had told him that his wife liked it and that it was the best way to please her and that not doing it might jeopardize his marriage. I was shocked that the pioneer would put his study between a rock and a hard place and so I pulled up a Watchtower (or maybe it was an Awake! in the “readers question”) that said it was a matter of conscience. He didn’t care. He accused me of being “un-Christian”. I thought that was over the top and cut him off. Every time we met from that point onward, I would simply say hello. My silence was deafening. I told him that if he ever expressed the un-Christian label again to anyone, I would take him up before a committee. It’s unfortunate, because I think his views were driven by overactive compensation from being a repressed homosexual. If not that, then he was a misogynist. There’s nothing wrong with being gay. But I think he couldn’t live with it and had to go to the extreme of keeping sex traditional and straight.
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Julia Orwell
What about the kooky artwork in the 80's books like Bible Stories and Live forever? Man, I'm glad they got away from that style. I don't even know what it's called.
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Apognophos
Oh, jeez, BU2B, you were right:
*** w83 3/15 pp. 30-31 Honor Godly Marriage! ***
True, porneia is sometimes used in a limited sense, as applying to sex relations between unmarried (single) persons. An instance of such a limited usage is 1 Corinthians 6:9, where “fornicators” are mentioned separately and in addition to those who engage in such other sexual vices as adultery and homosexuality. But just before this, at 1 Corinthians 5:9-11, Paul used the same word when counseling Christians not to mix with “fornicators.” Is it reasonable to think that here he referred only to immoral unmarried persons? That could not be so, for chapter 6 sets out a broad range of illicit sexual practices that must be shunned, including adultery and homosexuality. Likewise, Jude 7 and Revelation 21:8, which show that God judges unrepentant “fornicators” as worthy of eternal destruction, could hardly be limited only to unmarried persons that have sex relations. And the Jerusalem governing body’s edict at Acts 15:29, “to keep abstaining . . . from fornication,” must be understood to have the wide field of application.
So, then, “fornication” in the broad sense, and as used at Matthew 5:32 and 19:9, evidently refers to a broad range of unlawful or illicit sex relations outside marriage. Porneia involves the grossly immoral use of the genital organ(s) of at least one human (whether in a natural or a perverted way); also, there must have been another party to the immorality—a human of either sex, or a beast. Thus, self-abuse (unwise and spiritually dangerous as this may be) is not porneia. But to this day, the term porneia embraces the various kinds of sexual activity that might take place in a house of prostitution, where sexual favors are bought and sold. A person who goes to a male or a female prostitute to buy any kind of sexual favors would be guilty of porneia.—Compare 1 Corinthians 6:18.
How about sexual activity between married couples within the marriage bond? It is not for the elders to pry into the intimate lives of married Christians. However, the Bible certainly enters into their lives. Those who would “keep walking by spirit” should not ignore the Scriptural indications of God’s thinking. And they will do well to cultivate a hatred for everything that is unclean before Jehovah, including what are clearly perverted sexual practices. Married couples should act in a way that will leave them with a clean conscience, as they give unimpeded attention to developing “the fruitage of the spirit.”—Galatians 5:16, 22, 23; Ephesians 5:3-5.
What, though, if one mate wants or even demands to share with his or her partner in what is clearly a perverted sex practice? The above-presented facts show that porneia involves unlawful sexual conduct outside the marital arrangement. Thus, a mate’s enforcing perverted acts, such as oral or anal sex, within the marriage would not constitute a Scriptural basis for a divorce that would free either for remarriage.
Throughout the article they seem to be speaking in general terms without naming what specific acts would be perverted, but then towards the end, they finally lay it on the table that oral and anal sex count as "perverted". How disgusting of the organization to do this to people.
I see that this article is briefly quoted by a similar article in the 2/15/93 WT, but this article does not talk about avoiding oral/anal sex within marriage.
The WT of 2/15/04 makes the same statement as the '83 WT, that these kinds of sex are offered in "houses of prostitution", which is a mind-numbingly stupid line of reasoning; every kind of sex is offered in a brothel, so that would mean all sex is unclean; it's obvious that the writer(s) just feels that these kinds of sex shouldn't happen within normal married relations and wants to sully them somehow by bringing up prostitutes. What happened to 'all things being clean to all people', you lousy Pharisees? Anyway, despite their disparaging of these acts, they are not applying this warning to marriage, only saying that these count as immoral acts between unmarried persons.
A QfR about "uncleanness" in the 7/15/06 WT simply pretends they never made a wider application of "porneia" in the old days:
Fornication (Greek, por·nei′a) applies to illicit sexual relations outside Scriptural marriage. It includes adultery, prostitution, and sex relations between unmarried individuals as well as oral and anal sex and the sexual manipulation of the genitals of an individual to whom one is not married. A person who unrepentantly practices fornication does not belong in the Christian congregation.
So I think it's pretty clear that they are sweeping this one under the rug. But disappointingly, it seems that the last time they actually addressed the issue of these acts between married mates was to condemn them, so someone whose conscience is bothering them and who researches this thoroughly may find that the Society still seems to frown on those acts.
Personally, I think the reasonable thing for a JW to conclude is that if there's nothing specific that's been said since the '80s, that's a big sign that the Society doesn't care anymore and therefore it's a conscience matter at the very least. But I know some over-conscientious JWs will feel badly after reading these older articles and decide the practices are unclean just because some sexually-frustrated 1950s reject said so.
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konceptual99
Neanderthals
Rebuttals to contemporary theories on the ancestry of man.
Mitochondrial DNA
Carbon dating and how stupidly unreliable it is (in their eyes)
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Etude
The article I remember was pre 1980s. It clearly mentioned oral sex. I remember thinking how "progressive" the opinion was because it mentioned how it was impossible from the language in the to determine what actual practices did or did not incorporate into porneia. Obviously, this didn't ring correctely to my pioneer friend, because he decided that the article didn't apply to what he was imposing on his bible study.