Sorry, I don't have a scanner at home, so I'll have to type this out.
OK, the April 15, 2003 Watchtower is titled "What Has Happened to Spiritual Values? After of course, showing how few Catholics actually go to church in Europe, it says on page 5 under the heading "Where Can You Find True Spiritual Values?:
"If you are going to follow a religion simply because of family tradition, why not choose the Celtic religion that our ancestors practices 2,000 years ago?" asks Rodolphe with a note of irony............"I'm totally against the idea that religious convictions should be forced on me by tradition, simply because members of my family who lived tens or even hundreds of years ago practiced a certain religion." Rudolphe weighed things carefully; he did not treat this important matter as just something he inherited.Though the handing down of a religion from one generation to another is on the decline nowadays, the majority still remain attached to the religion of their family. But is it always right to stick to the religious values of one's parents? What does the bible say?
Incredibly, right on this page there's a picture with four smiling women, from 20 years of age up to one who looks like she's almost a hundred years old with the caption beside it that says:
Four generations of a family of Jehovah's Witnesses in France.
The very fact that the Watchtower has the audacity to say that your religion shouldn't be "forced" upon you, simply because your family has belonged to a particular religion, shows that they are the biggest hypocrites on planet earth. How many of us were born into this religion? Yes, it was FORCED upon us whether we wanted it or not. And when you're old enough to say "I don't want this religion", your entire family is told to shun you, because you've "abandonned" Jehovah and His Borganization.
[the article goes on to talk about Moses, Joshua, Abraham, Ruth and Jesus.......now here's a real good one on page 6:
"The account relating the beginning of Christianity is more explicit about the reasons why Jesus' disciples abandoned their ancestors' religion............All had to abandon either Judaism or the worship of various pagan gods........to please God, it was necessary to follow a new form of worship, that of Christianity."
To me, this is a real stretch of what actually happened. Jesus certainly never intended to start a new religion, He simply wanted His people to return to real values and for the leaders of Judaism to quit "binding heavy loads upon [their] shoulders." In the first half of the first century CE, it would have been almost impossible to differentiate between Christians and Jews save that of the identity of the Messiah. First century Christians ideas were still very much influenced by their religion of Judaism and they still practiced circumcision, all their Festivals, many apparently still observed the Sabbath and the Ten Commandments. Paul was the one who really started the division between Judaism and Christianity, not Jesus.
Now that marijuana has been decriminalized in Canada, I think we should get some and send it to the GB in New York so they can continue to come up with even more insane articles............