Found this posting on a newsgroup (talk.origins). Very long, but well written!
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&selm=m6e4a0hh75s10cebnbk96mc2r97j81obi2%404ax.com
(You have to copy and paste the URL into your browser. Can't click on it because of the ampersand URL bug on JWD.)
Here's the text from the posting:
I wrote up my own personal summary of JW theology where the meaning of
life, why we exist, how we got here, etc, is concerned. Despite it's
rather irreverant tone, this is really does cover the basic reasoning
behind the Witnesses interpretation of the Bible. It's what I used to
think of as The Truth but now think of as The Story.... Here it is...
A long long long long, painfully long, very very dreadfully long long
time ago (did I mention it was a long time ago?) there was nothing.
Nothing that is, except for an all-powerful deity who was not created,
never had a beginning and would never have an end. There was no time,
so space. Those things hadn't been created yet. It wouldn't make
sense to ask where this deity was or how long he had been there or how
he got there. The story doesn't go back that far. He was, however,
there for a very very very very long time. Really really long, OK?
OK. Eventually he decided that just hanging around doing nothing was
getting old and he decided to create something. So, he created a son.
Another creature like himself. How did he do this? No idea. But, he
did. The two of them, father and son, hung around in whatever
alternate dimension they inhabit (we call it heaven) and decided to do
something with their time. They decided to create more stuff. Lots
of it. Before they created the Universe or the Earth or anything like
that, they created more beings like themselves. We call them angels
now (or demons, those are just angels who went bad). They worked as a
team. The father did the design work, the son the construction.
Their creative skill in working together made Lennon and McCartney
look like rank amateurs. Between them, they populated an entire
dimension and then set out to create a new one. This would be the
material dimension, a.k.a. The Universe.
This Universe they created was (and is) unimaginably vast. It is so
incredibly huge that no human mind could possibly comprehend it. If
the entire thing we're shrunk down to a size that would fill the
largest football stadium in the world, the entire galaxy we live in
would still be an invisible subatomic dot. The situation wouldn't be
helped much even if you scaled the Universe up to a model the size of
our entire planet. Our galaxy, our planet, our Sun, would still be
microscopic and invisible. The Universe, to put it simply, is just
too large for us to wrap our minds around. No matter how far or deep
you look into it, you find there is more of it there. We are very,
very tiny and this father and son duo made the whole thing from
scratch.
After spending a few billion years fashioning the rest of the Universe
and hanging out with all the angels, father and son decided to take
all this experience they had gained in creating things and put it to
use in creating a perfect planet. So, not only did they build this
massive Universe thing, but apparently they did so for only one real
reason, as a container for the Earth and the Earth itself was created
simply as a container for their number one, top of the charts, no
holds barred best creation ever? Man. They pretty much just let the
rest of the Universe do it's own thing while they concentrated their
efforts here and made us. This happened in 4026 BCE or about 6029
years ago as of this writing in 2004 CE.
Man was created after all the animals as the culmination of the life
on this planet. He was created in a specific place, The Garden of
Eden, and after a little complaining was given a mate so that unlike
God himself (who reproduces asexually, father and son, no mother) Man
could create copies of himself without wielding Godlike power. So,
there we had Man and Woman. We don't know what their original
pronunciations of their names were, but we call them Adam and Eve.
The billions of years that came before this event, the entire
Universe, the angels, all of it, were prelude to this moment. The
angels cheered when they witnessed the birth of mankind. These tiny,
insignificant, frail beings inhabiting a miniscule portion of the
crust of an invisibly tiny planet were, without a doubt, the best
thing ever, to be envied and admired. However, within an eye blink,
Man screwed the whole thing up.
It wouldn't be fair to say it was entirely the fault of Adam and Eve
that they messed things up. They had a little help. See, the
conditions under which they were created were perfect, but there was a
catch. The perfection only lasted so long as they stuck to their role
in life, which was to listen to whatever God told them to do. They
were given free will, but were expected to only exercise it to
willingly do what they were told. They weren't pre-programmed. They
could obey or disobey and God figured that was the only way for the
obedience to really mean anything. It had to be a choice. I mean,
what's the point of obedience if it's not by choice?
This concept of free will was not only given to our ancient parents,
Adam and Eve, but was also given to all those spirit creatures that
were created before Man and one of them, a particularly good-looking
and smart one the Bible says, decided to exercise his free will to
trick the first humans. He has gone by a lot of names, but we'll just
call him Satan.
Despite what you may have heard, Satan wasn't a red-horned devil with
a pitchfork. Hell, he wasn't even created evil. He was one of the
smartest and handsomest angels around and got just a bit too full of
himself. His big problem? Arrogance. He figured that he could get
humans to turn against God and in so doing could show that it wasn't
really God's creation to run. Oh sure, maybe God did the creating and
oh sure, maybe he was the biggest and the strongest, but Satan had the
idea that people should be able to do what they want, govern
themselves, run their own show. He said so to Eve, in so many words,
telling her that she should eat some fruit from the tree and become
like God, knowing good and bad. Satan was a smarty pants, realizing
that a naïve new human wouldn't stop and wonder why a snake was
talking to her and she fell for the deal, hook line and sinker.
She was tricked, so maybe God should have gone easy on her, but he
figured that she wouldn't have fallen for the trick if she wasn't
feeling rebellious in the first place so he didn't let her off the
hook for it. Adam, well, he wasn't tricked at all. He was just
whipped. This was the only woman for him and if she was going to do
something, he was going to follow (Adam, inadvertently, set the
example for billions of men since, way to go dude...).
At this point in the story, a quandary arises. Should God, having set
the stage for the rebellion by providing a) free will and b)
temptation, forgive the two transgressors? Should he wipe them out?
Whatever should he do? Taking the long-term approach, God decided to
look at the big picture. He figured it like this. If he destroyed
the troublemakers, he wouldn't have answered the question that was
raised (namely, should the creation be self-governing or should God
run the whole thing) and other sentient beings with free will that he
had created (i.e. - angels, or any new humans he created to replace
the first ones) would simply raise the issue again. Rebellion upon
rebellion would ensue. Well then, thought God, I will settle this for
once and for all right now before I go any further with this whole
creation thing and his solution was novel, to say the least.
God's solution to the problem was to let go of the reins, sort of. He
altered Adam and Eve's genes so they wouldn't be "perfect" anymore.
From now on, they would grow old and die and could make all the
mistakes they wanted, but their life was going to pretty much suck.
No more paradise, childbearing pain, sweat, toil, cursed land, you
name it. If they wanted to go it alone, they were going to GO IT
ALONE. No breaks for humans from here on out, they had to prove that
they could manage themselves. On top of that, Satan was basically
given free reign to mess with everybody and to get them to follow him
instead of God. It was this set of initial conditions that laid the
groundwork for the world we live in. Pain, death, suffering, war,
disease, you name it, it all stems from this sort of universal court
case. We all live and die and toil and suffer to answer the question
of whether or not we should be self-governing or whether we should
submit to the rule of God. There are some who would ask if this is
actually fair since the issue raised by Satan wasn't "Can imperfect,
flawed people manage without God?" but was actually an issue for the
original perfect ones, but this is The Story and it's what happened so
those people can just shut up.
Right after all this, God said something to Eve and the Snake that
later became interpreted as a prophecy. In talking to the snake he
said:
"So the LORD God said to the serpent, "Because you have done this,
"Cursed are you above all the livestock
and all the wild animals!
You will crawl on your belly
and you will eat dust
all the days of your life.
15 And I will put enmity
between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and hers;
he will crush your head,
and you will strike his heel."" - Genesis 3:14-15, NIV
A cursory read of this scripture might give you the impression that is
was basically saying serpents would slither on the ground and eat dust
and that they would forever after bite people on the heels, but get
their heads crushed in the process. This is a perfectly reasonable
way to interpret this and other than the fact that snakes don't
actually eat dust is reasonably true, but according to The Story it
meant something more. It meant that a Son of Eve would someday arise
who would destroy the Original Serpent himself, Satan. This was the
very first prophecy in the Bible and pointed to a Messiah who was due
to arrive someday to set this whole mess straight.
About the Bible? It figures into The Story too (obviously), but not
for a little while yet because it wasn't written for a few thousand
years. See, after all of these events transpired, Man was bummed, the
Garden of Eden was closed down and life went on. People made babies
and suffered and lots of interesting things started to happen. Angels
saw that chicks were hot and decided to come down and get a little
action, had monstrous babies and got God all riled up. People made
lots of bad decisions. It seems that free will lead to a lot of
murder and theft and generally bad stuff happening. God had seen
enough and decided he needed to get control of the place again and so
he found the one family of folks that were following his will and told
them he was going to kill everybody else in a flood. They made a big
boat, loaded up 2 (or 7) of all the animals and made it through after
a year spent in their ship, the Ark. The family consisted of Noah and
his kids and their wives.
After The Flood, there was really nobody around. Every living thing
and every person except the 8 people and as many animals as would fit
in the ark was dead. That was it. This major extinction event
occurred in 2370 BCE, or about 4,373 years ago. God felt bad about it
and decided he wouldn't do that again (at least not via a flood) and
he made rainbows happen so we would always remember that. There were
no rainbows before 2370 BCE. Also, before the flood, people didn't
kill animals and neither did animals. It was all a big herbivorous
world. Tigers stalked bananas. Spiders built webs to capture stray
pieces of grain that blew through the air. After The Flood God
decided that people could eat animals and apparently managed to do so
without stopping those animals from repopulating their demolished
populations throughout the world. I personally wonder about the logic
of opening up hunting season when animals are at their most
endangered, but that's what happened and who I am to argue with it?
Obviously the entire planet was successfully repopulated in the
4300-odd years since so I guess it worked out.
Not too terribly long after this all happened, god became friends with
a human named Abraham. He liked him and made him a promise, he
promised to bless his offspring. His child, Isaac and his grandkid
Jacob were the basis for the nation known as Israel and a people known
as the Jews. They were special, God picked them out and was quite
willing to kill anybody who got in their way, but he was also willing
to punish them whenever they did anything wrong. God killed a lot of
people back then because they weren't using their free will as he
intended. He even went so far as to punish them by letting them all
get enslaved by the Egyptians where they moaned and gnashed their
teeth and waited for a leader to set them free. That leader came
along and his name was Moses and he gave Charlton Heston one heck of a
role to play a few thousand years later. After leading the Israelites
to freedom he was instructed by God to write some books. Today we
know them as Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy,
a.k.a. the Pentateuch, a.k.a. the Torah, a.k.a. the first five books
of the Bible.
That was the time that God told all the people what was what for the
first time. That was when he let them know how they were created,
what this whole "court case" was about, why the Jews were special and
all the basic stuff that laid the foundation for the other 61 books of
the Bible. This writing was done between 1513 and 1473 BCE in a 40
year burst of literary activity, finished approximately 3477 years
ago. For the first time ever, 2,552 years after putting human beings
on this planet and 897 years after he wiped almost all of them out,
God had told them why he did it and what it was all about. Better
late than never.
As Steve Miller so aptly pointed out, "time keeps on slippin' into the
future" and that is indeed what happened. The trials and tribulations
of the ancient Israelites could fill a book (and have, it's called the
Bible, or at least the Old Testament/Hebrew Scriptures part) but the
history of the next 1473 years of human history boils down to this:
people are stupid, God is disappointed. Time for the Messiah.
This is one of the harder parts of The Story to wrap your brain
around, but it goes a little something like this. What Adam gave up
way back when he sinned was the last bit of human perfection. He had
been perfect and then he wasn't. No perfect person had lived since.
So, how could a person make up for what Adam had lost? A perfect
person needed to live and die while staying perfect the whole time.
Why? That's where the logic breaks down a bit but it seems to have
something to do with cosmic scales of balance and God's sense of
justice. The explanation is, Adam sinned and through him sin entered
into the world and death through sin. The only way to reverse this
process is by the sacrifice of a perfect human life. Hence, the need
for a Ransom Sacrifice and a Messiah to set it all straight again.
Apparently correcting the imperfection introduced into the DNA of the
species doesn't fix the problem, somebody perfect has to die to really
make it all work.
The Messiah was a guy named Jesus, but he wasn't just any guy. He was
God's Son, the Firstborn of All Creation, the Masterworker. He was
the other half of the creative duo. There weren't any perfect people
around anymore and God apparently didn't want to just create one. For
some reason, he decided to have his own Son be the one to "balance the
scales". (Yes, I know that most Christian religions consider Jesus as
actually having been God himself since they accept the Trinity and
all. I told you there were variations in this version of The Story.
This is one of them.) So, he transformed him from a spirit being into
a baby in a womb. The baby was born and grew and lived a perfect
life, taught people all sorts of wonderful things, performed miracles,
healed the sick and was ruthlessly killed by heartless Romans on
charges of sedition just as he was getting started. We start
reckoning our time from when Jesus was born where I live so his birth
was 2004 years ago and his death was 33 years after that.
In the time since, the world has grown into a terribly troubling
place. The religion started by Jesus when he was here (ok, started a
few years after he left, but close enough) has taken quite a few
twists and turns. His message of peace has been the fundamental force
behind countless wars and atrocities, Bibles have been burned, as have
people and cities. People have been born and died, have fought in
wars and have basically suffered to further this whole court case
God's got going on. He promises that someday he will wipe all the bad
people out, end sickness and pain and rule the Earth again. Eden will
return. Pollution will go away. Perfection will return. All the
people who suffered and died over the years will be resurrected.
Jesus will be King and will rule along with his dad, Jehovah and a
bunch of good people who have gone to heaven to be angels of their
own. There will be much rejoicing. This will happen any day now and
the criteria for being counted among the good ones remains the same as
ever. You must have your free will and deal with the temptations of
Satan and still chose to follow God.
Ask a question and The Story answers it. Why do we live? God created
us to serve him. Why we die? Adam sinned and passed death on to us.
Why there is suffering and pain? Adam messed us up and Satan
capitalized on it so life is pain. Is there a long-term hope for the
future? Of course, God sent a Messiah to save you from this mess.
The answers to all the cosmic questions about life, the universe and
everything are summed up in a few pages by The Story. This is a
summary of what happened, the true history of mankind, or at least
this is the version of it I was taught and for some reason, I just
don't think it holds water anymore. What do you think?