Well, since most people don't say something unless they have some sort of outcome in mind, I'm wondering if you can clarify your intended outcome for me
I'm not a motivational speaker. I'm not selling a book. I'm not teaching a class. I'm not presenting myself as somebody of authority who must be heard and followed. I'm just a dusty old fart howling at the moon. Do I expect the moon to blink? Nah.
You are openly hostile to the idea that intelligent, educated individuals, after a careful examination of existing materials on the subject, continue to believe in the bible and/or God. In your personal experience this is tantamount to being purposely blind to the facts since after your own careful study of the same materials you came to a different conclusion.
I don't think I'm hostile to ideas good or bad. I'm taken aback by deliberate behavior which purports to be one thing; but, is in fact another. JW's, for instance, behave a certain way. They will explain why. But, the abberrent psychology of it is distastefully manipulative and destructive. I was up to my eyelids in that mucky swamp of self-deception once. It scares me. Why could I not see it? How could I be so blind? How could I be so willfully obtuse? That is what informs my "hostile" panic at purposefully blind people. I see MYSELF as I was and I wonder how anybody could have got through to me.
Tie that to the fact that you believe that coming to any conclusion but yours on the matter is actually dangerous to people and I have to guess that you are frustrated, irritated, and yet still concerned for people who you see making a harmful decision on all things divine.
Dangerous is a matter of results, isn't it?
What has been the result of JW belief in the lives of thousands (if not millions?) Further, what is the result of belief world wide by convinced, convicted fundamentalists who won't budge a millimeter from their rigid view of God's will? That is dangerously close to dangerous, wouldn't you say?
The only intended outcome that I can see is that you hope that, by making believers feel stupid in light of your advanced knowledge and wisdom, they will abandon their beliefs and be shamed to their senses. Something like a rude rescue. LOL Is this the case?
J
If by "stupid" you mean: in a state of mental numbness, I'd say you were pretty close to accurate that I feel strongly about willful intransigence. But, my "advanced knowledge" doesn't represent a great mind on my part or a monster intellect. No, It represents the way a drowning man clutches at the life preserver. I seek facts and cling to them. I'm hyper-aware of the shades of nuance words represent when they lie on the printed page to persuade others. I'm wary of the serpent's tooth of rhetoric in religious argumentation. I often become nauseous at the utter lack of substantive bedrock in my previously held belief system when I think back on it. I WAS SO DAMNED SURE it was truth. It wasn't truth at all. How was I fooled like that? The only answer I can come up with isn't very satisfying: I was emotionally needy of the structure of the JW's as a group of people WHO INCLUDED me in their body. It was emotionally satisfying. Therefore, I whored out my mind to give my needy emotional emptiness the soothing glow of belonging.
As a former mental whore I am sullied. There is no end of self hate. I have no respect for the me (of former years) who allowed his mind to serve his emotional habit by prostituting it in deliberately ignorning the warning signs that I was in a cult.
Any hostility you discover in my passions here is me trying to slap sense into the former (me) reaching back through time (as it were) in futile blows. This forum is an effigy, a simulacrum of therapy in that effort.
I am superior only to pond scum.
Terry
