Hey holly,
Just to respond to a few things you said....
the jws use the bible as their yardstick - whether they interpret right or wrongly, they use the bible.
The Bible can be interpreted rightly or wrongly to support almost anything. Heck, if you believe the Bible itself, it was interpreted correctly to support genocide of the Canaanites by its first followers.
the bible calls us to be like jesus - they follow that to the letter from what i can see.
The Witnesses are not like how the Bible describes Jesus. Read the gospel accounts and you get the picture of a pretty open-hearted guy, trying to teach people love and acceptance. The Witnesses have precious little of either of those.
the blood issue - big issue - it does say abstain from blood - again that could be interpretation and they may be wrong. they may however be right.
You shouldn't base life decisions on the remote possibility that someone may be right. I believe in a Pink Unicorn on Pluto, and although I may be wrong about it, I may be right, so I follow his instructions just in case. See how crazy it sounds? Believe things that stand up to strong critical analysis. Doing something superstitious, "just to be on the safe side," actually puts you in a very dangerous situation by causing you to act in ways you don't fully understand. (C.f. Stevie Wonder, "When you believe in things that you don't understand / You just suffer / Superstition ain't the way." )
some one has the truth
Whoa, whoa, whoa. BIG assumption there. Check your premises. Seriously. Think about this one. There are many levels of assumption that are happening here. You're assuming there is such a thing as "religious truth" to begin with, then secondly, that it can be known by humans in our present state. You're also making huge assumptions as to what the content of such "truth" would be (for example, that the "end" is coming).
Think about this, holly. When human knowledge advances, people all over the world receive and accept the new knowledge because it makes sense and is beneficial. So, for example, when we learned that the earth was, in fact, not the center of the universe as once believed, although there was some initial resistance to the idea, in the end people accepted it because it was clearly in line with the facts and it enabled us to understand the universe much more accurately. Only nut-cases take issue with the idea now.
How about religious ideas? How do they stack up? For some reason, when some group comes out with a new book on How To Know God, it doesn't send shockwaves through the world. Why? Because invariably, the message is not convincing, not useful, and not clearly true to the majority of people.
Educated people all believe pretty much the same thing with regard to the physical universe. But not all educated people believe the same thing with regard to religious ideas. The reason is that there is not one clearly satisfying answer. If there were, people would adopt it, and pretty soon just about everybody would believe it. If you believe that six million people on the face of the earth have that "truth," and the rest of us are just to stupid or bull-headed to accept it, I think you have a skewed concept of humanity. I for one would gladly accept any new concept if I found it useful, reasonable, and satisfying.
Just some food for thought. Don't drink the Kool-Aid just yet. Keep that thinking cap on. :-)
SNG
