humbled

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Posts by humbled

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  123

  Imagine A World Where Being "Gay" The Norm & Being "Straight" Would Be The Minority!

  by Dis-Member in

  1. social
  2. entertainment

  imagine a world where being "gay" the norm & being "straight" would be the minority!

  [short film].. .

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnojgdw0gpi.

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  humbled

  Good morning, RubbyDubby!
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  137

  3 years of study, Just found out!

  by impala63rag in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  hello friends, .

  i would like some advice from those that are inpartial, and are familiar with the teachings of jw.

  i studied with a wonderful jw couple weekly for 3 years.

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  humbled

  You will not have a close relationship with God in this religion.
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  2596

  The Pastor of my Old Church Tried to Re-Convert Me Yesterday

  by cofty in

  1. jw
  2. experiences

  yesterday evening my wife and i were invited to friends house for new year's eve.

  we met them when i was a christian and we have kept in touch.

  they had a few other friends there as well, including the new church pastor and his wife.

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  humbled

  Apog,

  I t is obvious from this and other threads of the past that no one not even God can tell a Christian how to be a Christian. History bears this out as well.

  Your comments about the varied ways to understand bible verses underscores the fact that the bible- God hung us out to dry by the inscrutability of holy scriptures. Or perhaps the text that tells us about God was intended to be a rorschach test?

  If the scriptures are meant to be that subjective then Tammy's view of them is equal to St. Thomas Aquinas.

  If that is true, then whether the scriptures exist or not hardly figure. (Which is only fair considering the number of Christians throughout history who could not read a bible if they could get one.)

  If Jesus the carpenter lived and taught the poor the good news about the love of God "who made the rain to fall on the righteous and the unrighteous" it is small wonder that he called out finally: "My God, my God, why have you foresaken me?"

  If I try to live according to the precepts Jesus taught, I will say along with him "My God why have you foresaken us" what is wrong with that?
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  2596

  The Pastor of my Old Church Tried to Re-Convert Me Yesterday

  by cofty in

  1. jw
  2. experiences

  yesterday evening my wife and i were invited to friends house for new year's eve.

  we met them when i was a christian and we have kept in touch.

  they had a few other friends there as well, including the new church pastor and his wife.

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  humbled

  But how just and loving is the bible god to see people savaged by nature or man, people who have never heard of his New Deal of Salvation through Jesus? A grave problem for me in believing in the bible God, Apog, is that salvation-as-taught-in-the-churches renders ignorant sufferers as the damned. And they suffer so much.

  This economy of salvation is not just or loving.

  The words are lovely in Isaiah 55--if applied to the gritty love that Jesus is said to have taught as the "higher way". But as a call to excuse what is ongoing carnage on the earth? Then I do not believe the bible is the word of a god of love.

  The complaint I have is as much with the scriptures themselves as the idea of a powerful, loving god.
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  2596

  The Pastor of my Old Church Tried to Re-Convert Me Yesterday

  by cofty in

  1. jw
  2. experiences

  yesterday evening my wife and i were invited to friends house for new year's eve.

  we met them when i was a christian and we have kept in touch.

  they had a few other friends there as well, including the new church pastor and his wife.

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  humbled

  If the thread has helped me, it has been in this way:

  It forced me to critically examine thoughts that had long been submerged in my mind:

  What will happen if I question the Bible God?

  Will I have to then deny the benefits I have received from the teachings of Jesus?

  Does it mean that I must deny any thing/principle/force that may exist if I do not believe the God of Christian Theism exists?

  The answers are mine to deal with. There is mystery. I do not believe the God I was told of exists.

  What is the loss? What can I do about it?

  The loss of the Bible god and the retaining of Jesus loses me nothing. I and everyone else will die some day. The only change is I do not have to tell others they are subject to doom if they are not saved. But then I do not have to tell others they have a heaven to receive them and wipe their tears away. However, no one is the loser if I am wrong, for then they will have a pleasant surprise.

  The benefit of having only love and justice as the best of Jesus' teachings, is the need to implement these in more practical ways. And really that is and was the most important thing anyway.

  This thread will continue to reverberate for me. I almost would say it has been life changing. Not because I had not ever thought of these things. I just would not let myself openly deal with them. There has been healing from a corrupt religion and exploration of what remains to guide my steps going forward.

  A Post script:

  As for how cofty has moderated his thread--Though he is some years my junior he has reminded me of my father. My father came up through the ranks starting in WWII as a private, a sargeant in the Korean conflict and then went to officer candidate school. He became disillusioned with army politics and the callous abuse of young men in the ranks during Vietnam. I heard a soldier say of him."Capt. Dolan is tough but he's fair."

  Cofty's trajectory through the JWs and Church (seems to have) put him through some of the same. He comes off as a bit crusty. But in my estimation also: cofty is tough but fair.

  And I say it even though I have winced at his rough handling of fellow posters. I was one of my father's 9 children and we were a wild lot at times. He didn't often flatter our feelings with long explanations when he had to deal with us. We had to think about it. But he wasn't above conceding an honest point when it came up.

  And it's been a hard thing to press our thoughts --not our feelings or what we were taught--- from the question the thread opened with. It's natural to take up a defensive stance after a hard hit. But the topic is a hard one. Smack smack smack! a lot of loosely held beliefs shattered (for me) that had cracks in them anyway.

  No matter where our journey of faith ends, after participating in this discussion, we'll know that we walked through some fire to get there. And that's never bad.

  Maeve
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  2596

  The Pastor of my Old Church Tried to Re-Convert Me Yesterday

  by cofty in

  1. jw
  2. experiences

  yesterday evening my wife and i were invited to friends house for new year's eve.

  we met them when i was a christian and we have kept in touch.

  they had a few other friends there as well, including the new church pastor and his wife.

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  humbled

  Edited:

  NO SCORE, Flamegrilled!

  What are you really about?

  Cofty made that reasonable comment on another thread on prayer.

  I saluted that.
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  2596

  The Pastor of my Old Church Tried to Re-Convert Me Yesterday

  by cofty in

  1. jw
  2. experiences

  yesterday evening my wife and i were invited to friends house for new year's eve.

  we met them when i was a christian and we have kept in touch.

  they had a few other friends there as well, including the new church pastor and his wife.

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  humbled

  Edit
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  17

  Dream or Nightmare?

  by compound complex in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  i have reached a frontier dreamt about as a child -- the outer reaches of a vast realm under stars.. though an imaginative and inquisitive lad, my forward-looking mind and open heart could never have conjured up this fabulous, this infinite unreality into which i have been catapulted.

  what may appear a distortion of my former reality i tentatively accept as a cosmic tableau that threatens both to fascinate and crush my frail, puny body and spirit.

  i am unable to comprehend what i gaze upon with frightened, delicious terror.. my recent escape from lunaria was of sheer necessity: my people have been overtaken by a scorpion race of alien malefactors whose intent toward us was not one of beneficient intervention but that of conquest.

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  humbled

  Darn it, Coco! Why'd ya have to remind me of my dirty dishes!

  O, what a mood you make!

  I really should be doing them. But reading this has been much more fun.

  Good night, Coco.
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  5

  Ponder daily these 6 things

  by Terry in

  1. watchtower
  2. child-abuse

  6 things we probably need to wrestle with and keep before our mind to challenge our view of true and false, good and bad, right and wrong.. .

  1. it boggles the mind.

  most religions are smart enough to keep their doctrines out of the area of objective disproof.. the watchtower society obsessive date-setting has put it all to the test over and over again.. how do they get away with it?.

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  humbled

  I was baptized in 1985. I was well in to my JW life before I heard about 1975. I heard about it from a householder in the door-to-door work. It was hard to find any info on it.

  What a rotten product--the JW thing.

  And I bought it for 22 years! And worse: I tried to sell it to others.
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  39

  Allow Me My Dreams

  by compound complex in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  today, today, as with all those new days before, .

  i awoke from the sweet dreams of nocturnal .

  flights of fancy, and that they should take .

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  humbled

  Absolutely, Coco. Absolutely.

  Free to feel completely. Eyes open in the morning and you enter into the beauty of each day without guilt.