spirituk:
Plenty of rebuttals but I will add my take as a fellow outsider and relate it to my own religious experiences.
Yes, they do look happy and blissful. They boast about having one faith worldwide as opposed to all those different churches disagreeing about every little piece of doctrine. They boast about how a witness family can find themselves alone in a distant location and instantly call upon help of a brother in the faith for help thanks to the worldwide brotherhood. They truly study their Bible more than I am use to seeing in other churches. They seem to take a more intellectual approach to the Bible than most churches which usually caters to the emotional aspect of humanity. They even get some things right that most churches get wrong, like Christmas and birthdays.
Trust me, I was nearly convinced myself but I was still skeptical because I noticed some parallels between them and my old IFB church that I had personally debunked long before I married my witness wife and began attending their meetings.
- They believe that they are the only true church teaching the only true teachings and having the only correct interpretation of the Bible.
- They each believe that their preferred Bible is the most accurate translation.
- They each have a laundry list of rules that seem ever expanding that their adherents must follow in order to have the right standing with God.
- They each have come out with contradictory rules that are best interpreted as exceptions to the rules but only for certain people.
- They each have had to rescind old rules or teachings that have been proven wrong beyond all reasonable doubt.
- They each outlaw seemingly innocous things such as the smurfs, the telly tubbies, Captian Planet, Super Why, and Sparlock.
The result is that many adherrents either get frustrated and depressed trying to follow all the rules in order to please God (like I did when I was an IFB) or you have people basically calling out specs in others while ignoring beams in themselves.
Furthermore, the main advantages that they have can be found in varying degress in other churches or even secular groups so in the end I saw no benefit to being a witness except to end up living like my wife. She lives a double life big time but not the kind of double life most religious people live (like smoking or drinking on the sly for example). No, she is not allowed to share with her religious friends that she sees little wrong with celebrating most holidays or birthdays and cannot share what college she is attending to earn her master's degree. How silly is that?
