when i was a bible fundamentalist jehovah's witness it was easy for me to dismiss homosexuality as a sin and move onto the next, more interesting, topic.
it is much more complicated than that for me at this point in my life.. i think about it this way:.
what if i, a heterosexual, were raised in a community where everybody was homosexual and heterosexuality had a harsh taboo attached to it.
It sounds, NC, sort of like homeopathic Christianity. (ie. very dilute).
I myself have struggled with these feelings (although not gay myself) for quite awhile.
Have you ever noticed how people in here make it a point to establish their heterosexuality when posting on a subject of homosexuality? If homosexuality is not an issue, why the need for the qualification?
back to the barbie.
when i was a bible fundamentalist jehovah's witness it was easy for me to dismiss homosexuality as a sin and move onto the next, more interesting, topic.
it is much more complicated than that for me at this point in my life.. i think about it this way:.
what if i, a heterosexual, were raised in a community where everybody was homosexual and heterosexuality had a harsh taboo attached to it.
I understand your point, Quendi, and respect your right to believe what you believe. People not only choose what they will believe, they realise that they are doing so, and what can be more important to choose to believe in God and His Word and live your life accordingly? If they are sufficiently dense, as we know some are from your own experience above, they will extrapolate the facility of choice to sexual orientation and, since to them it is a choice and not something beyond the control of the individual and since it is something that contravenes what they have chosen to interpret biblically, they will condemn it. If you dissect the dynamic you realise that they have no more right to condemn homosexuals than homosexuals have to condemn them. But it still comes down to how you want to interpret the Bible. If you choose instead to believe that the Bible is bullshit, then everything else just fades away.
Time to fire up the barbie.
when i was a bible fundamentalist jehovah's witness it was easy for me to dismiss homosexuality as a sin and move onto the next, more interesting, topic.
it is much more complicated than that for me at this point in my life.. i think about it this way:.
what if i, a heterosexual, were raised in a community where everybody was homosexual and heterosexuality had a harsh taboo attached to it.
Yes, I get your point, NC. There are gay ordained ministers, case in point. That phenomenon I ascribe to selection bias, of which virtually all Christians are guilty. There are many Christians in here who subscribe to evolution of species in its entirety, thus dismissing wholesale the creation account in Genesis, who still have no trouble staying Christian. Different flavours of Christian arrive at what they believe through how they choose to interpret the Bible. Most don't take it literally but pick and choose the parts that they want to believe in. The Witnessess and other fundies realise that to be a true Christian believer and accept the Bible as God's word you need to believe everything the Bible says is literal and you can't pick and choose what's wonky and what's not. Yes, it is screwed up, but the root of it is starting off with the assumption that the Bible is God's word.
when i was a bible fundamentalist jehovah's witness it was easy for me to dismiss homosexuality as a sin and move onto the next, more interesting, topic.
it is much more complicated than that for me at this point in my life.. i think about it this way:.
what if i, a heterosexual, were raised in a community where everybody was homosexual and heterosexuality had a harsh taboo attached to it.
Simple answer, outsmartthesystem, the Bible is bullshit.
when i was a bible fundamentalist jehovah's witness it was easy for me to dismiss homosexuality as a sin and move onto the next, more interesting, topic.
it is much more complicated than that for me at this point in my life.. i think about it this way:.
what if i, a heterosexual, were raised in a community where everybody was homosexual and heterosexuality had a harsh taboo attached to it.
But to the analogy. An accurate understanding of why people are gay is not all that complicated. All you need to do is understand a little gene theory. The genes you carry forward in your body are exact replicas (with minor changes) of the genes of your grandparents. It is a 4x4 randomised matrix of genes and their alleles which will provide the absolute blueprint of the person you are. There are always dominent and recessive characteristics of genes. The dominant disposition for sexual attraction is heterosexual attraction because it ensures the continual passing forward of the genetic code but the recessive disposition for sexual attraction is homosexual attraction. One or the other, although some people will be disposed to both. Sexual attraction is genetic. The gene for homosexuality is a non-fatal gene which has absolutely no impact on the immortality of the genetic code, so is never selected out of the genetic code. Long story short, homosexuals don't choose to be homosexual any more than they choose the sexual organs they were born with. They just are.
when i was a bible fundamentalist jehovah's witness it was easy for me to dismiss homosexuality as a sin and move onto the next, more interesting, topic.
it is much more complicated than that for me at this point in my life.. i think about it this way:.
what if i, a heterosexual, were raised in a community where everybody was homosexual and heterosexuality had a harsh taboo attached to it.
There may be small flaws in your analogy but the parallel message is powerful, and about power. People have power over you the extent to which you allow them to have it, and the closer a person is to you the more power they have over you. Your mother was making sure you could see she'd been weeping for hours so that you would know how much you were personally causing her pain. If your best friend got into the habit of using similar emotional blackmail to keep your mind in a state that most closely approximated his, you would in all likelihood push back realising and fully accepting that it could end your friendship. The exercise of power people have over one another in a true equal friendship is 50/50. Neutral and reciprocal, which over a long haul should be about right in any close relationship. It's not so easy with family members but especially so in the Watchtower world. In normal families, when a child becomes a mature, thinking adult and chooses a path in life that differs from his parents' expectations, the parents get over it. There may be arguments, screaming and crying but then the world just accomodates things and the child-parent relationship actually strengthens and matures. In the Watchtower world the child gets shunned. The exercise of power a person may want to have over you is so great that he or she will bludgen you with it. The child-parent relationship is destroyed, no matter what happens next. Good post, sab.
in the thread http://www.jehovahs-witness.net/jw/friends/213523/1/feeling-a-bit-alienated, concerned jw wrote:.
mistakes will happen.
concerned jw, if mistakes will happen, i was wondering what mistakes you feel the jw organization is currently making?
Precisely, NewChapter. Understanding something of great complexity - like life, for example - can be analogous to perceiving a stone structure. Say the Great Pyramid. From a distance it looks like a single, solid stone, four sided geometric. It appears to be simple. But when you get up close to it you can see the great multitude of carefully masoned stones that make up the exterior of the structure and then it appears not to be simple but complex. And the more you study each individually masoned stone the more you perceive that there are other deliberately shaped stones beneath it that you cannot see yet must be there else the entire structure would fail and then you begin to just clue into the realisation that the structure is not only complex, it is exceedingly, astonishingly complex, almost incomprehensibly complex. And this is just a man made structure.
What the Watchtower does is analogous to helping people perceive the single, solid stone geometric and in so doing creates an illusion of understanding without perceiving even the first level of the true complexity involved. In order to understand more accurately would require a great deal of intellectual effort. It it much easier just to perceive the pyramid as simple. This is intellectual sloth.
I was wondering myself, OUTLAW, if this was Debator again. It all felt too familiar.
in the thread http://www.jehovahs-witness.net/jw/friends/213523/1/feeling-a-bit-alienated, concerned jw wrote:.
mistakes will happen.
concerned jw, if mistakes will happen, i was wondering what mistakes you feel the jw organization is currently making?
I can only agree with you, WontLeave. To believe you have come to know the meaning of life after only a few Watchtower bible studies is intellectual sloth.
i'm very hesitant about starting this thread .
because i don't want to judge anyone or inspire hatred myself.
also, i believe i'm past the anger/bitterness thing well and truly.. so i'm asking this question not out of emotion .
Dynamite download, VM44!
I've converted the jpegs to a pdf file, downloadable here http://www.sendspace.com/file/0r8b1d
i have been a bit obsessed with listening to these secretly recorded meetings lately and have downloaded a dozen or so from various places on the internet.
this page has a few:.
http://www.jwinfoline.com/page/audio.htm.
marked (thanks!)
