"Honey! Do you have time to talk to these gentlemen about scripture?"

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What got you out? Are you shunned by your family still in? (I lost every relative JW or not and every friend I ever knew when I left.)
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I left because I did not agree with their teachings. Not all of them, but many of them. It bothered me most that they believe our spirit is just our blood. So when a person dies the spirit also dies.

I did loose much of my family, all of my friends at the time and it was a difficult time in my life. I literally had to start over.

From what I understand from my family members who are still JWs, the organization is not as rigid as they once were. They no longer divide the family. I see my JW sister a lot. We even take trips together.

I am sorry you lost your family, any chance of reconciliation???
 
I think you mean their teaching about the soul? Yes they believe we ARE souls not HAVE them. So when you die you are just a dead soul.

When I was growing up JW I was not allowed to know any of my family who is not JW, and then when I left JWs the JW ones shunned me, so I know nobody now. After 40 years of not even knowing certain aunts and uncles and cousins, it is too late now—and many have died. There is no reconciliation unless I give up the Catholic Church and go back to being a JW. Which will never happen.

The JWs go back and forth on how much you can associate with ones who leave–and the most recent understanding is that you can have no contact again. It was lenient for a while in the
90’s but it is back to being strict, in fact just recently they even made it a disfellowshipping offense to go to college! So it swings back and forth. You are lucky your family does not keep the rules so strictly. But most are not so lucky. My guess is 8 of 10 families are ruined by them.
 
Mrs. OKing, you said in response to my post,
*
Does not the catholic church have the same bias? As I understand it (correct me if I am wrong), the CC offers THE ONLY CORRECT interpretation of scripture & doctrine and everyone else is wrong.*

The CCC does not interpret each and every verse for us the way the Watchtower organization seems to do. We are free to interpret much of the Bible for ourselves, as long as our interpretation does not contradict Church Doctrine. For example, we have no doctrine about how long (in our human terms) Creation took, so a Catholic may be a “young earth” believer or an “old earth” believer, and neither contradicts doctrine.
*

I think Ravyn is right about the return to strictness in disfellowshipping. My sister is considering stopping all communication with my disfellowshipped niece - just when she needs her Mom the most. She’s about to have twins!

My poor sister - I can tell she feels awful about this. Please join me in praying that she be freed from the JWs.

Ruthie
 
I think Ravyn is right about the return to strictness in disfellowshipping. My sister is considering stopping all communication with my disfellowshipped niece - just when she needs her Mom the most. She’s about to have twins!
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My poor sister - I can tell she feels awful about this. Please join me in praying that she be freed from the JWs.
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Ruthie
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Ruthie, I will pray for your sister and your niece. Hopefully when the time comes for the twins to be born, your sister and niece will find a compromise and work things out.

Sometimes when our hands are tied, all we can do is pray.

My sister’s son is gay. I think it wrong of my sister and her husband to “kick him out of the house” the moment he turns 18. They gave him the choice to either remain a JW, or he had to find his own way in life. That kid is going to have one rough life and he will be easy prey in the homosexual world all on his own.

In all honesty, my parents did the same thing. Not just to me, but to all of my brothers and sisters. I think it is just the way of the JWs.

You and Ravyn are most likely right about the strictness of association. I do not follow the “teachings” of JWs too much anymore, even though my sister and mother are part of them. We do get in conversations of morality, end of times, the trinity and afterlife but it is never to prove sides, at least for me it is not.

I just found they get defensive, when they think I am trying to convert them, so I discuss with the attitude that I will plant a seed, and God will water and help it grow.
 
They called yesterday afternoon.
“We were having a discussion about the differences between images used in the temple and images used in church”
I did correct him saying “Actually the discussion was about graven images where you stated that God forbade them, which is obviously not true in light of what we find in the temple, on the ark, on the veil. God forbids the worshipping of images.”

It sounded like he was shifting the base.

Oh Lord, please help me during this gathering.

They are coming at 9:30am (it’s 7:15am local time as I write this).

PRAY FOR MY WIFE AND I !!!
  • to say the right things
  • to not say the wrong things
  • to not say anything if that is what is required
I think I’ll have to bring up Jesus’ divinity (the Jesus=Michael-the-Archangel idea at least) as well as where they get their bible.

Keep us in your thoughts and I’ll let y’all know how it went.

🙂

michel
 
**I just had this experience not to long ago, and myadvice to you is to never let them control the conversation.

They were coming to talk with my dad for a year before i moved back to Kentucky, and after they visited a couple times while i was here, i quickly realized their motive is conversion, make no mistake.

My dad really just appreciated how nice they were, and enjoyed the company, but he is not really that schooled academically in his Faith. He could not rebut or counter their claims.

Remember that Jesus told the truth ALWAYS even if it upset some people. Well after they gave my dad a book called “Are you a member of a cult?” and i opened it up to see a picture or depiction of a Roman Catholic Priest, I knew I had to smack the devil’s hand for putting it in my tent, otherwise he would eventually get his whole body in.

So i typed up a simple paragraph, and made a copy for each of them. I had my dad hand it to them before they left one day I work from home so i was not present during their “visit”. ]

I simply put something like this:
You all claim to the Watchtower to be a prophet of God, I submit to you the test of the prophet:

Duet 18:21-22
21 **** "If you say to yourselves, ‘How can we recognize an oracle which the LORD has spoken?’, 22 **** know that, even though a prophet speaks in the name of the LORD, if his oracle is not fulfilled or verified, it is an oracle which the LORD did not speak. The prophet has spoken it presumptuously, and you shall have no fear of him.****"

Watchtower predicts the “end times” :

1914
1925
1975

among more than a hundred other false prophecies supposedly given to them by God, and it only takes “ONCE” of being wrong for us to know they are false, no redo’s.

Therefore by the very word of the scripture that is in yours and my bible, The watchtower is a false prophet, rendering it’s teachings null and void.

What now?
Well he handed it to them in their car, and they started to drive away…the brake lights came on and they stopped…i am guessing that is when they read it…and they they left and never returned.

I hope the seed of truth i planted grows, cause they are nice fella’s and I am sure they want to love God, but they are 100% wrong on his teachings, and they were trying to denounce the Truth of God, so i simply told the truth, an undeniable truth.

They can no longer stand before God and say " well no one told me the truth"…

one of them even wrote a letter about 2 month’s later, saying they missed my dad, and would love to talk with him again, as long as “your son is not present, as he is obviously wanting to bash our faith, and not participate in a peaceful discussion of scritpture”…

I thought I had discussed scripture, and how it tied into historiacl fact 😃

hope this help, point is, always stand for the Truth.

Peace of the Lord be with you 🙂
**
 
I’ve very glad you at least got to give the card.

My Sunday morning was great.
It was just one of the fellows that showed up from the first meeting.

The first meeting finished with this fellow, Steven, saying he had some homework to do regarding statues.
In his initial meeting he stated that God forbids statues.
I had stated that God forbids the worshiping of statues.
I pointed out the 12 oxen in Solomon’s temple.
So he was going to do some study about the JW stance on statues and figure out why ‘they’ allowed statues in the temple.
He showed me in an official JW book that the stance on statues was exactly what I had stated.

Yesterday he stayed almost 2 hours.
I brought up the deity of Christ and showed in John 10 (THANK YOU ChristianRoots).
There was more that we covered in this regard.
The only scriptural rebuttal he showed was regarding the word ‘begat’ in reference to Jesus (can’t remember the book/chapter/verse) and in Proverbs 8:22.
I didn’t have a response for what he showed in Proverbs and told him that I would have to study it to be able to discuss it further.
Yesterday afternoon I went back to Proverbs 8 and realized that this was actually about the personification of “Wisdom”, not really Jesus.
If anyone has any speaking points about Proverbs 8 PLEASE SHARE!! 🙂

I left him with the following thought.
He wouldn’t out-and-out state that the early church fell into a complete apostasy. He pointed to scripture that talked about wolves and I stated that I agree with scripture and that this doesn’t point to a complete apostasy.
Several times he pointed out, referencing his bible, that he trusts the Word of God.
I pointed out that he is cherry picking what he believes from the early church.
I mentioned that the Council of Nicaea clarified the teaching on the trinity. This is something that he believes is a wrong teaching.
I pointed out that the new testament canon wasn’t defined until 382.
Why would he trust a church that got the basic definition of God SO wrong to tell him what the Word of God actually was (the canon). I told him that he couldn’t be sure that his bible had the right books.

I got his email!!!

He wanted me to send him scripture for my claims that their is one church that Christ founded and that it is visible, authoritative, and apostolic.

I can’t even remember all of what was said in this two hours.
I’ll share more later.

Know that the talk was very charitable.
I again commended him on doing what he though was following God.

THANK YOU ALL FOR YOUR CONTINUED PRAYERS!!!

michel
 
cazayoux said:
I’ve very glad you at least got to give the card.

My Sunday morning was great.
It was just one of the fellows that showed up from the first meeting.

The first meeting finished with this fellow, Steven, saying he had some homework to do regarding statues.
In his initial meeting he stated that God forbids statues.
I had stated that God forbids the worshiping of statues.
I pointed out the 12 oxen in Solomon’s temple.
So he was going to do some study about the JW stance on statues and figure out why ‘they’ allowed statues in the temple.
He showed me in an official JW book that the stance on statues was exactly what I had stated.

Yesterday he stayed almost 2 hours.
I brought up the deity of Christ and showed in John 10 (THANK YOU ChristianRoots).
There was more that we covered in this regard.
The only scriptural rebuttal he showed was regarding the word ‘begat’ in reference to Jesus (can’t remember the book/chapter/verse) and in Proverbs 8:22.
I didn’t have a response for what he showed in Proverbs and told him that I would have to study it to be able to discuss it further.
Yesterday afternoon I went back to Proverbs 8 and realized that this was actually about the personification of “Wisdom”, not really Jesus.
If anyone has any speaking points about Proverbs 8 PLEASE SHARE!! 🙂

I left him with the following thought.
He wouldn’t out-and-out state that the early church fell into a complete apostasy. He pointed to scripture that talked about wolves and I stated that I agree with scripture and that this doesn’t point to a complete apostasy.
Several times he pointed out, referencing his bible, that he trusts the Word of God.
I pointed out that he is cherry picking what he believes from the early church.
I mentioned that the Council of Nicaea clarified the teaching on the trinity. This is something that he believes is a wrong teaching.
I pointed out that the new testament canon wasn’t defined until 382.
Why would he trust a church that got the basic definition of God SO wrong to tell him what the Word of God actually was (the canon). I told him that he couldn’t be sure that his bible had the right books.

I got his email!!!

He wanted me to send him scripture for my claims that their is one church that Christ founded and that it is visible, authoritative, and apostolic.

I can’t even remember all of what was said in this two hours.
I’ll share more later.

Know that the talk was very charitable.
I again commended him on doing what he though was following God.

THANK YOU ALL FOR YOUR CONTINUED PRAYERS!!!

michel
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Thank you for this update, Michel. You have engaged in this “adventure” with such charity. :tiphat:
 
I sent an email yesterday.
I had posted in another thread about a Proverbs passage he gave me to prove that Jesus was not God.
I’ll paste my email below.
Steven !
Code: 
Again, I've enjoyed the discussions.
I owe you discussion on Proverbs.
I also wanted to bring up some history.
Proverbs 8:22
Code: 
In our last discussion you brought up Proverbs 8:22.
The LORD created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of old. (RSV = Revised Standard Version)

You attempted to lead me, or actually mislead me, to believe that this text was a reference to Jesus.
You seem like a very nice man, who wishes to follow God.  I choose to believe that it was not your intention to be deceiving by saying this verse was in reference to Jesus, but that you are merely passing on what you have been taught.
The logic presented was that since Jesus was created, at the point before his creation, God was without Jesus, and therefore Jesus is not the same as the almighty God.

I  backed up and read the entire proverb.
It would not be correct to equate all, if any, of the words of Proverb 8 where Wisdom = Jesus, but to make a point, let's consider it.
You use this text to posit that this shows that God created Jesus, so there was a point that there was God without Jesus.
However, let's apply the same logic to the face of the scriptural text.

… and I would truly like to get an answer from you for this question ...
**
Do you read Proverb 8 to say that there was actually a point that God was without Wisdom?**
Code: 
If you say that God always had Wisdom, then you might agree that the language in Proverbs 8 regarding the creation of Wisdom, even if an allegory of Jesus, cannot in any way be a prooftext that there was a point at which God existed without Jesus.

If you say that there was a time where almighty God did not have Wisdom, I'm not sure we go from here since that God would be less than almighty.
Council of Nicaea (325) and Council of Constantinople (382)
Pre-325 showed misunderstandings in the nature of God himself (Arianism) where the nature of Christ was misunderstood.
The heresy of Arianism did not, however, teach the same theology that is taught by Jehovah’s Witnesses.
The council in 325 answered the question at hand and clarified the teaching regarding the nature of God.
The trinity is properly defined.
The Jehovah’s Witness of today will not agree with the Christian church that defined the trinity.
While you don’t want to say the church was in apostacy by this time, I believe this is actually what you think.
At the very least, you stated that the teaching of that council was not correct.

Pre-382 showed much disagreement regarding which Christian writings were inspired and which were not.
Some books that made it into the canon were hotly contested.
Some books that didn’t make it into the canon, were thought by many to be inspired.
There was much argument and discussion about this.
The council in 382 is where the matter was first settled and list of Christian writings was given and these books were defined as ‘inspired scripture’.
Not that other books weren’t useful or good, but they just weren’t to be considered inspired.
The Jehovah’s Witness trusts his bible as the inerrant Word of God.
You stated that there is no higher authority.
THAT is the trust you put in those men in 382 (in tradition actually) to tell you what writings make up the Word of God.
I tell you that these were men, but they were led by the Holy Spirit, to give us this teaching.
Whether you realize it or not, you agree. At least in practice, you agree.
Code: 
This leads to the one question I have for you on this matter…
** If this church was so very wrong about understanding the nature of God in 325, why do you at a later date trust this same (apparently wrong) church to tell you what the Word of God actually is?**
Code: 
Logically, if we consider that over time man got further away from God's truth (until 1870), we have three options:
	1 - Do not believe the church in 325 (trinity) nor in 382 (canon) … complete apostacy was before 325
	2 - Believe the church in 325 (trinity), but not in 382 (canon) … complete apostacy was between.
	3 - Believe the church in 325 (trinity), and in 382 (canon) … complete apostacy was after or never

Your theology of believing the church in 382, but not in 325 is logically inconsistent.

I do aim to show you that there was never a complete apostacy.
I still owe you my notes and scripture on why I believe Jesus founded only one church which is unified, visible, authoritative, apostolic, and still here.
I'm still working on putting this together.
Please be patient with me.
With love, brother
michel
give expecting nothing thereof…

michel

I shall work, above all, with a pure intention and with detachment from self, having always before my eyes the hour of death and the accounting of which I must render of time ill-spent, of talents unemployed, of good undone, and of empty pride in success, which is so fatal to the work of God.
 
There is a question that I would like to ask Jehovah’s Witnesses if they come to my door again…

JW’s make a big deal about using the name “Jehovah” and claim that to be God’s name, and we should use it. However, in my opinion “Jehovah” is not God’s name at all. Because the Watchtower in its own literature maintains that the pronunciation of the divine name has been forgotten; if that is true, then how could the collection of syllables made up by a Catholic monk in the middle ages possibly be said to be God’s name?
It’s as if you told someone your name, and said “THIS is my name. Remember it.” But later, the person says, “Well, I forgot the name you told me, but that is okay, because I made up something else, and I will say that as your name.” Would you let them get away with that? You wouldn’t. And God wouldn’t either–esepcially God when it is His Name. The Witnesses use a man made word, “Jehovah,” and claim that to be God’s name!

It seems to me that a name has three aspects to it–its pronunciation, its spelling, and its meaning. We really don’t know how to pronounce the divine name, but we do know the its spelling–in Hebrew! The Tetragrammaton. We could try to transliterate the tetragrammaton, but since we don’t know the pronunciation, we can’t really transliterate it properly. That leaves the meaning–and we do know the meaning of the divine name. So perhaps it is the meaning that God has preserved and wants us to remember. NOT a meaningless, made-up bunch of syllables that no Hebrew will have ever heard of.

So, Jehovah’s Witnesses pride themselves on using God’s name, when in fact they do not use it at all.
 
mackbrislawn said:
JW’s make a big deal about using the name “Jehovah” and claim that to be God’s name, and we should use it.
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This is something we discussed.
He showed me photos of some Hebrew text of four characters.
I said that their research was not reliable, not real.
How can they look at the letters and say how it USED TO BE pronounced. Without a phonetic spelling, how would they even know.
He said the Jewish people forgot the correct pronunciation and points to the pictures and says ‘this IS real’.
I said that I agree the characters are real … and say ‘Yahweh’ and that in no way could they know pronunciation in opposition to Jews and Christians of today.

I mentioned that the term Jehovah didn’t exist before the 12th century.

I said it was more poor scholarship from the Watchtower.

michel
 
cazayoux said:
This is something we discussed.
He showed me photos of some Hebrew text of four characters.
I said that their research was not reliable, not real.
How can they look at the letters and say how it USED TO BE pronounced. Without a phonetic spelling, how would they even know.
He said the Jewish people forgot the correct pronunciation and points to the pictures and says ‘this IS real’.
I said that I agree the characters are real … and say ‘Yahweh’ and that in no way could they know pronunciation in opposition to Jews and Christians of today.

I mentioned that the term Jehovah didn’t exist before the 12th century.

I said it was more poor scholarship from the Watchtower.

michel
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No, the Witnesses don’t know how the name used to be pronounced. Nobody does.

The picture that the Witnesses show, the tetragrammaton, the four Hebrew characters is real of course, and was used in the Old Testament, and perhaps should be used in translations of the OT. However, the tetragrammaton does NOT appear in the New Testament and should NOT appear in NT translations. In no Christian Greek manuscript is it to be found. Theos, God, and Kyrios, the Greek term for Lord, are universally used instead. The conclusion is that pronouncing God’s name is not important for Christians, especially since no one knows the correct pronunciation.

The Watchtower, though, makes the assertion that the autograph Greek NT manuscripts DID have the tetragrammaton, but that heretics completely erased all traces of it in subsequent copies of the NT.
Well, that would be quite an accomplishment, to destroy all copies of the NT over the thousands of miles of the Roman empire and leave absolutely no trace of what they did anywhere. To destroy every manuscript and recopy them al! Completely impossible to believe. But that is what the WT teaches and the Witnesses meekly accept this preposterous claim.

(As kind of a side note, a form of the Divine Name does appear in the book of Revelation, in the word Allelulia, which means Praise Yah. Yah, or Jah being a short form of the name. I guess the heretics missed this one!)
 
mackbrislawn said:
(As kind of a side note, a form of the Divine Name does appear in the book of Revelation, in the word Allelulia, which means Praise Yah. Yah, or Jah being a short form of the name. I guess the heretics missed this one!)
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I did bring up that allelulia is a shortening of ‘Hallel Yahweh’ which means ‘praise God’.

It is preposterous to say that all Christian and Jews of today are in error by using the name ‘Yahweh’.

michel
 
cazayoux said:
I did bring up that allelulia is a shortening of ‘Hallel Yahweh’ which means ‘praise God’.

It is preposterous to say that all Christian and Jews of today are in error by using the name ‘Yahweh’.

michel
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You’re right, it is preposterous, and even though the WT actually knows (even if individual Witnesses don’t), that Yahweh is more accurate than “Jehovah” they are stuck with Jehovah so they continue full speed ahead anyway.
If a Witness says you are in error by using Yahweh, say that you aren’t and ask him to check with his elders, or the Society itself, because the Society knows better.
 
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