Jehovah's Witness Skinny

[Tom7]

I found Aquinas to be useful. It doesn’t have to be taken on faith but reason shows the first cause.

I hope your research goes well. Nice talking to you.

 

[ReaderT]

The Jehovah’s Witnesses predicted the end of the world several times (all were wrong):

Unfulfilled Watch Tower Society predictions - Wikipedia

By this criterion, the Bible calls them false prophets, and if they lived in the Old Testament, their leaders would’ve been put to death:

(Deuteronomy 18:20-22) But a prophet who presumes to speak in my name anything I have not commanded, or a prophet who speaks in the name of other gods, is to be put to death.” You may say to yourselves, “How can we know when a message has not been spoken by the Lord?” If what a prophet proclaims in the name of the Lord does not take place or come true, that is a message the Lord has not spoken.

 

[niceatheist]

I was raised a Jehovah’s Witness, though I left when I was sixteen. Their beliefs may have changed somewhat in the intervening thirty-odd years. They are effectively an off shoot of the Seventh Day Adventists, and inherited some of that sect’s peculiarities but inherited many of their own. Russell was a bit of a Bible code nut, which is how they came up with their calculations about when the end times (which they’ve had to revise multiple times) came about. He was also a bit of a Pyramid nut, but that got dropped. It was under “Judge” Rutherford who gained control of the Society in 1917 that the more notorious aspects of the sect came into existence; disfellowship and shunning, not to mention the blood transfusion ban, as well as the overall structure of the Society.

These days they’ve had a fair bit of trouble with their own child abuse scandal, and while they seem to claim a significant following, the word I’ve heard is that they do some funny counting to make it seem as if their numbers are still in high in the developed world. They’re having a bit more success in Latin America, which is probably part of the same general movement that is seeing the Pentecostals and similar groups do well in that part of the world.

The best way I could describe their theology is nominally Arian, but also a bit erratic, and where they embarrass themselves too much suddenly some “New Light” will come along. Oh, and they tampered with the language in John 1 to try to prop up their anti-Trinitarian views.

 

[pulchraesamicamea]

I am confused. What do you mean?

 

[mcq72]

also happen to work in a Catholic university

Cool…what subjects do you teach

 

[mcq72]

As I have already stated I don’t believe all the teaching of the catechism and believe them to be in error compared to Scripture. I also don’t accept some of the teaching of my own faith. All done in good conscience. What should someone do? Obey their own conscience regardless. Please drop the notion that following the Catholic faith in its entirety hasn’t caused immense and unnecessary suffering to people over the centuries.

Not trying to be arrogant but if I can’t honestly say a prayer/intercession to Mary with a clean conscience how can I be judged to be in error by you? Paul says let each man examine his own conscience and keep quiet. That’s why I should stick to reading things here and not posting.

Hi Tom…speaking of conscience, which even the Church agrees we should obey, have you read Crisis of Conscience by Raymond Franz, who used to be on their/ yours (JW’s) board of directors so to speak?

 

[pacloc]

How do you reconcile the difficult parts of your history with the idea of the Church being the bride of Christ? I mean the misuse of political power, corrupt Popes, child sex abuse cover ups? Some severely criticise the mistakes in our faith but it feels extremely hypocritical.

I don’t reconcile the RCC’s errors because I don’t believe it to be the continuation of the Church established by our Lord Jesus Christ. They broke from the Church around 1054. The Orthodox Church does not have the same problems at such a large scale, and the teachings have not changed as they have in the RCC. You mention having read Pope Benedict XVI and Thomas Aquinas, I recommend that you go back a little further and read from the writings of St. John Chrysostom and St. Cyril of Alexandria from around the end of the 4th century. They have free writings on the internet. St. Basil the Great has a treatise on the Holy Spirit that defends the Divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. When you read it, it almost sounds like he is talking against the doctrines of JWs because he was dealing with people that were trying to teach that Jesus was not equal to the Father and that the Holy Spirit was also inferior to both the Father and the Son.

When you look back and see that JWs, like many groups splintered from mainstream Protestantism, have their very recent beginnings in the US from men that thought it was a good idea to interpret the Holy Scriptures by themselves, you begin to see the prideful origin that is not so different from the first sin in the Garden of Eden. And when you look back and read writings from the Saints of the Church from the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th centuries and see that these same things are taught and practiced in the Orthodox Church, it is hard to continue following a man made religion that was invented yesterday. The so called problems with the Orthodox Church’s doctrines have been dealt with by these Saints throughout history, so you can find answers to the questions posed by Protestants, JWs, Jews, Muslims, etc. The RCC shares a lot of this history as well, and they have a lot of the same answers. Again, I am glad to see a JW on the forum and willing to read outside sources and to hold to truths in the Scripture that contradict the JW teachings.

By chance, how do you defend the JW teaching that Jesus was not resurrected in a physical body when in the Gospel of St. Luke, he specifically says that he is not a Spirit, but has flesh and bones and even eats fish and honey and allows the Apostles to touch him to know that he was physically resurrected. Christians believe that our Lord became a man and for all eternity will be man, and this is how we share in His Divinity because He shared in our humanity, joining in Himself God and man. JWs actually teach that His body evaporated, clearly denying the words at the end of St. Luke’s Gospel.