Tiauha
06-07-2005, 21:29
Yes, another religion thread, I can hear the sighs already. Anyway there have been a few things that people have said that have just dumbfounded me as to where they got their opinion. One being that JW's are Christians. Another thing is 'Religions are all the same though' except I kind of understand where people get this from.
And I must apologise for posting sources and links and not writing it in my own words, but my computer has taken a disliking to me and has got wiped and now AOL is logging me out every few minutes *glares*
You (of course) are welcome to disagree with me, but I must give you something to disagree with first...
The Jehovah's Witnesses do not believe or teach some of the very basic tenets of Christian doctrine. They deny:
1. The Trinity.
2. The Omnipresence of God.
3. The Deity of Christ.
4. The dual nature of Christ.
5. The bodily resurrection of Christ.
6. The visible return of Christ.
7. The person of God the Holy Spirit.
8. The Promise of Heaven to all believers.
9. The necessity of the New Birth for all believers.
10. The Lord's Supper for all believers. (only for the 144,0000).
11. The Eternal Security of the believer.
12. The conscious Eternal Punishment of the lost.
http://www.saintsalive.com/general/jwchrist.htm
He doesn't actually give a yes/no answer, but oh well...
What do the Jehovah's Witnesses believe about Jesus?
The Jehovah's Witnesses movement is surprisingly similar to the ancient heresy known as Arianism. The Christian church rejected this false teaching about Jesus. The Jehovah's Witnesses believe that Jesus is "a" god, but not the eternal Son of God, the second person of the Holy Trinity. They believe there was a time when He actually was created by Jehovah God. They do not believe Jesus is true God, as does historic Christianity. They do not believe the Holy Spirit is God, but only an impersonal force. Thus, they do not believe in the Holy Trinity.
The Jehovah's Witnesses' Bible, The New World Translation, goes out of its way to mistranslate various verses of the Greek New Testament. An example of this type of mistranslation is found in John 1:1. The Greek text says, "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God." The New World Translation translates the Greek this way: "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was a god." You can see how through such deceptive translating, the Jehovah's Witnesses attempt to mislead people.
How do Jehovah's Witnesses believe that people are saved?
Based on misinterpretations of passages from the Book of Revelation, the Watchtower Society believes that Jehovah God extends salvation to two different groups of people. First, there are the 144,000 who shall inhabit heaven. The rest of those saved will inhabit earth in the new kingdom that Christ will establish when he returns after the Battle of Armageddon. They believe that the only persons who will be numbered among the 144,000 are those who have adequately met specific requirements and have lived well enough in imitation of Christ.
For Jehovah's Witnesses, salvation is not an accomplished fact by Jesus Christ, given as a free gift, but only something that is earned by doing good works. Chief of these works is aggressive personal visitation of non-members. This explains in large part why the Jehovah's Witnesses are so zealous for personal visitation.
http://www.lifeoftheworld.com/believe/jw.php
But then if they didn't come, I wouldn't get to hear amusing stories of how you got rid of them... Luckily I haven't been visited by any although some of my relatives are JW, maybe they don't visit new housing estates...
Other links
http://www.rapidnet.com/~jbeard/bdm/Cults/jw.htm
www.google.com :p
"When Christians, Jews, Buddhists, and others pray to their god, all of those individuals are actually praying to the same god, but simply using different names for that deity."
——registered opinion of four of every ten American adults (Barna poll)
Are these Americans right or wrong? Mahatma Gandhi of India once said:
"The soul of religion is one, but it is encased in a multitude of forms."
Is this true or false?
"In reality, there is only one religion, the religion of God. This one religion is continually evolving, and each particular religious system represents a stage in the evolution of the whole," claims the Bahá'í faith on its official Web site at bahai.org.
Are the Bahá'ís correct or incorrect? What about the Hindus?
"In whatever way men approach Me, even so do I go to them."
——quoted from the Hindu scripture by Swami Chidananda of Divine Life Society
Is Christianity's claim of uniqueness and exclusivity misleading and baseless? Or is it necessarily true?
Even a cursory examination of comparative belief charts and data* quickly reveals that different religions make very different truth claims on a number of even basic issues. And they do so in a definitive manner. In other words, as any knowledgeable student of comparative religions will tell you, every religion—not just Christianity—claims exclusivity.
Here are a few examples:
Nature of God
Christianity
— Monotheistic, personal
Buddhism
— Monistic, impersonal
Hinduism
— Monistic, polytheistic
Identity of Jesus Christ
Orthodox Christian
— Deity incarnate
Orthodox Jewish
— human only
http://www.christiananswers.net/q-aiia/religionssame.html
TOO MANY RELIGIONS
"Why are there so many religions and why is Christianity the right one?" This is a question I am asked by non-Christians.
Let me break your question into three. First, why couldn't many religions be true? Imagine that while travelling to Chicago, you come to a crossroads from which you could travel along a straight road in any of four directions: North, South, East or West. All four roads are labelled "This Way to Chicago," but it stands to reason that at least three of the signs must be wrong. Of course it's possible that none of the roads lead to Chicago (for example, Chicago might be to the Northwest), but at most, only one of them leads there. With religions, it's just the same. Each one says "This way to the Most Important Thing," but they give logically inconsistent instructions, so at most one of them really leads there. Of course, to say that a road doesn't go to Chicago doesn't mean that there's nothing good about it. Maybe it's scenic or historic; maybe there are Chicago tourism booths along the way; maybe, while travelling on it, you can even catch glimpses of Chicago at a distance. Just remember that none of these things will get you to Chicago.
Second, granted that at most one religion is true, then why should we believe that Christianity is the true one? There are lots of reasons. One is that Jesus is unlike any other religious teacher. He claimed not only to teach the Way, but to be the Way — to be God, Himself, in person. Someone who claims to be God is either evil, nuts or God. In the Gospels, we see that He doesn't come across as evil; he doesn't come across as nuts; and only one alternative is left. Here's another reason: Every attempt to explain away the Empty Tomb has failed. If a man makes the preposterous prediction that in fulfillment of prophecy he will rise from the grave, then does it, I think we have a good reason to take his other claims about himself seriously. You can find a good scholarly discussion of the Empty Tomb HERE .
Third, if only one religion is right, why are there so many others? I answer: Why not? There are more wrong answers than right ones to every question. What is two plus two? There is only one right answer, but there is an infinity of wrong ones. Besides, in religion we often prefer the wrong answers. If we don't want God most of all — if we want something else even more than God — then we convince ourselves that this Something Else is God, and that God isn't God after all.
http://www.boundless.org/2000/departments/theophilus/a0000297.html
And to save you wasting breath:
A number of readers wrote in to criticize my explanation. I agree that I could have made my point more clearly. Let's see if I can clarify it here! There were three main criticisms.
Objection #1: But there IS more than one way to get to Chicago.
Of course there is, but my point was not that spiritual roads are just like physical ones — it was that they aren't like physical ones. My argument was not "Just as there is only one way to get to Chicago, so there is only one way to get to God." Rather it was "Because there are many ways to get to Chicago, we easily assume that there are many ways to get to God. But you could imagine a world in which there were only one way to get to Chicago — and that's what the spiritual world is like."
Objection #2: Your roads were straight. Real roads curve.
Okay, let's speak of directions instead of roads. The spiritual course of an individual's life is often full of curves, but that's because he is changing directions, not because he is consistently following a direction. For example I may begin by following the direction "Wealth," which leads away from God, but later I may curve around to follow the direction "Christ," which leads toward Him.
Objection #3: All of the major world religions acknowledge some form of the Golden Rule, so shouldn't you have said that all of the roads point in roughly the same direction?
Although it's true that many of the same moral rules are recognized in all major world religions, that doesn't mean that they all lead to God in the end. We may know God's moral requirements, but by our own unaided efforts we fall infinitely short of them. As I see the matter, then, it's like this:
One of the greatest roads on the spiritual map is called "Be Holy, As I, the Lord, Am Holy." It really does point toward God, and there really are people of more than one religion walking on it. The problem is that the further you walk, the steeper the Road of Holiness becomes, until it ends in the Cliff of Purity — a flat, vertical rise of polished glass which no human being can scale. From here, people wander off in different directions. Some turn off onto a different path which is also marked "The Road of Holiness," but the roadsign is wrong; the real name of this road is "Trust Your Own Righteousness," and it ends in an arctic wilderness where everyone freezes to death.
Yet those who wait humbly at the foot of the cliff may hear a voice from way up on top. It is the voice of God Himself, calling "I'm throwing down a rope. If only you'll trust it enough to grab and hang on no matter what, I'll pull you up." Sure enough, there it is — right in front of you — just within your reach. The rope is Jesus. There is no other. He said so Himself. Will you take hold?
http://www.boundless.org/2000/departments/theophilus/a0000324.html
I think that's probably, if not too long already so I'll stop now. /rant
And I must apologise for posting sources and links and not writing it in my own words, but my computer has taken a disliking to me and has got wiped and now AOL is logging me out every few minutes *glares*
You (of course) are welcome to disagree with me, but I must give you something to disagree with first...
The Jehovah's Witnesses do not believe or teach some of the very basic tenets of Christian doctrine. They deny:
1. The Trinity.
2. The Omnipresence of God.
3. The Deity of Christ.
4. The dual nature of Christ.
5. The bodily resurrection of Christ.
6. The visible return of Christ.
7. The person of God the Holy Spirit.
8. The Promise of Heaven to all believers.
9. The necessity of the New Birth for all believers.
10. The Lord's Supper for all believers. (only for the 144,0000).
11. The Eternal Security of the believer.
12. The conscious Eternal Punishment of the lost.
http://www.saintsalive.com/general/jwchrist.htm
He doesn't actually give a yes/no answer, but oh well...
What do the Jehovah's Witnesses believe about Jesus?
The Jehovah's Witnesses movement is surprisingly similar to the ancient heresy known as Arianism. The Christian church rejected this false teaching about Jesus. The Jehovah's Witnesses believe that Jesus is "a" god, but not the eternal Son of God, the second person of the Holy Trinity. They believe there was a time when He actually was created by Jehovah God. They do not believe Jesus is true God, as does historic Christianity. They do not believe the Holy Spirit is God, but only an impersonal force. Thus, they do not believe in the Holy Trinity.
The Jehovah's Witnesses' Bible, The New World Translation, goes out of its way to mistranslate various verses of the Greek New Testament. An example of this type of mistranslation is found in John 1:1. The Greek text says, "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God." The New World Translation translates the Greek this way: "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was a god." You can see how through such deceptive translating, the Jehovah's Witnesses attempt to mislead people.
How do Jehovah's Witnesses believe that people are saved?
Based on misinterpretations of passages from the Book of Revelation, the Watchtower Society believes that Jehovah God extends salvation to two different groups of people. First, there are the 144,000 who shall inhabit heaven. The rest of those saved will inhabit earth in the new kingdom that Christ will establish when he returns after the Battle of Armageddon. They believe that the only persons who will be numbered among the 144,000 are those who have adequately met specific requirements and have lived well enough in imitation of Christ.
For Jehovah's Witnesses, salvation is not an accomplished fact by Jesus Christ, given as a free gift, but only something that is earned by doing good works. Chief of these works is aggressive personal visitation of non-members. This explains in large part why the Jehovah's Witnesses are so zealous for personal visitation.
http://www.lifeoftheworld.com/believe/jw.php
But then if they didn't come, I wouldn't get to hear amusing stories of how you got rid of them... Luckily I haven't been visited by any although some of my relatives are JW, maybe they don't visit new housing estates...
Other links
http://www.rapidnet.com/~jbeard/bdm/Cults/jw.htm
www.google.com :p
"When Christians, Jews, Buddhists, and others pray to their god, all of those individuals are actually praying to the same god, but simply using different names for that deity."
——registered opinion of four of every ten American adults (Barna poll)
Are these Americans right or wrong? Mahatma Gandhi of India once said:
"The soul of religion is one, but it is encased in a multitude of forms."
Is this true or false?
"In reality, there is only one religion, the religion of God. This one religion is continually evolving, and each particular religious system represents a stage in the evolution of the whole," claims the Bahá'í faith on its official Web site at bahai.org.
Are the Bahá'ís correct or incorrect? What about the Hindus?
"In whatever way men approach Me, even so do I go to them."
——quoted from the Hindu scripture by Swami Chidananda of Divine Life Society
Is Christianity's claim of uniqueness and exclusivity misleading and baseless? Or is it necessarily true?
Even a cursory examination of comparative belief charts and data* quickly reveals that different religions make very different truth claims on a number of even basic issues. And they do so in a definitive manner. In other words, as any knowledgeable student of comparative religions will tell you, every religion—not just Christianity—claims exclusivity.
Here are a few examples:
Nature of God
Christianity
— Monotheistic, personal
Buddhism
— Monistic, impersonal
Hinduism
— Monistic, polytheistic
Identity of Jesus Christ
Orthodox Christian
— Deity incarnate
Orthodox Jewish
— human only
http://www.christiananswers.net/q-aiia/religionssame.html
TOO MANY RELIGIONS
"Why are there so many religions and why is Christianity the right one?" This is a question I am asked by non-Christians.
Let me break your question into three. First, why couldn't many religions be true? Imagine that while travelling to Chicago, you come to a crossroads from which you could travel along a straight road in any of four directions: North, South, East or West. All four roads are labelled "This Way to Chicago," but it stands to reason that at least three of the signs must be wrong. Of course it's possible that none of the roads lead to Chicago (for example, Chicago might be to the Northwest), but at most, only one of them leads there. With religions, it's just the same. Each one says "This way to the Most Important Thing," but they give logically inconsistent instructions, so at most one of them really leads there. Of course, to say that a road doesn't go to Chicago doesn't mean that there's nothing good about it. Maybe it's scenic or historic; maybe there are Chicago tourism booths along the way; maybe, while travelling on it, you can even catch glimpses of Chicago at a distance. Just remember that none of these things will get you to Chicago.
Second, granted that at most one religion is true, then why should we believe that Christianity is the true one? There are lots of reasons. One is that Jesus is unlike any other religious teacher. He claimed not only to teach the Way, but to be the Way — to be God, Himself, in person. Someone who claims to be God is either evil, nuts or God. In the Gospels, we see that He doesn't come across as evil; he doesn't come across as nuts; and only one alternative is left. Here's another reason: Every attempt to explain away the Empty Tomb has failed. If a man makes the preposterous prediction that in fulfillment of prophecy he will rise from the grave, then does it, I think we have a good reason to take his other claims about himself seriously. You can find a good scholarly discussion of the Empty Tomb HERE .
Third, if only one religion is right, why are there so many others? I answer: Why not? There are more wrong answers than right ones to every question. What is two plus two? There is only one right answer, but there is an infinity of wrong ones. Besides, in religion we often prefer the wrong answers. If we don't want God most of all — if we want something else even more than God — then we convince ourselves that this Something Else is God, and that God isn't God after all.
http://www.boundless.org/2000/departments/theophilus/a0000297.html
And to save you wasting breath:
A number of readers wrote in to criticize my explanation. I agree that I could have made my point more clearly. Let's see if I can clarify it here! There were three main criticisms.
Objection #1: But there IS more than one way to get to Chicago.
Of course there is, but my point was not that spiritual roads are just like physical ones — it was that they aren't like physical ones. My argument was not "Just as there is only one way to get to Chicago, so there is only one way to get to God." Rather it was "Because there are many ways to get to Chicago, we easily assume that there are many ways to get to God. But you could imagine a world in which there were only one way to get to Chicago — and that's what the spiritual world is like."
Objection #2: Your roads were straight. Real roads curve.
Okay, let's speak of directions instead of roads. The spiritual course of an individual's life is often full of curves, but that's because he is changing directions, not because he is consistently following a direction. For example I may begin by following the direction "Wealth," which leads away from God, but later I may curve around to follow the direction "Christ," which leads toward Him.
Objection #3: All of the major world religions acknowledge some form of the Golden Rule, so shouldn't you have said that all of the roads point in roughly the same direction?
Although it's true that many of the same moral rules are recognized in all major world religions, that doesn't mean that they all lead to God in the end. We may know God's moral requirements, but by our own unaided efforts we fall infinitely short of them. As I see the matter, then, it's like this:
One of the greatest roads on the spiritual map is called "Be Holy, As I, the Lord, Am Holy." It really does point toward God, and there really are people of more than one religion walking on it. The problem is that the further you walk, the steeper the Road of Holiness becomes, until it ends in the Cliff of Purity — a flat, vertical rise of polished glass which no human being can scale. From here, people wander off in different directions. Some turn off onto a different path which is also marked "The Road of Holiness," but the roadsign is wrong; the real name of this road is "Trust Your Own Righteousness," and it ends in an arctic wilderness where everyone freezes to death.
Yet those who wait humbly at the foot of the cliff may hear a voice from way up on top. It is the voice of God Himself, calling "I'm throwing down a rope. If only you'll trust it enough to grab and hang on no matter what, I'll pull you up." Sure enough, there it is — right in front of you — just within your reach. The rope is Jesus. There is no other. He said so Himself. Will you take hold?
http://www.boundless.org/2000/departments/theophilus/a0000324.html
I think that's probably, if not too long already so I'll stop now. /rant