Posted by Cygnus [Cygnus] on November 24, 1999 at 22:11:50 {BlpRHB6gpc7eVbcAfU9ML4bdfUTIaI}:
In Reply to: ***********With a Bang posted by Cheeky on November 24, 1999 at 15:25:06:
I agree that the Witnesses seem to have better answers than "it's a mystery" or "Jesus loves you and that's all you need to know."
But let's consider just one aspect of Witness teaching. That of Jesus. According to the Witnesses, Jesus was...
- Non-existent
- Then existent (created as "a god" immaterially before the universe and lived with Jehovah for "perhaps billions of years" according to the WT, even though measurements of time require a universe)
- Creator (of all [other] things)
- Non-existent (during "transferrence" of his "life-force")
- Existent (as a zygote, soon then a baby boy)
- A little more existent (at baptism, remembering his prehuman "existence")
- Non-existent (dead in Hades, which isn't really a place, metaphysically or otherwise)
- Existent, in the form of his pre-existence, on earth, albeit "glorified"
- Ascended (spirits ascend, I guess) to heaven, sitting (?) next to God, "king" over the congregation
- "Present," "arriving" in 1874, then apparently again in 1914 as "king" ending the "gentile times," which Jesus really said would end back in the 1st century (where was Jesus before he was "present" anyway?)
- Resurrecting people by recreating them (or their "minds" or whatever makes a person a person) into spirits, first in 1878, then
again in 1918, and as soon as such a person dies today, Christ sees it and reconfigures him/her into a spirit, and "up" they go, "out there"
somewhere
- "Real Soon Now" Jesus will come again to kill a whole lot of people
- As the "angel of the abyss" he chains up the Devil, I guess by staring him down and using some kind of special "force" that these spirits do neat supernatural stuff with
- Then he sits on another glorious throne (all of this invisible of course), to judge the sheep and goats
- Then he keeps on sitting on that throne for 1000 years, while humans on earth somehow communicate with the spirits in heaven to get matters straight on earth. It takes Jesus, the spirits, and the humans 1000 years to get it "just right."
- Then he has to deal with the Devil again, but makes good on God's promise of Gen 3:15 and gives Satan payback for making him non-existent all that time ago by torturing the Devil into non-existence
- Finally, he hands the Kingdom over to his Father, and Jesus and the 144,000 spirits live happily ever after in heaven, while the rest of us pet lions for the rest of our lives
This makes sense to you?