Posted by N.H. on March 21, 1999 at 02:16:11 {MWGkei94xWMP.}:
In Reply to: Realization posted by Rick on March 20, 1999 at 22:33:05:
Hi Rick,
You said:
:Let's put aside H2O for a moment. This is what I personally think, and it won't sit well with those who believe people are entitled to do anything no matter how depraved, immoral, illegal or murderous. I came to the realization today. That realization was first best described as heartbreaking feeling but then then the heartbreak faded.
I wonder where you have met people: �those who believe people are entitled to do anything no matter how depraved, immoral, illegal or murderous�. I certainly don�t know anyone like that, here on the board, or anywhere else. If you are going to project your arguments against someone, you might try to do it on someone who actually exists.
:That realization is, that even though the Watchtower Society is wrong that only Jehovah's Witnesses will be spared through Armageddon, that there are people in our government, in corporations, or acting on their own today who are corrupt and evil beyond our comprehension. God must destroy them. Until they are all dead, the world will never be a safe place to life.
I am sometimes appalled by the gloomy outlook on life that is held by so many Americans. The US of A must be a horrible society to live in. I know of course that you got the highest crime rate in any western country, and that this makes you extremely odd in this sense. You are one of the few democracies who still hold on to capital punishment, and despite of this you still have such record crime levels. Wonder why countries that have abolished capital punishment is nowhere near such conditions. Thus we who live in such countries tend to have a far more positive opinion of life and the future. There might be people in our governments that are evil beyond comprehension, but I am hard pressed to think about anyone right now, anyway in a good democratic society such people won�t have much of a chance to du any harm. That is why we call it democracy. The evil people will eventually die, just like you and me Rick. Some might be overtaken by justice, punished, imprisoned etc. Armageddon being a product of someone�s overactive imagination will of course never come to pass and God won�t destroy anyone. If we want to get rid of murderers and thieves we will have to let the police and the Justice system handle it.
:No, I'm not talking about anyone in the Watchtower Society. They were instrumental in encouraging the young lady, now a sister in the faith, into igniting an interest in my heart at a youthful age for reading the Bible and learning about God's plan. I would have never gained this interest without her.
Neither am I, Rick. The leaders of the Watchtower Society will eventually die from old age or some terminal disease, no �God� or anyone else is going to punish them for all the problems and hardship their misguided and hopeless doctrines have inflicted upon millions.
:Those who God must destroy, whom I'm talking about, are a world full of criminally minded people who have no conscience. They are amongst the dedicated people in our government who work against the interests of freedom to sell us out; they are the bloodthirsty dictators of many countries; they are the murderers and rapists filling our prisons to overflowing.
Again I do not recognize this
horrible �world� you are talking about. The vast majority of people all over the world are decent, good people. At least this is the case where I live, and I suspect that this is also the case in the US of A.
If our description of the
conditions in your country is correct, then only the people living there can correct it. Do you live in a dictatorship or is all this bragging about the US being a country of the �free� just a big lie? If you were a student of history you
would also have noticed that we have in fact far less dictators today than we had 20 years ago. In those days, the US government supported the vast majority of those dictators.
:There are so many of these individuals that without God's intervention as promised in the Bible, mankind will likely become extinct in a very short period of time. Many of those who deserve death at God's hands control the world's natural resources, and are ruining this earth in exchange for currency and power. They destroy the earth for generations to come for what? Beautiful estates. Shoveling expensive foods into their gut. The genocide of future generations for a few brief years of wearing expensive clothing and sitting on their fat behinds on leather automobile seats. Like the kings and their courts in the dark ages, they keep shoveling that expensive food into their fat guts while the masses are left in hopeless living conditions. It never changes.
Dear me. This was quite a burst of doom and gloom Rick. There have been many times in mankind�s earlier history, like for example in the period of the Black Death in the 1300 where such a negative worldview could be understandable, but not now. As for natural resources, I remember the reports in the Watchtower and elsewhere, in the beginning of the seventies, predicting the end of global oil resources. Today we have so much oil that the prices are at an all time low. More poor people are fed now than ever before, child mortality rates are dwindling fast in all over the world. International organizations of dedicated people are working to make the world a better place instead of sitting on their �fat behinds� to use our own expression, and wait until some imaginary �God� comes down and kill everyone you don�t like. Thanks to people like that the world have become a far better place to live for millions of people. If you really want to see it Rick, the world is and has been changing for the better. It is all there to see, but it requires that you sit down and educate yourself a bit. To lift your eyes up from the depressing literature you are reading and learn to see the world behind the TV news and the tabloids.
:They are the ones I dearly look forward to seeing God kill at Armageddon as he has promised. Those who defend them and are appalled at my comments, would have defended Hitler if he had lived and won the world war. They would have equally been shocked if I looked forward to Hitler's death, as I do the deaths of all the wannabe Hitlers at Armageddon.
Well, Rick. You will never see any of this. I am not at all appalled by what you have said. I am however very sad on your behalf. What you have written is a very illuminating example of what living in such a self inflicted spiritual void can do to people. Evil people and criminals, who prey upon their fellow man is nothing new, evil behavior deserves no defense. There is no excuse for what Hitler and his faithful followers did. We can be grateful to those men who gave their lives in the struggle against him and his forces, instead of heaping scorn and condemnations upon US Catholics killing German Catholics, etc. Thanks to those people we don�t have to live under his rule. But Hitler didn�t die in Armageddon and neither will any �wannabe Hitlers. They will die because brave people will oppose them.
:Unlike many who take the law into their own hands, Christians who are true to God will wait until God puts the truly evil individuals on this earth to death as spoken about in Revelation.
Exactly, with such attitudes the �Hitlers� of this world would reign supreme today. Waiting for �God� while the world collapse around you is going to make it all so much better.
:Many of you talk about this event as being terrible, because you assume the Watchtower will dictate who lives and dies. The fact is they don't dictate that. No matter what the governing body says, only those truly evil and deserving of death will be slaughtered by angels as foretold in the book of Revelation.
Whoever it is in your imaginary world that decides who lives and dies Rick, isn�t of much importance. Whether it is 99,9% or 50% or whatever portion of mankind is going to be killed by your God, it doesn�t matter. It is the total hopelessness of such thinking that appalls me. If you excuse me I haven�t got much confidence in a God which had women and babies exterminated based solely on them belonging to the wrong tribe. I understand that you derive some relief in your fantasy about it being only people who �deserve it� that will be �executed� by your God.
:Just because you're not one of Jehovah's Witnesses doesn't mean you're deserving of death. No matter what anyone tells you, or even what you've read (or misread) in a Watchtower publication, there are good hearted people from every religious belief. There are Muslums in the Middle East who have good hearts, in the hundreds of millions or more, who are probably good hearted people. God will not destroy them because they aren't Jehovah's Witnesses!
Don�t worry Rick. I have no fear of dying in the hands of an imaginary entity. As you so correctly point out, the vast majority, be that Hindu�s, Moslems, etc. Are decent people. What you are promoting here is the idea of universialism. The only idea that makes Christianity having half a chance of survival.
:The Bible speaks of the knowledge of Jehovah being abundant in the earth during the days after Armageddon, and the millenium in which Jesus Christ establishes his Kingdom on earth. That will become a time where the abundance of God's knowledge will teach those who are not believing the truth, perhaps including we as Jehovah's Witnesses, the real truth. Mankind will learn to live peacefully amongst themselves, beating their proverbial spears into plowshares, learning peace and not war.
One day mankind might see such a day, but it will be trough dedicated people working together internationally for such a goal. Every religion on earth today is in reality resisting such work every inch of the way. Religion in some form is behind most conflicts today and stands in the way of the realization of a peaceful society. Just think about the rules made by the Watchtower Society that forbids contact with former Jehovah's Witnesses. Do you think such rules promote peace and understanding?
>i>:I closing, when I speak of those deserving death at God's hands through his angels at Armageddon as foretold in the Bible's book of Revelation, I'm talking about those greedy, self-serving individuals who have turned this world into a pitiful failure. Those who murder others in the name of all sorts of justified reasons. Those who rape women and children. Those who destroy lives pushing drugs. Those who exploit third world countries for economic gains. Those who ruin the environment for future generations. Those who murder children and even the helpless disabled if that's what it takes to cover their error or further their cause. Will I feel sorry when God puts them to death, or sorry they might not receive a resurrection? NO. I will feel no remorseful than, for example, a man who sees the murderer of his parents in cold blood in a robbery put to death in the electric chair or by lethal injection. Why would anyone mourn the deaths of those who hate them and take pleasure in bringing others suffering and death?
As I mentioned above. Most civilized countries have abolished capital punishment, because of the principle that man shouldn�t take human lives. Even people who have killed someone shouldn�t be executed. First of all because no country have a perfect justice system and the wrong person could be executed, and secondly because you don�t instill the principle of the sanctity of life by taking it. I know that in the US the old Testament idea of an �eye for eye� kind of justice is very popular, but it is also a very primitive idea, which is abandoned in many other societies. The fact that many of us aren�t pro capital punishment doesn�t mean that we condone murder.
:Before we criticize Armageddon, why don't we define it? Why is it, incidentally, that I predict Norm, with all good intent, will find this posting appalling? Why would anyone defend those who commit murder by expressing disapproval when someone says how relieved they will be when those people no longer exist? Do those in this category feel the death penalty is barbaric? Should we tolerate murder as just one of those unpleasant aspects of life, but protect the murder's rights and freedoms to kill? I'm being somewhat facetious in asking this, but I've seen in the past people express outrage when others have expressed the sentiments against evil as I just have!
There is no need to criticize �Armageddon�. It is a wholly imaginary concept. It is the kind of thinking behind such a concept that is worthy of criticism. And that is what I have done above, Rick. I don�t find your post appalling, it is if anything very predictable. But it is very sad indeed, to watch an obviously intelligent and resourceful person like you engage in such hopeless fantasies. As I have already explained above I do find the death penalty barbaric. And the fact that in the US having the death penalty still doesn�t seem to have any effect on the highest crime rate in the western world. The fact that in your country, handguns kill more people than in places where there is war going on, should give you some clue as to what has to be done. No society tolerate murder, the death penalty has got nothing to do with that.
:Ironically, those people are quick to condemn Hitler and would spit on his grave, but when others express outrage against all the Hitler clones in the world like I just have, this is somehow "appalling." Maybe I'm mistaken, but just thinking ahead of some types of replies it seems this topic might get, and wondering why? Am I one of the few who feels this way? Does anyone else share my sentiments, and will those who don't tell me what is wrong about my sentiments just expressed?
Rick
I think many of us live in a different world from you Rick, not because we are in another physical world, but because of the way we perceive reality. This reality will be out of your grasp as long as you keep looking to the random collection of old writings commonly referred to as the �Bible� for guidance. The books, which in themselves is quite interesting is OK. It is when someone actually gets the idea that this collection of incomprehensible and mutually contradictory writings somehow is the word of some �God� that the tragedy starts to unfold.
Norm.