Posted by Rick on March 21, 1999 at 19:30:45 {MWSZV6.08fSjY}:
In Reply to: Different Perspective posted by Eduardo on March 21, 1999 at 12:55:05:
Eduardo, I used to think along similar lines. Grasping at straws to illustrate this thinking, a horror film comes to mind which I'll discuss in a moment.
Surely the implication of your post wasn't to imply that everyone on earth -- except Jehovah's Witnesses -- are "dead" anyway? Or was that your intent to imply?
In effect, an older and more current version of the horror film "Night of the Living Dead" by George Rimero, where 6 billion dead are walking the earth, and only God can mercifully stop them from moving around. This is Romero's symbollic version of Armageddon, and it's chilling in its implications.
If you never saw the original or recent remake of "Night of the Living Dead," it's about a global plague similar to the bovine virus (or "preon" disease) that kills the area of the brain responsible for conscious awareness. However, the rest of the brain that services the living body remains alive. Parts of the brain fail, causing the bodies to start deteriorating similarly to the decay of corpses. This is a horrific disease, and I recall years ago running across a similar "cannibalism" disease affecting parts of the brain causing people to cannibalize in the deep jungles of Africa. I suspect the author Rimero got his idea from that incident in Africa, but it's an ironic metaphor to what many Jehovah's Witnesses essentially believe is the deceased spiritual and therefore in effect actual physical condition of everyone who isn't a JW.
To continue about this movie, the plague is like a "preon" disease transmissible from cattle to humans -- parts of the brain die to where there's no moral consciousness driving the needs of the body. There's no consciousness in the body, but it still moves around to blindly fill hunger. Of course the movie exaggerates this disease -- billions of bodies blindly walk around worldwide and fills its needs in acts of gruesome cannibalism. The unsavory result is that anything "digestible" the body eats automatically, so basically, you've got billions of dead "eating machines" roaming the earth.
Get to the point Rick! you say? Okay! For some odd reason, several million people are immune to this disease. However, like AIDS, when they're injured (such as a bite) it can get in the bloodstream so they must avoid all contact with the dead. This seems symbolic of what you described; that the world is "dead" for the most part, whereas true Christians are alive.
If it were really like in the movie NOTLD, you would want to stay away from "apostates" because one bite and you're infected. You're one of them, cannibalizing the spirituality of other innocent living ones. Further, you would want to maintain as little contact with the "world" as possible, because they are all infected with the disease and essentially "dead" anyways. The wisest course is to wait for God to stop the involuntary movements of these walking corpses, to cleanse the earth of this disease for the benefit of several million living Jehovah's Witnesses.
Baptism could be treated as a form of "immunization" against this disease, and getting infected with a "bite" from an "apostate" individual would mean certain death. The movie NOTLD and its spinoff movies are really gruesome metaphors of the implications of your attitude that those who are living -- because they spend a mere 80 some years on earth before dying -- are really dead.
If we extend your metaphor to the ultimate, and maybe you did have this in mind, then even Jehovah's Witnesses today are "dead." The mistakes the organization has made, even though it corrected, has exposed all Jehovah's Witnesses to the "disease" of deadly sins of apostasy leading to death.
If it could be said truthfully, Eduardo, that the Society never made any substantial errors in its teachings, then you could conceivably claim the world is "dead" and JWs are "living" in the sense you illustrated. The problem is that if there was any point in time when this was true, this ended when false teaching (such as the organ transplant teaching) contaminated all of Jehovah's Witnesses, thus "infecting" them. We would have to end the movie at that point in history where the Society first let major false teachings creep in (even if they later corrected it). It would have been like everyone getting bitten and becoming "zombies," only later the Society says "we won't let that happen again!" Too late, because they claim Christendom is already good as dead even if they eventually see the light and abandon false teachings! They've already been "once bitten" and are doomed to certain spiritual and literal death at Armageddon. So basically for Jehovah's Witnesses, if we accept this line of thought defining the "dead" and "living," the movie ends where everyone becomes one of the living dead. Everyone including Jehovah's Witnesses become devoid of consciousness and thought, roaming the earth to simply fulfill bodily needs.
I think the solution is to define "life" and "death" differently, and to accept the real possibility that an incomprehensible number of mankind -- possibly a few billion or over half of earth's population -- will live through Armageddon. Thereafter, they accept the patient tutilage of Jesus Christ and teachers whom he appoints to teach the masses the truth over the millenium.
Rick