Would you?

Kotoko said:
1. If there was no one to tell you about God, would you believe?

2. If there was no heaven, and no afterlife, would you believe?

3. If there were no books, and no texts proclaiming the existance of God, would you believe?

4. If there were no promises, and no miracles to be had, would you believe?

1.How could you believe if no one tell you?
2.Nobady tell me.
3.No.
4.No.

I know what you are traying to say :)

SnakeLord
-Becouse we hear voices.
Kotoko
But are we inherently born with the knowledge of God?
-Yes.
Hapsburg
How can you be born with the knowledge of the existence of a nonexistant entity?
-How could be a robot born?
Mythbuster
-Right.
Xerxes
-Do not regret.
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
SnakeLord said:
Indeed, please do.
Click to expand...

Okay... sorry if it is rather long, but it's an interesting story, and has much to do with the non-religious person I am today.

Much to my surprise, I was born in a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Yup. My earliest memories of religion are all the same – it bored me to tears. JWs spend a lot of time in the ‘Kingdom Hall’ (KH) and going door to door. My life consisted of:

Monday: Home bible study
Tuesday: ~1.5 hour evening service at the KH
Wednesday: Home study
Thursday: Home study
Friday: 2 hour evening service at KH
Saturday 3-4 hours of walking door-to-door with parents
Sunday 2 – 2.5 hour morning service at KH.

While I believed that what I was being told was true, I never liked it much. Seemed like a strange way to run a universe. I hated how I was kept isolated – we were taught to view the rest of the world, including Christians who were not JWs, as being misled and/or wicked. We (my older brother and myself) could not play with a lot of the neighbor kids because “Bad associations spoil useful habits” – this is a JW-bible version of some passage in Matthew (24:14 I think). We were made to stick out like sore thumbs at school, because we had to sit during the pledge of allegiance. We would go to hockey games as a family and get a lot of odd looks as we sat in our seats stoically during the national anthems. (JWs do not participate in any patriotic activities.) These are the same people who are dead-set against blood transfusions, which they think are forbidden in the bible.

When I was about 12 my parents started having problems and eventually divorced. During the time the problems started, my father stopped going to the KH and I was overjoyed to be able to hang with him on Sunday AM watching football instead. My mom and brother kept going to KH for a while, but eventually they stopped too. Finally my folks split, which saddened me, but I was free from the JWs, which made me very happy. They were both disfellowshipped from the JWs.

My dad and I got along for the next 10 years or so, then he moved to Florida and guess what, he decided to get back into the JWs. He was eventually re-instated and got re-married. Then the fun really started. He really went off the deep end. He started by disowning everyone in his family who was not a Witness, including his own mother, who treated him like a king and was the sweetest, most positive woman I ever knew, may she RIP. He disowned his sister. And my older brother. You see, my brother was baptized, but I never was. Once you are baptized as a JW, you are ‘signed-up for life.’ Since my brother was now a non-JW, he received a series of angry letters from my dad telling him to get back to the KH, or else. I got some similar letters, but with a softer tone. I wrote him back and explained my views at the time, which he must have hated (I was an atheist at that point.) A couple years later he decided to move to Ecuador to do a JW mission. This was about 10 years ago or so.

But wait, it gets better.

My mom went on to get remarried and became a Catholic. She is a sweet person and bears no ill-will to anyone, including my father. And many years ago she told me a little story that forever changed my views on most everything…

Being born the second child meant that I was a candidate for a rare problem known as Hemolytic Disease of the Newborn. Basically, it results from having a different blood type from your mother and older sibling, and what happens during the violence of birth is apparently some mixing with your mothers blood such her antibodies enter your blood supply via the placenta and attack your own red blood cells – because one is Rh negative and the other Rh positive. I’m mangling the physiology explanation, but suffice to say I was a sick, anemic infant. The doctors wanted to give me blood to fix this, and of course, my dad wanted nothing to do with it. He told them no way, but the hospital had the legal resources to get me a transfusion anyway.

It is not clear if it happened before or after the transfusion, but my mom told me that my father snuck into the hospital one evening and was in the process of smuggling me out when he was stopped by security. Certainly, if it were up to him, I likely would have never lived. That was clearly preferable to him rather than the abomination of a blood transfusion.

So I am eternally thankful to the State of New York for basically giving me my life. And yes, I am still bitter about my father’s actions. And yes, I realize he is an extreme case, and > 95% of Christians would never do such a thing. I’ve become more and more accepting of religious people over time, but I certainly have a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. And there are still lots of religious fanatics out there, and I have no respect for them, having narrowly escaped one myself.

I have worked very hard to make my religious and philosophical choices based on reasonable arguments and not emotional ones. But I won’t deny that these events may have played some role in giving me some initial direction.

Anyway, thanks for reading.
 
Monday: Job & make some $$$
Tuesday: Job & make some $$$
Wednesday: Job & make some $$$
Thursday: Job & make some $$$
Friday: Bar, Disco, Sleep, Internet, buy food
Saturday = Watching saturday morning cartoons
Sunday = Super Bowl GO SEAHAWKS!

Life is fun :) Sory about that, i coudn't resist
 
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