Standing Up For One's Beliefs in Class

[TrueTomHarley]

At the Regional Convention, at least half of the videos were directed at young people. This is good because they are under more peer pressure than most not to 'go along with the crowd.' All young people experience this pressure, but Jehovah's Witnesses youth more than usual because what they stand for is more specific and the degree to which they stand is more determined. Besides, there are many young people who resolve the pressure not to go along with the crowd by going along with the crowd. Sometimes they go so far as to answer the wise words of their mama, "If everyone jumped off of a cliff, would you jump off, too?" with a "That's what I'm talkin about!"

Such talks at the convention would feature some Bible character doing something that took guts, and then the modern video application have some young person taking a bold stand based upon consideration of it. I don't remember the specific talk, but I do remember the specific video of a high school girl saying how she was really quite shy but got into the habit of, right from the start, at school's opening intro 'show and tell' session, reveal that she was one of Jehovah's Witnesses and thereafter let it be known, when all the kids are quizzing each other as to what they did on the weekend, that she engages in spiritual activity during much of that time. That is all she did.

"People started coming to me with their problems," she relates. Upon establishing herself as a member of something she thinks works better, all she has to do is be nice, cooperative, friendly, and it is easier for her to stand firm when peer pressure to do something she thinks wrong comes her way. People approached her, she said, and to the extent they did, she was ready to discuss what she had and how she found it had worked for her. Let me tell you, it works way better than haranquing people over religious doctrine, which few in the West care much about anyway, and the ones that do are inclined to do nothing but argue over it.

The Watchtower Study Sunday furthered that basic youth-supporting theme, with paragraphs discussing various situations. When another student approaches her teacher, and you know it is a science teacher because of the ascending apelike creatures on the chart in the background, she does not have to convince him to turn the whole troupe around and march them back into the slime from whence they came; he is not going to do that. All she has to do is tell him that she doesn't buy it. It is undermining to her faith and it is not sufficiently logical to be allowed to do that. To overturn the common sense model seen everywhere else that anything made has a maker and the more complicated the made thing is the smarter the maker must be will take proof more conclusive than what is offered.

Even the teacher, though he may mutter a bit, may be able to live with this because Watchtower publications speak of the six days of creation being "epochs" and the period prior to their commencement being "aeons." Jehovah's Witnesses are not young-earth creationists.

When the Watchtower wants to suggest a biology teacher, always the ascending ape chart is in the background; that's how it is done. It probably is done everywhere, not just in the Watchtower, for that one chart instantly conveys the idea as nothing else does. Icons are everywhere. Sometimes they are not even accurate. When a scientist was impressed with a discussion between he and I and wanted to reproduce it on his own blog, he represented himself with a double-helix. I got stuck with a cross! So I told him Jehovah's Witnesses do not believe that Jesus died on a cross but on an upright stake. "I knew that, actually," he said, "but an upright stake makes a ridiculous looking icon." What could I say? I had to bear my cross.

Several videos (back to the Regional Convention) feature Witness youths being put down, sometimes even by the teacher, and thereafter mustering up boldness to ask to address the whole class, always (in the cases shown) winning respect from students and teachers alike.

 

[James Thomas Rook Jr.]

 

That is why I have adopted a "chainsaw" approach.

It actually hurts no one.  Not really.

Nothing like getting offended to make a person start thinking.

.... most of the time.

 

[JW Insider]

13 hours ago, TrueTomHarley said:

Watchtower publications speak of the six days of creation being "epochs" and the period prior to their commencement being "aeons." Jehovah's Witnesses are not young-earth creationists.

Just an aside but this is a fairly recent article in agreement with TTH's statement above:

*** w11 2/15 pp. 8-9 pars. 10-13 Holy Spirit—At Work in Creation! ***

• 10 The Bible goes on to describe what God did during a series of creative days. These are not 24-hour days but are epochs. . . . 13 After aeons had passed and God had produced innumerable animate and inanimate works, the earth was no longer “formless and waste.”

But what do we make of a previous Watchtower article, just 15 years earlier, where we still have this:

*** w96 4/1 p. 13 par. 10 Praise the King of Eternity! ***

• 10 Wonderful developments took place on earth during the six creative “days” of Genesis chapter 1, each day covering thousands of years.

We know that there is absolutely no reason to put any emphasis on the "6,000 years of man's existence on earth" unless we believe that each of the creative days was 7,000 years long and that the millennium should therefore "fit" into God's rest day before the 7th day is finished. This is why we believe the 7th day is now coming to its close.

*** w98 7/15 p. 15 par. 6 Have You Entered Into God’s Rest? ***

• As “the seventh day” comes to its close, the earth will have become a global paradise inhabited eternally by a family of perfect humans. (Isaiah 45:18) “The seventh day” is set aside for, or dedicated to, the outworking and fulfilling of God’s will regarding the earth and humankind. In that sense it is “sacred.” . . .

  Though “the seventh day”—God’s rest day—is still in progress, . . . . [v]ery soon, the Messianic King, Jesus Christ, will take action. . . . During Christ’s Thousand Year Reign, Jesus . . . will bring earth and mankind to the state that God had purposed.

*** w94 7/15 p. 29 How Accurate Is the Jewish Calendar? ***

• Many thousands of years went by between the first creative day and the sixth, when Adam was created. Dating the creation of Adam at the same time as that of the physical heavens and earth is neither Scriptural nor scientific. . . . Still, how was it determined that the “Era of the Creation” began in 3761 B.C.E.?

[Of course, the point of the article was to dismiss the traditional Jewish calendar date of 3761 B.C.E. for the creation of Adam, even though our own chronology is only different by 265 years.]

*** w94 9/1 p. 6 Science, Religion, and the Search for Truth ***

• Religion Gives Creation a Bad Name  In a supposed attempt to uphold the Bible, the “creationists”—mostly allied with fundamentalist Protestants—have insisted that the earth and the universe are less than 10,000 years old. This extreme view has invited the ridicule of geologists, astronomers, and physicists, for it contradicts their findings.
• . . . Another excess of religion is the way some interpret the six ‘days’ of creation. Some fundamentalists insist that these days are literal, restricting earthly creation to a period of 144 hours. This provokes skepticism in scientists, for they feel that this claim conflicts with clear scientific observations. However, it is the fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible—not the Bible itself—that is at odds with science. The Bible does not say that each creative “day” was 24 hours long; indeed, it includes all these ‘days’ in the much longer “day that Jehovah God made earth and heaven,” showing that not all Biblical ‘days’ contained just 24 hours. (Genesis 2:4) Some could have been many thousands of years in length.

The last sentence there was a very important change of doctrine because it allowed that each creative day might be a different length. Of course, this could potentially spoil the idea that the 7th day had to be 7,000 years in length. The idea that each creative day had to be exactly 7,000 years in length goes all the way back to the Photo-Drama of Creation and was a major theme.

It was still a crucial piece of the "1975" arguments, both before (as cautionary) and was used immediately after the "failure" of 1975 expectations, as a possible reason for the failure:

*** w76 7/15 p. 436 pars. 17-19 Keeping a Balanced View of Time ***

• There are reasons why we cannot know this. For one thing, even though Bible chronology clearly indicates that we have reached the mark of six thousand years since the time of the creation of the first human, Adam, it does not tell us just how long after that event the sixth creative day came to its close and the seventh creative period or “day,” God’s great rest day, began. . . . 18 But that great rest day did not begin immediately after Adam’s creation. Other events took place after Adam’s creation but before the close of the sixth creative day. One of these is of great importance to all of us. That is the creation of the first woman, Eve. . . .  19 How much time elapsed between the creation of the man and that of the woman? The Bible does not reveal this.

Again, the timing of the creation of Eve is meaningless in this context, unless we believe that the creative days were exactly 7,000 years each.

The Watchtower was still explicitly arguing for each creative day being 7,000 years even 10 years later. The following from 1987 is one of the last Watchtower articles in Fred Franz style on a Fred Franz topic outside of his work on Revelation - Its Grand Climax At Hand which was also completed in 1987/88

*** w87 1/1 p. 30 Questions From Readers ***
Does that Jubilee correspond to the period following God’s creative week of 49,000 years?

• Because the number 49 occurs in both cases, it might seem that the Jubilee would foreshadow the time following the end of a creative week of 49,000 years. But . . . what occurred during Israel’s Jubilee corresponds more with what will occur during the Millennium, the last thousand years of such creative week. . . . Second, a study of the fulfillment of Bible prophecy and of our location in the stream of time strongly indicate that each of the creative days (Genesis, chapter 1) is 7,000 years long. It is understood that Christ’s reign of a thousand years will bring to a close God’s 7,000-year ‘rest day,’ the last ‘day’ of the creative week. (Revelation 20:6; Genesis 2:2, 3) Based on this reasoning, the entire creative week would be 49,000 years long.
• Noting the similarity in numbers, some have compared the 49 years of the ancient Jubilee cycle to such 49,000 years of the creative week. . . .  and humans have existed, not for 49,000 years, but for about 6,000 years. The Bible shows that some time after Adam and Eve were created,. . . . By the end of the Millennium, mankind will have been raised to human perfection, completely free from inherited sin and death. Having thus brought to an end the last enemy (death passed on from Adam), Christ will hand the Kingdom back to his Father at the end of the 49,000-year creative week.—1 Corinthians 15:24-26.

I might move this discussion under a more appropriate topic, but I started it here because, even recently, we do still present ourselves as "young earth creationists." We allow that the earth could have been here for billions of years, but that the creative days were only on the order of thousands of years long. We never print a statement saying they could have been tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions. Therefore, this is still extremely young for the aforementioned geologists who find their evidence for creative days going back at least 125 MILLION years for plants bearing forth seed according to their kind.

Something happened to the doctrine between 1987 and 1994, but I don't know if there is any more information on the change other than just the fact that 1994 contradicts 1987 and we should therefore consider it to be 'new light.' But no one has commented on how this might change our view of the millennium fitting into the 7th day. Or whether we should still use Hebrews to show that the 7th day lasts for thousands of years.

• (Hebrews 4:1) . . .Therefore, since a promise of entering into his rest remains. . .

 

[Evacuated]

56 minutes ago, JW Insider said:

These are not 24-hour days but are epochs. . . . 13 After aeons........

This is a much more reasonable approach than the rather quaint efforts to shoehorn the earth's creative week into 6x7000 yr. compartments. By that old reckoning it appears that we are 43 years in to Adam's settlement/cultivation/animal naming/no helper period and still counting.

Incidentally, whilst we are talking about adjustments, did you find the Courage from Creation videos highlighting a rather less disneyesque side to animal behaviour than usual? I mean, what will mongooses do in the New World? Crack Brazil nuts for us? I was disappointed no one mentioned the Honey Badger actually..........

[JW Insider]

53 minutes ago, Gone Away said:

I mean, what will mongooses do in the New World? Crack Brazil nuts for us?

True, it said that the mongoose relies on "God-given" defenses and abilities to defeat the cobra. No more anachronistic blaming of the teeth of saber-toothed tigers at least indirectly on Satan and the fall of the first human pair.

[TrueTomHarley]

11 hours ago, JW Insider said:

I might move this discussion under a more appropriate topic, but I started it here because, even recently, we do still present ourselves as "young earth creationists." We allow that the earth could have been here for billions of years, but that the creative days were only on the order of thousands of years long. We never print a statement saying they could have been tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions. Therefore, this is still extremely young for the aforementioned geologists who find their evidence for creative days going back at least 125 MILLION years for plants bearing forth seed according to their kind.

 

There was an Awake interview of Michael Behe, who in the main supports evolution, but simply says that it has limits. It would not have happened if the two hated each others guts.

I doubt the thousands of years from the model once applied to creation means anything anymore. Particularly since they have said :we don't do anti-types anymore.' You get almost as much bang for the buck, with no downside, by saying 'this reminds us of that.' Can anyone come along later and say that it doesn't?

We can overthink things. Aren't there a few examples in theocratic histroy where memes competed with each other for a time before one emerged as the winner?

I think, with the exception of Adam and Eve, they are saying 'to each his own' as to days of creation. Let scientists be scientists and Bible teachers be Bible teachers. Even with Adam and Eve, I invite people who I think might stumble over it to think of it as a metaphor and try to discern the underlying meaning. People love being thought perceptive enough to be entrusted with such a challenge. They can go back and resolve it in more detail for themselves at a later time, if they wish, as I did.

[James Thomas Rook Jr.]

I am curious TTH ... how did you resolve the fact that the Australian Aborigines  go back 30,000 and more years?

I have explained at least four times, here on the archive, how I resolved it.

The same way I resolved how Cain got married in the Land of Exile.

[Space Merchant]

Unfortunately one has to stand up for their belief in the Bible, in my experience, it was a bit harsh, it consist of both hate, racism a chalk full of discrimination being directed towards me and several instances of the same person attempting to provoke me so I can physically hit him, in an attempt to play the blame game to pin the accusations against me, another instance is where I almost did something because I was pushed to do so, but I merely pinned the same kid down and it was only then he had been exposed for what he has been doing to people who is not the same race as him, and I guess that pin down caused the other kids to speak up finally when they saw the bully on the ground, mind you this was the 3rd grade, granted the fact at the time, most American kids were not aware of someone their age who knows twice as much as they do of not just the Bible, but of a lot of other things, education and learning was kid key in my household since I was on the islands.

I was not Nationalistic or Patriotic either, for when I was 10, when 9/11 happened, when the Twin Towers fell, I remember someone, my age, saying why didn't America stop the plane and save all those people, as I grew older, I know the truth and how monstrous people can be, the blood of all those was of government hands by means of corruption and money and power, should such have not been in place at the time, those Towers would have still been standing, but this is the price they pay for messing around in the Middle East, but history repeat itself and we can see this now being played out by world powers and their supporters.

Other than that, such is the reason why I can be very strict when it comes to history, the Bible and other things because the way I see it, it is as if I am back in that class, despite being a young adult now. Unlike my younger self though I am more restraint, I do not pin people down physically, if anything, I throw knowledgeable punch with facts, reasoning, and logic, and expose some people for speaking things that are false and or of conspiracy - for, knowledge is indeed power.

There will be always someone for or against you, so being on a defense is always key, for at times it is not the faith they target, it is your race, your background, the way you look either physically or the say you dress, they care not for who you are as a person because they brand you the second they discover who you are and or what you follow.

But that being said, if a child is very, very intelligent for his or her own good, all that can be said is for this young one to prepare for the storm, the storm can be positive at times, and negative. For some parents do not give a phone or a tablet to a child to play games all day without breaks, Temple Run, Candy Crush, or what have you, perhaps that new Fortnite nonsense that is blowing up, on the other side of the spectrum, some parents give physical books, have a give do research and more.