Facebook and the Watchtower

Facebook is my blog's enemy. For example, most everyone in my Facebook circles (or in my wife's circles) knows that my mom was diagnosed with cancer, but I've never made it over to write up a post on my blog about it.

That was just one example, but pretty representative. (and my mom is doing quite well - God is walking with her and is healing her through the various procedures.)

I have a vague memory of thinking a month ago that I would start posting here more frequently since it's easier to put longer thoughts here than on the Facebook status area. But, alas and alack, that seemed to fail. But (again), hope springs eternal, so here I go again.

That's the "Facebook" part of the title. Here's the "Watchtower" part.

About two weeks ago, we were handed a couple handouts from some high school or college age people while we were at the store. They went into the recycling bin, but I flipped through them before I tossed them in. It was interesting to see how they were virtually indistinguishable from common Christian pamphlets - there was nothing of the gospel of Christ in them, but were almost completely filled by self-help and social/political concerns.

Obviously there was nothing in them about Jesus actually being truly God since they don't believe that, but there wasn't even anything dealing with salvation in anything other than live-a-better-life-so-your-life-will-be-better sort of junk.

Like I said, it was virtually indistinguishable from most Christian pamphlets I run across. I did note a couple carefully phrased statements about Jesus which avoided implying that Jesus was one with God, but if you weren't looking for that, one would be unable to tell that they weren't Christian pamphlets.

That's a VERY sad state of affairs.

I did get a kick out of a particular part, though again it was a somewhat sad "kick". They had a "Reader Question" section, one of which was a question "Will the earth always produce enough to sustain life?"

By "life" the article definitely referred to human life on the scale we have now and foresee into the future. They stressed that modern famines are typically not caused by a lack of food in the world, but rather the distribution of that food, often caused by politics. Then they had to use a Bible verse to back themselves up. Here's what they said - Genesis 8:22.

What does it say? "As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, ... will never cease." They use that to say "Thus, just as surely as we know that the sun will shine each day, we can be confident that the earth will never cease to produce what is needed to sustain life."

Wow! No, that's not what it says, even if you use their own apparent "literal" reading. It doesn't say that the seedtime and harvest will always be sufficient to feed mankind, just that they will continue. And never mind that their literal reading is completely missing the point of the passage - it is immediately after the Flood and rainbow promise from God that He would never again destroy the earth by water.

That context does seem to change what the verse means, just a touch. But never mind that - they are taking the Bible "literally"!

Lest this be taken as a slam against the Watchtower publication and the group which supports it, remember that I said their pamphlet was pretty much indistinguishable from Christian publications. I'm slamming on the far too common tendency for Christians to take the Bible "literally" and completely miss the point of what is being said.

Common example: using bits and pieces of the Psalms to support specific details of Creation theories. (I'm looking at you whoever first claimed that "spread the heavens like a tent" means God used a white hole-like mechanism to create the universe - "spreading" matter! That has no more support for it than claims about "pillars of heaven" meaning the Bible says there are pillars holding up the sky.)

But, thankfully, the Church also has many members in it who eschew silly "literal" readings like those. God is good and I love His Church, it's just that every once and a while it's hard to swallow what some of my brothers and sisters spout off.