Sheep and Goats

Author: tomsheepandgoats

  • Above Us Only Sky on the Cruise Ship

    On the cruise ship vacation not so long ago, a makeshift chorale of passengers sung ‘Imagine’ as melodically as a church choir. Only, it was a chorale extolling the virtues of there being “above us only sky” and “no religion, too”—as though they might sing it in a hospital terminal word with the assurance it would bring comfort to ones in their final hours. I mean, only atheists can be so oblivious to what is meaningful in life.

    Then there was the frustrated foreign ticket taker who kept saying “Turn, please. Turn. Excuse me, turn!!” and I did keep turning the ticket, but it made no difference to the stupid machine. Now, had she said “Turn over” or “flip” I would have known that I had to do it opposite to the last scanner encountered. (Alas, I snapped at her a little, a rare lapse of politeness that suggests it is back to Bible 101 for me.)

    I’ll tell you one thing. I’d rather look out my airplane windows and see the Twilight Zone monster that terrified young William Shatner than I would seeing the horrific (but necessary) labyrinth of lines and security personnel and scanners one must navigate at international airports.

    It’s a little gimmicky, but you can walk into a Bethel and someone may ask you what you notice about the world map displayed overhead. Or the globe in the lobby, should there be one. The answer is that there are no borders, a fore-glimmer of the new system to come. Add to the signs of the times that scream “Last Days!!!” the fact that when I was a boy, you could board a plane with no more fuss than boarding a train. Buy a ticket and hop onboard. 

    We had many adventures during that cruise. Chief of all takeaways is the realization that, while the earth is round, it shouldn’t be. I know very well that the earth is round. I know it. At no time have Jehovah’s Witnesses been among the intelligentsia who supposed it was flat. But it should be flat! What was God thinking? It should be flat with all sunlight illuminating all surfaces at once. That way there’d be no such thing as jet lag. 

    ******  The bookstore

  • The Righteous One Perishes but No One Takes it to Heart

    There is no huge significance that the Doomsday Clock stands at 85 seconds to midnight instead of a minute or two either way. But there is significance for it to stand in any of those spots instead of 10:30 AM or even high noon. That’s probably the way to gauge a verse like Isaiah 57:1:

    “The righteous one has perished, But no one takes it to heart. Loyal men are taken away, With no one discerning that the righteous one has been taken away Because of the calamity.”

    It’s not a call to identify any specific “righteous ones” who have perished. It is not to be applied to that actor who passed away a few years ago, an actor who had garnered more good press and than bad press, so that a certain romantic chum of mine mused that his demise satisfied that verse—just like Dick Van Dyke’s death, when it finally occurs (Lord knows, having topped 100, he’s old enough) might also have made him think of the verse, had he not died first.

    No, you don’t focus on individuals. It is the times you focus on that make such a verse meaningful. The ones who perish don’t perish during glorious times so that you’re saddened they’ve missed the fun. They perish during times so perilous that you say ‘It’s just as well. Now they can sleep through the wreckage and awaken in the resurrection.’

    Incidentally, that Clock, a contrivance of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, was advanced four more seconds as of January 27, 2026. The Clock is symbolic, you understand. it is not a literal prediction of just 85 seconds left. Rather, it is an assessment of the mess humanity is in, and whether they are worse off or better off than the times just before. They are worse off, was the assignment of those Atomic Scientists, by four whole seconds.

    Whereas last year we were a refreshing safe .0001029615916 percentage distance away from total annihilation, this year we have gotten alarmingly close: only 0009837962963% distance away! The problems those scientists fret over include a failure of leadership to tackle worsening global risks like nuclear threats and record-breaking climate change, biological threats and pandemics. AI misuse and cyber risks add to the chaos. Clearly, these scientists aren’t cheerleading over the incredible successes of science. They are lamenting its redirection to evil.

    Science is a tool only as good as the ones wielding it, and the ones wielding it are not too good. The “broken-hearted ones living in the world” are not coming to any “agreement” as the ‘Let it Be’ song predicts. Nor does it comfort anyone to ‘Imagine’ that there is “above us only sky” and “no religion, too.” Very few world leaders have any use for religion today, The ones that do accept only the brand that “knows its place” (last place) and defers to human models of rulership.

    It’s a little like when I had a lengthy discussion with a man at the door over abiogenesis (origin of life) versus creation and he at last asked what difference did it make? Either way, we are here, so who cares how it happened? I answered that if God created life, it is just possible that he did not create it for nothing, that he has some purpose for it, and will not stand idly to see it all destroyed. But if we got here through abiogenesis, then any hope for humankind depends solely upon human efforts, and “they’re not doing too well.” The man’s wife, who had remained silent during our 45 minute discussion, spoke for the first time: “That’s a good point,” she said.

    It’s also a little like Timothée Chalamet, playing Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown, pushing back at the incessant demand he keep cranking out more peace, love, and cumbaya songs that transformed the genre as it marked his musical debut. ‘Well, they’re not exactly doing the trick now, are they?’ someone else observed. JFK had just been murdered, then Malcolm X. Robert F Kennedy and Martin Luther King would soon follow. The Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world inches from World War III.

    At the Newport Folk Festival, he didn’t sing ‘I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing,’ or even his own ‘Blowing in the Wind’ type songs. He sang ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’ to mark the end of an era. It was all over. Furthermore: “Well, I try my best to be just like I am, But everybody wants you to be just like them, They say, ‘Sing while you slave’ and I just get bored. I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more.” Problem was, he “had a head full of ideas that were driving him insane” and it was “a shame how they made him mop the floor” instead.

    There was lots of insanity making the rounds about then with those four icons killed in just five years, with nukes to the U.S. only spared because one of the three Russian shipboard commandants refused the order to launch. (It had to be unanimous for go-ahead). With that backdrop, you can almost see why a guy might get all excited that 1975 might mark the end, given that 6000 years of biblical history was to end just then.

    “Aw, you don’t believe we’re on the Eve of Destruction?” (P.F. Sloan – 1965)

    Looks like it was just a head fake, a dry run for the real thing to come shortly. It is just around the corner. To be sure, it is one heckuva corner. But it is just around it.

    ******  The bookstore

  • Pop’s Friends and ‘Agape’ Love

    Pop’s friends were invariably those on his bowling team. Or golf. Or the husbands of Mom’s friends. He was amiable and would get along with most anyone. One of his pals had always been controlling of his wife. After she died, he was wracked with guilt. She had wanted a computer when the devices were new. He flat out refused her. Not for any good reason. He just didn’t want her to have one. “If your mom had wanted a computer,” Pop said to me, retelling the story, “the first thing I would know about it would be to see it sitting here on this table.”

    Maybe it’s Pop’s story that recall two movies for me, both ranking quite high. In both, the husband is initially presented as the seeming star. In both, the facade is little-by-little stripped away to reveal the frauds they are underneath. In both, it is the woman who propped them up and convinced them they were better than they were. In both, those women were taken for granted, sometimes with disdain. Why do I think of that truism made many times in Witness literature that putting another down is the same as boasting, even if it presents differently? In both cases, the relative positions shift the same.

    ‘About Schmidt’ was one of those films. Jack Nicholson played the husband, a big dog at his firm as the top insurance salesman, many awards to his credit. Everyone gladhands him, looks up to him. His retirement looms. He has purchased a gigantic RV in which he and his wife plan to roam the country thereafter. He dreads it. How will he ever be able to put up with the inane woman? Turns out he doesn’t have to. She dies unexpectedly. Perhaps it was a heart attack; at any rate, it was sudden. 

    Thereafter, all his assumptions begin to unravel. Turns out that no one really liked him at the workplace. They tolerated him. He had a certain knack for the job, and so they stoked his ego throughout his working life. His usefulness over, they were all glad to bury his memory and move on. 

    Then, it turned out that his wife, a seeming dingbat he treated with familiar contempt, had been seduced by his best friend at work. Only once. Fists flew briefly when he finds out, but in the end it dawns on him, ever so slowly, that ‘Duh! What did he expect?’ He had treated her as a non-entity. Someone paid her a little attention and it was too new an experience for her to resist. 

    Such is the thread of the movie, as Schmidt’s pure ordinariness is revealed. Aimless, he pilots the huge RV around all by himself to the destinations he dreaded to go with his wife, only now he misses her. Now, he is likewise consumed with guilt. ‘Was I really that bad of a husband?’ he asks of her, atop the parked RV, looking up at the stars. He asks her forgiveness. He takes a falling star as a sign that forgiveness has been granted. It had been granted throughout his life. Now, at long last, a wiser man, it was again granted him via meteorite.

    The theme pops up in many films. It as so in ‘One True Thing,’ with the added ingredient of a daughter who initially idolizes college professor father, despises her mother, but by degrees comes to think she has had it entirely backwards. He would agree. As she deteriorates with terminal cancer, he despairs and repents. She has been the “one true thing” of his life, he realizes too late. He, the revered professor, always in demand, who may even have had a fling or two with some undergrads (roundly condemned today but it was a thing back then), comes to appreciate that he has really just been an empty bag of wind. Like Schmidt, he becomes full of remorse for how he took her for granted. 

    Any student of the Bible knows there are four Greek words for love and that ‘agape’ is the highest one, but it is the one not every marriage comes around to, and some do it too late. Agape is the principled form of love, the one applied to how God loves his people. It is a love that attaches itself to its object and does not let go until it has achieved its aim. Somewhere along the line, marriage has to incorporate this sort of love if it is to weather the decades. It can’t be self-centered. Unlike how God loves his people and stays the course until they come around, marriage incorporates the added ingredient of coming around oneself. It carries the added ingredient of molding two persons, not just one.

    Eventually, Pop’s bowling mate overcame his guilt and grief. He started crooning about this beautiful woman he had recently met and aimed to marry. “How beautiful can she be?” Pop mused. “She’s seventy-something years old.” All very fine, I guess, and much better than the Rod Stewart joke I recently heard. A beautiful and touching experience had happened to him just recently, the jokester related. He was there at the hospital to witness the birth of his next wife. 

    ******  The bookstore

  • Isaiah 51: Mined from a Quarry

    Never thought I’d live to see childbirth likened to mining a quarry, but that is the meaning of Isaiah 51: 1-2. We just don’t usually think of our own birth that way, as though mined from a quarry. Nobody, but nobody I have ever known has likened childbirth to mining from a quarry. Yet there it is in Isaiah. Why had I not noticed this before?

    “Listen to me, you who are pursuing righteousness, You who are seeking Jehovah. Look to the rock from which you were hewn And to the quarry from which you were dug.” (Isaiah 51:1)

    What rock is that? What quarry is that? The next verse answers.

    “Look to Abraham your father And to Sarah who gave birth to you.” (verse 2) Don’t ever say that the Bible writers were of the Victorian era. Imagine—likening childbirth to mining a quarry!

    Furthermore, the metaphor is extended—twice. Not only is Abraham the rock, but Jehovah also describes himself that way in Deuteronomy 32:18. There, the Israelites “forgot the Rock who fathered you, And you did not remember the God who gave birth to you.” Is God both the rock AND the quarry here? Clarifying, or maybe adding more mystery still, Paul later describes a “Jerusalem above” which served as “mother” to the early congregation, for the early congregation is the second extension of that metaphor. Christ is the rock upon which the entire Christian congregation is built. Simon is renamed Peter, a word that means rock, and is given the keys to direct its early doings on earth.

    “Simon Peter answered [Jesus]: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” In response Jesus said to him: “Happy you are, Simon son of Joʹnah, because flesh and blood did not reveal it to you, but my Father in the heavens did. Also, I say to you: You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my congregation, and the gates of the Grave will not overpower it. I will give you the keys of the Kingdom of the heavens, and whatever you may bind on earth will already be bound in the heavens, and whatever you may loosen on earth will also be loosened in the heavens.” (Matthew 16:16-19)

    Alas, only a remnant of either stays faithful, of the Christian congregation or of the ancient nation of Israel. It goes poorly for them when they do not, to the point that they “bow down so that [their enemies] may walk over you!’ So you made your back like the ground, Like a street for them to walk on.” (vs 23) It’s as graphic a metaphor as the quarry!

    And, for now, I’m not even going to touch the “stone” that was “cut not by human hands” and hurled into the feet of the statue Daniel saw. Nor will I mention one friend, a father, whose home I visited and he had somehow acquired a model replica of that statue, multi-colored to indicate the bronze, gold, silver, copper, etc, standing about a foot tall. “Do you shoot pebbles at its feet via slingshot for family study?” I asked him.

    No matter where one looks, it is all humans forgetting their Maker. Verse 13 poses the question: “Why do you forget Jehovah your Maker, The One who stretched out the heavens and laid the foundation of the earth?”

    Forsake God and he forsakes them. They are left to their own devices. Fearsome though the Jews were in battle, they were no match for the professionals. The Book of Isaiah logs how the ten-tribe kingdom to the north (a product of Rehoboam’s pig-headedness) forgot Jehovah their Maker, and then the remaining two-tribe kingdom to the south also forgot. Though delivered once in Assyrian times, they were not delivered again in Babylonian times. There, they would have to settle for a later remnant to be released.

    The ten tribes were decimated by Assyria, its survivors scattered throughout that empire. The remaining two tribes were decimated by Babylon, survivors exiled into Babylon itself, except for the lowly peasants, initially left to remain, but subsequently organized by rabble, whose put down would see them killed off.

    They are glutted with own counsel in the meantime. This is easier seen in the present day, because the present day is where we live. “Why do you Witnesses always have to assume things are getting worse? What does that belief do for you?” some atheist asked me. It helps me to explain why the Doomsday Clock is set at 90 seconds to midnight and not 10:30 AM.

    There is material progress in the modern day, no doubt about it. If you measure life by gadgets or by the demand for back-breaking work, it has improved for most. But if you measure it by any cognitive feeling of well-being, it has gone down the drain—or, in the words of my non-Witness dad, “the world is going to hell in a hand basket.” If you are in the house-to-house ministry, open by saying, “The world is crazy, and we think the Bible helps—in explaining why it is crazy, offering hope for the future, and guidance on how to live in the meantime.” People may or may not think the Bible helps, but no one in may part of the world will deny that it is crazy

    When I was a boy, there was one and only one possible “end of the world” scenario: nuclear war. I was not a Witness then and would not become one until my 20s. Today there are a dozen or more “end of the world” scenarios, most some variant of pollution or mismanagement of the earth. The very latest one is the changes AI may bring upon humanity. These things make people anxious and anxiety is an ever-present backdrop of life today. Recently I read of significant swaths of college students—was it one third?—reporting they were anxious “all of the time.” Substance abuse is pandemic today, as is loneliness. At least a third of all Americans are on some sort of antidepressants. They feel they need that to cope with life. Trust in the good will of others is at a low. One never knows when a complete stranger will do you harm for no reason at all. “Whistleblowers” arise in every field to convince us that no institution can be trusted. A 1968 Truth Book statement that humans cannot live together in peace—have they improved in that aspect since or have they become more contentious? In short, there is no stability in life for many, and lack of stability plays havoc with the emotions, even if materially you’re better off than back in the day.

    ******  The bookstore

  • One Recent Day in the Hospital

    I visited the ACE (Acute Care for the Elderly) unit of the hospital today and tried to get them to take comfort in the beautiful Lennon song Imagine, and the line in which there is “no religion, too,” and  “above us only sky.” 

    They all told me to go to hell.

    So I switched Beatles and brought up the song lyric. “And when the broken-hearted people living in the world agree, there will be an answer.”

    Nobody told me to go to hell, but someone muttered, “Fat chance they ever will!”

    One patient was watching, on his hospital TV, a science-fiction movie I had not seen before. In it, the just-arrived aliens, amidst widespread awe and hysteria, conducted a news conference.

    “What is your origin?” the lead scientist asked.

    “God. Duh! What kind of a planet is this? No wonder intelligent life in outer space doesn’t come here!”

    He was in hot water when he returned home, however. “What the . . . . You visited EARTH?!” Premier Ymphtxxpht rebuked the explorers. “That place is on the Do Not Call list!”

    In the waiting room was an atheist visitor, grumbling at God during his spare time: “God gives even children cancer and Christians say he loves with a perfect love?”

    Actually, since cancer was extraordinarily rare in past centuries but is now common in these days of food and environmental degradation, I think it is safe to say that Man gave children cancer.

    ******  The bookstore

  • Not Giving Up. Not Hardening One’s Heart

    Three times Joseph would have been within his rights to give up. Three times he suffered reversal so serious as to think life had betrayed him. And maybe, since God was in charge of life, that He had betrayed him, too. At each instance, the circuit overseer paused to ask how Joseph would have felt at that moment, what prospects would he have just then assigned to his future. How could he not have become despondent then, and he probably did for a time. But he recovered.

    And then, when the ones who caused him the most trouble came calling years later, had be been hard-nosed toward them, who could not understand it? But he did not. His heart had not hardened over the years. He had not been plotting his revenge. 

    The first occasion, a complete reversal of life for him, was his brothers selling him into slavery. He—his father’s favorite. When you see pictures of him in the publications, the circuit overseer said, it is often with Jacob’s arm around him. No more. Sent out to check on his brother’s welfare, they captured and sold him.

    He adjusted. He worked hard. His new master put him in charge of everything. Life started looking up. Trouble was, the man’s wife was always trying to seduce him. When he refused her, she accused him of attempted rape. The master believed her, threw him into prison. There, would he not have said, “What did I do wrong? I did everything right!” Might it not have seemed another betrayal by God? Could he have been blamed for giving up? It’s not like he could just figure on doing his time and getting out; his most likely prospect was to rot there.

    Then there was the time when the chum he made in prison got released, the pharaoh’s cupbearer. ‘Hey, make sure to mention my plight when you get out,’ Joseph implored him, ‘I don’t belong here.’ Surely, one can could on a chum. Nope. The guy forgot all about him. A third betrayal. How much can a guy take? Somehow, he recovered. 

    Interpreting dreams was a thing then in Egypt. They had huge tomes full of dreams and what they meant. Trouble was, it was tough to do, and there were plenty of frauds and phonies who knew how to string the dreamer along and make a fine living off it. The pharaoh had a dream that greatly troubled him. THEN the cupbearer remembered. ‘Hey, you know, there was this guy in prison who was pretty good at such things. Why don’t you give him a shout?’ 

    Pharaoh did. Joseph told him affairs and gove Jehovah all the credit. It resulted in complete reversal, more thorough than the previous betrayals had  been betrayals. Turned out the dream was of national significance, how to stock up for the upcoming famine. Joseph was put in charge of implementation. It was in while in that role, years later, that his brothers came crawling to him, having no idea who he was. “Oh, so NOW you come seeking my help!” the CO spelled out the drama that could have arisen had Joseph allowed it, but he did not. (He probably didn’t tell Pharaoh, though, the CO tossed in, because Pharaoh would not likely have been as forgiving. Then set a long and convoluted process in which Joseph maneuvered to see if his brothers had changed. Were they still the heartless louts of before? They were not. They had changed.

    The drama comprises nearly 30% of the Book of Genesis. It takes 14 chapters to unfold. It all comes to an end in the next book, Exodus, with a new pharaoh arisen who did not know Joseph. But that’s a reversal for another talk. It was not mentioned in this one. Fast forward a few thousand years to when my mentor would lose a business contract. Trouble is, he would say, a new pharaoh has arisen at the company who does not know Joseph. I had that happen to me a time or two as well. As did the CEO of one of my first accounts, the fellow whose coffee cup meme, “CAN’T a man drink his coffee in peace, for crying out loud?!” would many years later emblazon my tee shirt, a first for me, since I have long stated that I am not a billboard. This CEO showed me all the mounted awards his company had won. ‘They don’t mean a thing,’ he said. ‘Sometimes we get canned the very next year.’ Alas, he himself suffered a betrayal, in the form of a massive stroke that left him unable to function.

    But this all aside that the circuit overseer would not have included even had he been aware of it. I never saw that CEO again. His second-in-command took charge, whom I did not especially like. Today, I would have visited the stricken man. but he was many years my senior at the time, everyone held him in a sort of awe, self included, and the gulf between us was huge. 

    The CO would go on to develop themes of not giving up, not becoming despondent, and not letting the circumstances of life make one’s heart hard.

    ******  The bookstore

  • Isaiah 48:22: “There is no Peace for the Wicked”

    Jarringly out of place at the end of Isaiah 48, so it would seem, is the final verse: “There is no peace,” says Jehovah, ‘for the wicked.’”

    Who’s he talking about? Just who is “wicked?”

    Is he referring to the same as, whenever the younger brothers took to squabbling, the older bro would tilt back in his chair and say, “It’s amazing what Jehovah can accomplish, given what he has to work with?”

    Well, maybe a little. But, for the most part, it is attuned to what one sister said in public comment: “It should never be said that someone is worthless since you can always be used as a bad example.”

    More of that. A little of the former. At any rate, the “wicked” God refers to are from the ranks of his own people! They also seem to have comprised the rule, not the exception. Despite that, he did a lot, and it sure wasn’t due to their wonderfulness. 

    “For my own sake, for my own sake I will act, For how could I let myself be profaned?” (48:11)

    But regarding his own people? “I knew how stubborn you are —That your neck is an iron sinew and your forehead is copper.” (48:4) And “you have been called a transgressor from birth.” (vs 8)

    Again, what he does is not due to their record, but despite it: “But for the sake of my name I will hold back my anger; For my own praise I will restrain myself toward you, And I will not do away with you. (vs 9)

    As to his own people—it just got so tiresome to deal with them—he addressed (vs 1): “You who swear by the name of Jehovah And who call on the God of Israel, Though not in truth and righteousness.”

    How can one not think of a first century counterpart utterance of Jesus, that many would come to him in the final day, with their “Lord, Lord, didn’t we do this? Didn’t we do that?” only to hear the rebuke: “I never knew you. Get away from me, you workers of lawlessness!” “Workers of lawlessness” versus “truth and righteousness” is apparently the deciding factor. Loudly singing the name in itself doesn’t cut it. (Matthew 7:22-23)

    No sense in squabbling over this passage, because each one will apply it to the other guy. But it does show that the popular view of Jesus being so loving that’s it’s near impossible to get him upset is wrong. Apparently, it’s quite easy to get him going, but also quite easy to avoid. Just supplement your acceptance of our Lord’s redemption with “doing the will of my Father who is in the heavens,” and you are okay. (Matthew 7:21)

    It’s a little hard to imagine that “doing the will of my Father who is in the heavens” would consist of no more than being nice and helping out the poor. Those are not such polarizing activities that one could later turn against them, becoming “enemies of the cross,” as Paul said many had done. “For there are many—I used to mention them often but now I mention them also with weeping—who are walking as enemies of the torture stake of the Christ.” (Phillipians 3:18) Nor does it seem that anyone could later interpret them as “shackles” and “ropes” that the very “kings of the earth” and their “high officials” would want to break free from. (Psalm 2:2-3)

    Ah! The ray of hope: “No, you have not heard, you have not known, And in the past your ears were not opened.” (vs 8) Okay. So, leave the past in the past. Accept the Lord, come to him in repentance, but then don’t “accept the undeserved kindness of God and miss its purpose.” (2 Corinthians 6:1) “Gonna change my way of thinking; Make myself a different set of rules,” is the way Bob Dylan put it. “Gonna put my good foot forward; stop being influenced by fools.”

    Are you saved upon doing that? One circuit overseer addressed a Bible-belt (Southeastern U.S.)  congregation on how to respond when people ask “Are you saved?” Aren’t you? he said. Aren’t you in a saved condition? If you hesitate in any way, perhaps to clarify trinitarian concerns or to point out that it is not once saved-always saved, they take it as a ‘No.’ So just say Yes. Whereupon he had the congregation repeat three times, “I am saved.”

    Really applying all this Jesus likens to the cramped gate versus the broad and spacious way that most people prefer. “Go in through the narrow gate, because broad is the gate and spacious is the road leading off into destruction, and many are going in through it; whereas narrow is the gate and cramped the road leading off into life, and few are finding it.” It just might entail major changes in life. Like another circuit overseer who described that car easing its way veerrrrry slowly through the cramped gate. Upon squeezing through, everyone breathes a sigh of relief. The car accelerates then halts with a THUD.

    Oh no! The trailer didn’t make it through!

    ******  The bookstore

  • You Almost Never Have all the Facts

    Lot was a righteous man. The Bethel speaker said so. Three times 2 Peter 2:7-8 says he was. So, he must have been.

    “And [God] rescued righteous Lot, who was greatly distressed by the brazen conduct of the lawless people—for day after day that righteous man was tormenting his righteous soul over the lawless deeds that he saw and heard while dwelling among them.”  

    It really bothered him to see all the riff-raff and how they were carrying on. 

    And yet, righteous is not the first word coming to mind when most think of him. What is? Quarrelsome? Opportunistic? Materialistic? Abraham offered him a choice and he chose the best portion. Just like the circuit overseer was dismayed when Ernie chose the biggest piece of pie. You’re not supposed to do that, he said, you’re supposed to defer to the other person. Well, which piece would you have taken? Ernie countered. He replied that he would have chosen the smaller piece. “Well, there you go,” the slick fellow said.

    But maybe, just maybe, the Bethel speaker said, Lot was older than Abraham—did you ever think of that? It could be. Abraham was probably the baby of the family. Long as their child-producing days were back then, his brothers might have been much older than he, so much so that their kids would also be older than him. So maybe Lot was. This led to the observation that the older man always gets the cushier place, which led to the sacrosanct Bethel practice of bidding on both rooms and apartments. I know this first-hand from our Bethel friends who maneuvered forever to get a fine apartment up there in the Sliver Building that Bethel owned, and there we were after a day of sightseeing in New York, up high in his apartment with wine and cheese and a magnificent view of Manhattan. Alas, soon afterwards, he and his wife were transferred to Patterson. What would they see outside those windows, cows?

    Then, too, since Lot had been kidnapped years ago, swept away, and it took a SWAT team to free him, maybe, just maybe, he suffered shell-shock, PTSD, and Abraham knew that, so no wonder Lot would thereafter avoid the wide open fields. No wonder he would seek out the safety in numbers. So there.

    Could the Bethel speaker prove it? No. But that was his point, he said. You also couldn’t disprove it. In fact, it was all a segue to lead into something else. His talk had nothing to do with proof, he said, nor with Lot, for that matter. His talk had to do with not jumping to conclusions when you don’t have all the facts. 

    We love to do it. We do it all the time. But we shouldn’t. You almost never have all the facts, and instead extrapolate from what you have, which sometimes is very little. The speaker next gave examples, one or two from the scriptures where such is frequently the case, but most from real life, in which it was easy to be hard on someone—until you knew a key missing fact which turned the entire situation around—as it might have with Lot. 

    That’s why it’s so much easier, not to mention more productive, to turn your scrutiny upon yourself, and not the other person. Even with yourself you may not have all the facts but you’ll have 100 times what you do with the other person. Remember what everyone’s mama used to say: when you point your finger at someone else, there are three pointing back at you.

    ******  The bookstore

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  • GB Update: Use of One’s Own Blood (under construction)

    who is accountable for the lives lost under the blood doctrine?

    Who is accountable when a Christian gets killed in war? Who is accountable when a missionary is kidnapped or killed? Who talked them into so putting their lives at risk?

    I am surprised that this atheist argument—which holds that loss of life is permanent and irreversible calamity—is picked up on a Christian forum.

    I think it’s called “living in the world.” Things change. Time and changing settings make you look at things anew.

    The Acts 15:29 principle about “abstain from blood” remains intact. What was said in the update was just an extension of something said 20 years ago: “A Christian must decide for himself how his own blood will be handled in the course of a surgical procedure, medical test, or current therapy.”

    People work with the understanding they have at present, not the one they will have in the future. Ask the relatives of anyone who suffered harm, even loss of life, in some war that was all the rage at the time but was later seen as wrong-headed. Or due to some scientific decree what was seen to be cutting edge at the time but is now seen as deluded. Such things happen. Some adjust and some don’t.

    “Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated,” said Mark Twain.

    Moreover, I’m not sure how many lives were lost previously. It will be like Covid-19, when, in order in inflate the numbers, if you died for any reason while having Covid-19, it was recorded that you died OF Covid-19

    …I think it’s called “living in the world.” Things change. Time and changing settings make you look at things anew.

    The Acts 15:29 principle about “abstain from blood” remains intact. What was said in the update was just an extension of something said 20 years ago: “A Christian must decide for himself how his own blood will be handled in the course of a surgical procedure, medical test, or current therapy.”

    People work with the understanding they have at present, not the one they will have in the future. Ask the relatives of anyone who suffered harm, even loss of life, in some war that was all the rage at the time but was later seen as wrong-headed. Or due to some scientific decree what was seen to be cutting edge at the time but is now seen as deluded. Such things happen. Some adjust and some don’t. “Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated,” Mark Twain said. 

    The point is that we put up with it in any other venue, be it nations, be it science. Time passes by and we look at many things anew. It is only in a disliked venue that people will not put up with it. 

    JWs people lost their lives because they refused blood transfusions because of the WTJWorg ban. GB are blood guilty, for sure.

    To the extent they are, so is any leader of any sort presiding over policies in which anyone suffered harm (and you, if you had any role in putting them there). They “knew or should have known” is how the lawyers put it. Whether it be changes in politics, statecraft, science, economics, medicine, manufacturing, even sports, policies change all the time, by your reasoning making whoever was in oversight before “blood guilty.” Yet, we all accept this as a cost of living in the real world. Nothing is frozen in time. Everything updates as time progresses, and not always for the better.

    “The “life-saving instruction” they gave you was paid for dearly. It was paid for with Human Lives. You served God in ignorance and arrogance.”

    How are Human Lives different from human lives? Got it that, in atheistic society today, human life is all that counts, and even among the religious, mankind’s salvation is the overriding issue, whereas with JW it is secondary to sanctifying God’s name—if the latter happens, the former automatically follows. Yet, even with these caveats, JW is by far the “safest” religion out there. Abstinence from drugs, tobacco, alcohol abuse, war, even extreme sports far overweigh anything regarding transfusions, regardless of the latest tweak, so that to vociferously oppose them plainly points to another motive. I mean, if Human Life is truly your greatest concern, look anywhere else first.

    Who would think that a faith that is non-violent, that has all but eliminated racism, that teaches living honesty and peaceably among others, and that doesn’t meddle with governments would be the subject of such online furor as is so with the Witnesses? There has to be another motive for this to be so.

  • The Owner’s Manual

    This thought I liked from yesterday’s Watchtower Study and compared it to an ad for online therapy now making the rounds in my neck of the woods:

    “After they rebelled, Adam and Eve immediately experienced the consequences of their violating God’s law​—a law that was “written in their hearts.” (Rom. 2:15) They could sense a change in themselves​—and not for the better. They felt compelled to cover portions of their body and hide like criminals from their Creator. (Gen. 3:7, 8) For the first time, Adam and Eve were subject to feelings of guilt, anxiety, insecurity, pain, and shame. To one degree or another, those feelings would plague them until their death.​—Gen. 3:16-19” (para 10)

    The ad for therapy asserts that it can help since “we’re all figuring it out.” Not to diss therapy; it probably can help—if not always, at least sometimes. But it seems like it can help a whole lot more if you if you augment  counselors yet “figuring it out” with sources that have figured it out, sources that tell us where “feelings of guilt, anxiety, insecurity, pain, and shame” (para 10) come from in the first place. Those emotions bubble up and reappear in settings far removed from their origin, but it is still good to know what their origin is. 

    The illustration that resonates with Witnesses is that of an owner’s manual for a product. You’d be crazy not to heed its directions. Witnesses figure the Bible is the owner’s manual for the product that is us. They draw that thought from scriptures such as 2 Timothy 3:16-17: “All Scripture is inspired of God and beneficial for teaching, for reproving, for setting things straight, for disciplining in righteousness,  so that the man of God may be fully competent, completely equipped for every good work.”

    Since God made us, it’s only going to create internal discord to go against what is “written in our hearts,” from Romans 2:15 again in that paragraph. You really do have to cooperate with the owner’s manual. The point of this post is not to devalue therapy. It is to elevate instruction from our Maker.

    ******  The bookstore