In an earlier blog entry (A First Step…) I spoke about how it struck me as unfair that an accident of birth (mine, in the middle of the US of A) would somehow put me more in God’s favor than if I were born in, say, central China or India. And since I believed God to be nothing if not fair, then maybe it was not just unfair, but unlikely. This was my first significant step in questioning my belief system as one of Jehovah’s Witnesses. But therein be dragons, because if this basic premise was inaccurate, what else might I believe that should be challenged?
But first, a little dogma of Jehovah’s Witnesses, as taught by the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society (at least as I understood it).
As a Witness, I was taught a number of things as incontrovertible:
• There is a God.
• He reveals Himself to us through the Bible, His written word.
• He created us and everything else in the universe.
• Although He loves all of us, He is a just God (an eye for an eye, and all that).
• One of God’s angels (referred to in the Bible only as Satan, which means “Resistor”) rebelled, later leading Adam to sin through Eve and that’s why we all die (since Adam’s sin was before anyone on earth was conceived, all of us inherited Adam’s sin).
• God sent his son Jesus to earth to ransom us from the sin of Adam.
• He has a “chosen people” on earth doing His will, and they are Jehovah’s Witnesses.
• The Watchtower Bible and Tract Society (the legal entity of the worldwide organization of Jehovah’s Witnesses) is how He reveals His will to the faithful today.
• In the very near future (like, months or years, not centuries or even decades), God is going to cleanse the earth of wickedness (through Armageddon) and re-establish a theocracy on earth with Jesus ruling from heaven as King.
While not necessarily an all-inclusive list, I think that pretty well sums up what I was taught (and believed down to my toes); I daresay few Witnesses would disagree. There are obviously a whole bunch of corollaries to these statements; for example if God reveals Himself through Jehovah’s Witnesses, then all other religions (and the people in them) are wrong and are actually being misled by Satan. And they are thus part of “this wicked system of things” doomed to destruction at Armageddon, unless they “see the light” (again, as revealed by the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society) and join the faithful.
Another interesting corollary involves evolution and creation. Jehovah’s Witnesses do not accept evolution as a scientific fact; they believe in direct creation by God. But they are not anti-science; in fact a careful evaluation of their philosophy reveals no negativity toward science nor progress. So why the insistence on creation? It’s not simply a universally literal interpretation of the Bible. There’s a number of things in the Bible that Witnesses don’t accept as literal, including aspects of a Biblical creation story (Witnesses don’t believe the creative days were literal 24-hour periods, for example). The explanation is actually quite direct: the Bible states that Jesus died for all our sins. The reason it had to be him as God’s son was that all humans aside from Jesus were born with Original Sin, which we all inherited from Adam. If Jesus was without sin (as the Bible states), then Adam must have been also (for Jesus’ sacrifice to be equal). The only way that works is if there was an actual person, directly created by God (and thus without sin). Reject an actual person named Adam and the necessity of Jesus “sinlessness” goes away.
To restate: if we reject a literally created Adam, then the whole basis of Christianity’s belief in the grace of God (Jesus’ ransom sacrifice) goes away.
Houston, we have a problem.
