Dear Rahvin;
But to say that "hope of the resurrection" is the ONLY source of comfort and hope is horribly bigoted and arrogant. A Hindu would draw comfort and hope from the belief that their child will be reincarnated, perhaps into a better life. And it is still valid to say that an atheist could take pride in the way they raised their child, and be at peace with the life their child was able to lead. I'm not saying that it doesn't hurt like hell, and I'm not saying that it ever goes away. I am saying that a person can remain strong and retain a positive outlook on life and a sense of inner peace despite that pain. . . . Atheists lose children just as often as Christians, it hits them just as hard, and I doubt you can show that every one of them loses their sense of inner peace any more than a Christian does.
The hope of the resurrection is the only hope of seeing your dead loved one again, reincarnation doesn't offer that hope. Reincarnation is a poor sort of hope anyway, since even if there was any truth in it, the person has no memory of their past life, the mind is wiped clean. If that happened, the person is gone, reincarnation of a vegetable, would be the result. For without what is in our minds that makes us who we are, we would be nothing, brain dead. The hope of the resurrection is the only real hope, non-Christian religions have nothing in comparison and their explanations for evil and other things fall just as short. Most importantly of course, is that fact that man made religions have make believe hope, since it isn't from Jehovah God.
Yes an atheist could at least take pride about having raised their child, but they have no hope at all, just bleak acceptance. Perhaps some atheists do manage to maintain a positive outlook on life after such a lost, but they have to do it without any hope. Those who do, are a testimony to their personal strength, not to the strength of the philosophy of atheism. There is no comfort or real inner peace (the kind built on hope) in atheism. As a group, I would expect that those who have real faith in the resurrection cope far better then a group of atheists. I have seen a very marked difference between Jehovah's Witnesses everyone else in coping with the lost of a loved one in death, ours is a measured grief, like the child has been whisked away to a far country without our consent, but we know he will return to us in time. While for others, the grief is total.
I have personally known several atheists who are more moral, more caring, more genuine, more emotionally stable, and mentally stronger than nearly all of the Christians I have known. My experiences would tend to disprove your assumption that all atheists are hopeless and dead inside.
And what hope does an atheist have in the face of death? If they have no hope, then they are hopeless, if they have accepted death then they are in a way already dead inside.
Most christians are such in name only as you know already, hypocrites are never at peace, and since most christian religions follow the word of man rather than the Word of God, they are a poor example anyway.
Many people have read the Bible and concluded that it did NOT, in fact, provide satisfactory answers. To say that the Bible is the ONLY source of satisfactory answers is not only foolhardy, but bigoted against other religions beyond belief.
Reading something is not a guarantee of comprehending it. (Acts 8:30-31)" "Do you actually know what you are reading?" He said: "Really, how could I ever do so, unless someone guided me?"" It takes a thorough study of the Bible to find the answers to these questions, a person just reading it on their own, would be unlikely to the answers on their own. Which is why Jehovah's Witnesses offer to study the Bible free of charge with anyone who would like find them. We also offer Bible study books free to people who would like to read them and learn these things. So the fact that some have looked into the Bible and not found any answers doesn't mean that they are not there. If you want to know what they are, like why does god permit wickedness?; I would be happy to show it to you from the Bible. And in actually going door to door, and talking to people of other religions, I can tell you that they do not have satisfying answers to these questions.
We had THOUSANDS OF YEARS under the philosophies of religion and achieved NOTHING. Please note the Dark Ages, a period in which the Catholic Church enforced a Theocracy across all of Europe. Ever hear of the Inquisition? Yes, religion worked very well for us there. Or how about Afghanistan? The depravities of the Taliban were and still are done in the name of faith. Secular societies have only recently arisen, and in that time we have sent probes to the outer regions of the solar system, cured countless diseases, and improved the quality of life for BILLIONS of human beings. I'd say the "philosophies of men" have held up pretty well through some of the darkest periods of history, and advanced the entire human species.
We had THOUSANDS OF YEARS under the philosophies of false religion. Jesus warned, (Matthew 7:15-20) "Be on the watch for the false prophets that come to YOU in sheep's covering, but inside they are ravenous wolves. By their fruits YOU will recognize them. Never do people gather grapes from thorns or figs from thistles, do they? Likewise every good tree produces fine fruit, but every rotten tree produces worthless fruit; a good tree cannot bear worthless fruit, neither can a rotten tree produce fine fruit. Every tree not producing fine fruit gets cut down and thrown into the fire. Really, then, by their fruits YOU will recognize those [men]." when a religion does evil things, it shows itself to be evil. Christ said of such people, (Matthew 7:22-23) "Many will say to me in that day, 'Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and expel demons in your name, and perform many powerful works in your name?' And yet then I will confess to them: I never knew YOU! Get away from me, YOU workers of lawlessness." all religions that produce bad fruit are not true followers of Christ. It is easy to spot these false religions by their long histories of evil deeds and by the fact that what they teach is in conflict with what Jesus taught. Jesus taught his followers to be no part of the world, to be peaceable towards all men, loving them as they would love themselves.
The scientific advancement of our day is very impressive, but what good is it without moral advancement? We make better medicines, but we make better weapons too. I am all in favor of science, but it is only a tool, a way of finding better ways of doing things. It doesn't give us morals to live by or answer the questions that are in our heart, because science is about how, not why.
If you wish to tout secular societies, why not consider the former USSR? Surely as an atheistic society it was the best of all countries in which to live. (LOL)
You're arguing as if you had already proven that the strongest sense of peace comes only from God. Then you say that only God can say for sure — if we mere humans can't possibly know, then why ask the question to other mere humans?. . . But you have failed to prove that an Atheist or person of a non-Judeo-Christian faith cannot have a sense of inner peace that is just as strong as the peace that can be attained through faith in God. Please provide evidence for your argument. . . . If you would like to debate whether Atheists and non-Judeo-Christians can have a sense of inner peace just as strong as the peace Judeao-Christians draw from their faith in God, then please provide evidence to back up your claims.
As I mentioned before, it is hard to measure some one's inner peace, and how do you tell if his inner peace is unbreakable? The answer of course is simple, you see if can be broken. Now I am claiming that Jehovah God, the God of the Bible and the God of Jesus (John 20:17) and Abraham, gives his true followers an unbreakable inner peace. I am also claiming that only Jehovah's Witnesses are true follows of Jehovah God and his son Christ Jesus, and they are the only ones who have been given the unbreakable peace from God.
To test this assertion, one would need to round up a large number of Jehovah's Witnesses and subject them years of imprisonment with harsh treatment, torture, starvation and surround them with death and the threat of death. You would also set it up, so that all they have to do is sign a paper renouncing their faith, and they can walk out the door free. You would also show them you mean business by executing some of those who have refused to sign. Maximum phycological pressure would be applied, if our inner peace is truly unbreakable, you would expect the majority or at least a substantial percentage to be able to hold on to their inner peace as demonstrated by their keeping their faith by refusing to renounce it despite all hardship.
As evil and demonic as this thought experiment sounds, it has all ready been done, in Germany durning the second world war. Jehovah's Witnesses obeying God first, and man second, refused to break God's laws and serve in Hitler's armies or to give any support to the evil actions of the Nazi political party and remained neutral. The Nazi's viewed Jehovah's Witnesses as a direct idealogical threat and did everything in their power to root them out and destroy them. They didn't want to just kill them, they wanted to destroy them ideologically, they needed to discredit them by breaking them and making them renounce their faith. The full power of the Nazi war machine was turned on a small religious group who preached peace and merely wanted to be left alone. Would the True inner peace from God that Jehovah's Witnesses have received, fail? Here is what happened.
their faith held firm and there were few who were willing to sign [169] the paper denying the movement and thus buying their freedom. Theological principles were adhered to; Witnesses remained 'neutrals, they were honest and completely trustworthy and as such, ironically, often found themselves employed as servants of the S.S. One S.S. officer commented that only a Jehovah's Witness could be trusted to shave his master with a cut throat razor without wielding the razor to most violent ends.
Against all odds, Witnesses in the camps met and prayed together, produced literature and made converts. Sustained by their fellowship, and, unlike many other prisoners, well aware of the reasons why such places existed and why they should suffer thus, Witnesses proved a small but memorable band of prisoners, marked by the violet triangle and noted for their courage and their convictions.
In the camps they experienced the ultimate test of their faith, as 'witnesses' to Jehovah. It was adherence to their faith that kept many of them in camps, away from their families, suffering the privation and bestial conditions designed to break their spirit and reveal the strength and inevitability of the National Socialist cause in the face of all opposition. It was here, if anywhere, that survival strategies which put the keeping of the faith before the safety or even life of an adherent, were to meet their severest test. It is clear that the Witnesses found their principles stayed firm, their world-view confirmed rather than perverted, and their personal survival, in the face of God's plan, irrelevant. Some 10,000 were imprisoned, and together they received sentences totalling 20,000 years. One out of every two German Witnesses was imprisoned, one in four lost their lives. Nevertheless the work continued. The details of daily life in the concentration [170] camps illustrates yet again the real basis of the conflict between the Nazis and these sectarians. Witnesses were unswerving, refusing compromise, unrepentant and totally convinced that the Nazi system was doomed. Not even the fact that they made good and trustworthy servants could save them from the implications of these views. Mocked, sometimes by other prisoners as well as the guards, they maintained their faith, supported by the complex underground network set up within the camps, and even, on occasions, between different camps.
Bruno Bettleheim, in his study of the camps claims that according to classic psychoanalytical theory the Witnesses should have been the first to fall apart under stress, losing their delusions and certainties amidst the horrors of their new life. In fact, as Bettleheim and others have noted, they survived remarkably well, appearing protected against the camp experiences that broke other prisoners. Witnesses indeed had special aids to survival lacking to all other groups with the exception of the dedicated and convinced Communists. They had a supportive network, a conviction of being right, of having had their experiences of suffering foretold and, most of all, the sense of belonging to a chosen and esoteric group with its own world-view. This world-view could be held intact amidst the brutal realities of camp life and thus Witnesses had what later analysers of survival in camps have identified as essential, an ability to interpret and make sense of what they saw around them and what they suffered themselves. What they experienced had the effect of reinforcing their views, whereas for ethers it had the totally destructive and disorientating effect of throwing into question all they had ever learnt or believed about themselves and life. The Witness' view of the meaning of his life was held intact in the middle of the violence, humiliation and reversion to [171] animal behaviour which is known to have had such terrible effects on others. The Witness who remained alive, even if he suffered, was in God's hands. The Witness who died knew that there was a purpose in his death which became not empty and meaningless, but a martyrdom.
Witnesses in the camps behaved, as far as they were able, as model prisoners, accepting orders and willingly obeying authority. In this they were criticised by other inmates, but in this lay a measure of their survival. They remained detached, as obedient in the world of the camps as in outside society. They were God's people and nothing could change that.
Members of this self contained, believing group were impervious to many of the spiritual, moral and psychological crises experienced by other prisoners, although they were by no means spared their share of physical and emotional suffering. Witnesses, on the whole, unless they were tortured to the stage beyond which human judgement fails, were not confused, were never vacillating. They knew what was happening to them and they believed they knew why it was happening; death held no fear. Their uncompromising and unflinching attitude had brought them into the camps but it was this that sustained them, once there. The rigidity of their belief, their self-contained world-view explains an emotional and psychological strength which later scholars have found surprising in a group from a generally low socio-economic and educational background. Prisoners from this kind of background were found normally to suffer great disorientation in prisons and camps, since they wore unable to articulate their feelings or to make any intellectual sense of their situation. Witnesses were not like that, they came Out of the camps still seeking converts, handing round cards to their newly released and confused fellow prisoners. The cards gave a simple hope: 'There is [172] a God; there is a purpose to all of this'. They continued to make converts.
The Nazi State and the New Religions: Five Case Studies in Non-Conformity: A Triumph of the Will: The Jehovah's Witnesses
The book Crystal Night: 9-10 November 1938, reports that 300-400 Witness inmates in Buchenwald shared their bread rations with some of the 2,250 Jews brought to the camp in 1938. One Buchenwald survivor told how Witnesses gave their bread to Jewish prisoners and went without food themselves for up to four days.
Bruno Bettelheim observed that the Witnesses "were the only group of prisoners who never abused or mistreated other prisoners" and were "exemplary comrades, helpful, correct, dependable." The Witnesses were known for sharing their Bible message with other prisoners. "Though the gentile prisoners were forbidden to talk to us," said a Jewish woman in Lichtenburg, "these women never observed this regulation. They prayed for us as if we belonged to their family, and begged us to hold out." BBC reporter Bjrn Hallstrom said that in Buchenwald, Witnesses were punished for eight days because they "had not avoided the forbidden paths between the Jewish blocks."
Frustrated by the Witnesses' persistent resistance, the SS regularly announced in Sachsenhausen that prisoners caught talking to Witnesses would receive 25 strokes. Survivor Max Liebster recalls that the SS there isolated the Witnesses and declared their barracks off limits to other prisoners. In Melk, Polish survivor Joseph Kempler says he saw "a camp within a camp" and was told that the SS kept the "purple triangles" in it, dangerous prisoners because they taught people the Bible.
Capitulation, not annihilation, seems to have been the Nazi goal for the Witnesses, despite the fact that Hitler had declared about them in 1934, "This brood will be exterminated!" The Gestapo and SS applied the usual torture methods, and in the process hundreds of Witnesses died. But a clue as to the Nazi aim of breaking Witness resolve is found in a remarkable document offered repeatedly to Witness prisoners a renunciation of their faith and a pledge of loyalty to the fatherland. In exchange for a signature, a Witness could walk away free from camp or prison. Dr. Detlef Garbe, author of an exhaustive volume on the Witnesses, estimates that of the 10,000 Witnesses imprisoned during the Nazi period, there were only a few dozen cases of individuals who signed the so-called Declaration and gained release.
As an intimidation tactic, the SS staged several showcase executions. Heinrich Himmler ordered August Dickmann, a 29-year-old German Witness, shot by firing squad at Sachsenhausen on September 15, 1939. The New York Times named Dickmann as the first conscientious objector of the war to be executed by the Nazis. The entire camp, including Dickmann's brother Heinrich and about 400 other Witnesses, had to watch. The commandant threatened the Witness inmates with a similar fate unless they signed the Declaration. Not one Witness yielded, but the threat was not carried out.
In Ravensbruck, 400 Witness women refused to sew ammunition pockets. Brutal punishment resulted. Yet fellow prisoner Genevieve de Gaulle, niece of Charles de Gaulle, said of the Witnesses: "Ultimately, these women, who appeared to be so weak and worn out, were stronger than the SS. . . . It was their willpower that no one could beat."
Eugen Kogon's famous work The Theory and Practice of Hell states, "One cannot escape the impression that, psychologically speaking, the SS was never quite equal to the challenge offered them by Jehovah's Witnesses."
The Witnesses, who saw themselves as part of the universal struggle of good against evil, sought to conquer the scourge of Nazism in accord with the principles of their faith. For them, says James Pellechia, producer of an award-winning documentary on the Witness experience, it was "a battle for the right to worship their God, a battle to love their neighbor, and a battle to tell the truth."
Hannah, a children's librarian now living in New Jersey, U.S.A., feels that her chance encounter with the Witnesses helped her to cope with the terrors her family faced before they finally escaped Nazi Germany. "It allowed me to be centered in this situation by having seen and been told not to worry, how there are good people who are there to help," she says. "It impacted on me my whole life."
Purple Triangles: A Story of Spiritual Resistance
Himmler often used the "fanatical faith" of Jehovah's Witnesses as an example to his own SS troops. In his view, SS men had to have the same "unshakable faith" in the National Socialist ideal and in Adolf Hitler that the Witnesses had in Jehovah.
Jehovah’s Witnesses - Holocaust Teacher Resource Center
A few more relevant links.
Holocaust Encyclopedia | United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Jehovah's Witnesses and the Holocaust introduction
http://www.watchtower.org/library/w/1998/6/1/article_01.htm VA JOSEFSSON
http://www.watchtower.org/library/w/2003/3/1/article_02.htm They Triumphed
Over Persecution
After years of trying to break Jehovah's Witnesses, even someone like Himmler saw that we have an unshakable or unbreakable faith. The inner peace and faith of the vast majority of Jehovah's Witnesses remained intact and unbroken in harmony with what Paul stated at Romans 8:35-39. "Who will separate us from the love of the Christ? Will tribulation or distress or persecution or hunger or nakedness or danger or sword? Just as it is written: "For your sake we are being put to death all day long, we have been accounted as sheep for slaughtering." To the contrary, in all these things we are coming off completely victorious through him that loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life nor angels nor governments nor things now here nor things to come nor powers nor height nor depth nor any other creation will be able to separate us from God's love that is in Christ Jesus our Lord."
As inspiring as the courageous moral stand taken by Jehovah's Witnesses against the Nazis was, they were alone. All other religious organizations present in Germany at the time, compromised with the Nazis and supported them. Rather than taking the moral stand they should have, they curried favor with Nazis and actively supported them, even fighting and dying in support of the Nazi government.
If you would like to debate whether Atheists and non-Judeo-Christians can have a sense of inner peace just as strong as the peace Judeao-Christians draw from their faith in God, then please provide evidence to back up your claims.
I just have and the evidence is clear that the True followers of Jesus Christ, Jehovah's Witnesses, have an unbreakable inner peace and that no one else has anything like it. In the camps they were a solitary island of peace, surrounded by a raging storm of violence and death. There wasn't any other place of peace, they were alone in the storm.
I wish I could say that persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses was fortunately ancient history, but it is not and has continued right down to today. Jehovah's Witnesses still maintain the same stand today as they did then, and remain the only island of real peace.
Sincerely Yours; Wm Scott Anderson
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