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Dialogue With a Witness

Please allow me to make myself abundantly clear: this article will prove extraordinarily difficult for you to understand, if you are religious. Or are obedient to a master or father figure of any kind such as a cult, the state, your nation or political party. The more obedient you are to this father, the harder it will be for you to understand and challenge it properly. 

I drive old people to the hospital fairly regularly, mainly because I enjoy it. They are always talkative. I always learn something from them, even if I do not like what I learn. 

Today I had a conversation with a Witness. Inevitably we got onto God, the bible, the purpose of her new faith and how rewarding it has been for her. How much more often I would like to meet such people. 

My question is always this one: I sin. I do not want to sin. But I sin. Why can I not stop sinning?'

Following is the outline of our dialogue. Much of it anyone who has had dialogue with a Witness will be familiar with. 

But do not dismiss it because of that. My reason for writing this is to point out that it is not the answer which is so hard to find. But that the question has never yet even been understood by anyone. I'll repeat - no one has even understood the question yet - why do I sin when I have the free choice not to? Try to focus on this apparent paradox in the question and try as hard as you can not to answer the question. 

It's important because my usual theme provides a motive for why everyone without fail makes huge leaps of the intellect as a means to avoid understanding the question, before giving their bold answer, which is the quickly shot down as circular reasoning anyway. That can mean only one thing - OBEDIENCE. 

People are not trying to stop sinning, that is a smoke screen. People are determined to be obedient, above all else and to signal their obedience in the strongest way possible. A false God is required for that to appear to work - which it never does. It is an escape fallacy paradox. By its very nature, it is a sin. 

The dialogue went something like as follows: 
  • Freedom of choice - the Witness's mantra is that God had given me free choice, to sin or not to sin. This is a key signal that the initial question - why do I sin?, has yet to be understood
  • Temptation - this is the classic answer to the question but it's circular reasoning - I have free choice not to sin, yet I still sin, so this response means the question has yet to be understood. The devil cannot force me because God has declared he has given me free choice as a fundamental principle - to sin, or not to. To say it is because of temptation by the devil STILL means I have still chosen to sin which circulates back around to misunderstanding the original question.
  • The devil caused it - But the devil was not invented until the new testament was created by Christians. In the Torah the Witness is really referring to the serpent. There is no mention of the serpent being evil, only that he said it was OK to eat from the tree of knowledge. Using the devil to reinforce the reason that I sin is false
  • Obedience - Another Witness mantra is that we must obey God and what he says in the bible. But if God gives us free choice, evidently he does not want us to be obedient - obedience means there is no free choice. This is circular.
  • The Fall - All sins are sins. The first sin is the same as the last, the last is the first. Eve's first sin is identical fundamentally to my sins today. Talking about the fall always ends up in a circular argument once again. That is, Eve did not have to sin and she was not forced to do so. She had the free choice not to sin, but she still proceeded to sin. Why?
  • The tree of knowledge - if I'm not allowed to eat from the tree of knowledge, how can I ever know about anything? Does my obedience mean I do not require any knowledge? If I'm not allowed autonomy how can I at the same time have free choice?
  • The apocalypse - why do we need to wait until the apocalypse, why do I not stop sinning immediately? If I wait, why would I change my mind then if I cannot do it right away? Why do I freely choose not to enter the kingdom, immediately and what is so special about the apocalypse?
  • Understanding the question - The question is why do I sin, when I do not want to, and when I have the free choice not to? It is a rhetorical question to begin with. That is, one cannot proceed to answer it unless I first understand it fully and at the deepest level. Else the answer will always be circular. A circular response signals clearly the fundamental importance of the question has yet to be understood.
This is a typical dialogue you will have with a Witness. It is 'epistemic'. Meaning the difficulty in having this dialogue is that it is asking for a root cause analysis about the deep. It is buried away so deep because otherwise it demands we face the dragon head on. Maybe for the very first time. Not a cosy place to be. 

Many will kill their own children before going there. Most are OK to kill other people's children by the million if they can avoid understanding the question. Everyone will reward highly those who can help them escape from understanding it, no matter how corrupt or crooked they are. We're seeing this play out perfectly in the West right now. 

The result is what we call leadership in a society powered by hierarchy and obedience to that master as a first principle, way before morals, ethics, saving the planet and rights. Way before that! Our chosen leaders are those who can most easily help us escape from understanding 'the question'. God is not involved, though we place him right in the centre of it all, yet again to escape.

My view is that people who believe in the classical and false meaning of God do it because they prefer a master to whom they can be obedient. Far more than they want autonomy and the heavy load that always brings. Its such a cosy life to be able to throw all ones duties and obligations onto a master you can blame later for the problems you yourself have causes. 

But God *is* meaning. And he has given you autonomy, in the hope you will take it, in spite of the heavy load. The last thing he wants is your slavery. This is what is meant by sin. 

A terrible mistake. God exists. He means: 

"I do not want your obedience, that is a sin, I do not want you to obey me. I want you to love yourself before you love me. I want you to freely choose autonomy. Because then you will no longer have to visit the tree of knowledge to know. You will just... know - by virtue of seeing what is happening in front of your own face. If you can do that you will no longer ask for 'rights' and then ask me to deal with your own obligations. You will simply do your duty. And then you will live, reborn. Resurrected."

Can you see now, how difficult it is to understand, even the question, let alone know the answer. It requires a leap of personal transformation where you choose with the freedom God has given you, to do your duty, with autonomy. 1

And for 99.9999% of people, that is a leap too far, for now.

Create an image of good telling people at the apocalypse that giving them free choice means to stop being obedient to him, and means they will no longer choose to sin - the question will have been understood. And everyone will finally be able to answer.
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