Bridge of Reason

  ‘You’re a wizard, Harry’. Hagrid Arriving at school I was told by my fellow chaplain that a group of girls, who had been scaring themselves silly, were desperate to speak to us. These teenage girls had been playing with a Ouija board, and though they thought it would just be a laugh, they were shocked to discover that it worked. Why were these girls playing with a Ouija board? Where had they got the idea that it would be harmless fun? These adolescent girls told us that they had been watching TV programmes, namely Charmed and Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and had fallen for the narrative they espoused. Witchcraft can be fun. Witchcraft is practiced by beautiful young women. Witchcraft can help you get what you want in life. Add to the mix the extremely popular Harry Potter books and films, and we find that Witchcraft has become mainstream. Though this was a few years ago now, the enthusiasm for the occult has by no means abated. The choice of many is, the seemingly harmless,...

  'Father, into your hands I commend my Spirit' Luke23:46 We are looking at how Jehovah’s Witnesses think about the elements of the Christian Pasch (Easter). We have looked at the cross in two previous posts, and there is a major study on the Watchtower ‘cross’ coming in our next newsletter. If you haven’t already you may want to sign up to our mailing list from our website . Ecclesiastes On their website the Watchtower addresses the question, ‘What happens when you die?’ ‘ The Bible says: “The living are conscious that they will die; but as for the dead, they are conscious of nothing at all.” ( Ecclesiastes 9:5; Psalm 146:4 ) Therefore, when we die, we cease to exist. The dead can’t think, act, or feel anything.’ Proof-texting is commonplace with Jehovah’s Witnesses and, almost invariably, it gets them into all kinds of trouble. If they insist Ecclesiastes 9:5 is talking about the afterlife they must deal with the rest of the chapter, which doesn’t help their case at a...

The man was trying to give people something, but no one was taking it. Most ignored him, many crossed the road to avoid him and the odd one who did listen refused his offer. He wasn’t trying to sell something, nor did he appear to be some crazed religious fanatic, but clearly people did not want what he was offering. What was he handing out that seemed so objectionable? Five-pound notes. What a monster! You don’t get owt for nowt. We have a saying in Yorkshire: ‘You don’t get owt for nowt’. Now for those of you not fortunate enough to have been born in God’s own county, let me translate. It means: ‘One does not receive something without paying for it’. I recently had to visit someone in hospital. Upon arriving in the car park, I made my way to the Pay Station. There was a notice on the machine which said: Machine broken – parking is free today. As parking at hospitals can be quite costly, I should have been jumping for joy, but not me, I was suspicious. Parking at the hospital ca...

In my last post we got side-tracked from looking at the cross itself by an interesting quote from an ‘authority’ insisting Jesus died on a stake. The Insight book contains an entry on the issue of the Stake in which this single ‘authority’s’ words take up more than two-thirds of the entry. It turns out this is not the authority the Watchtower would have you believe. You can read it here . The Stake or the Cross? What is further interesting about the Insight entry is the following Watchtower statement: ‘ In classical Greek the word (stau·ros#) rendered “torture stake” in the New World Translation primarily denotes an upright stake, or pole, and there is no evidence that the writers of the Christian Greek Scriptures used it to designate a stake with a crossbeam.’ Of course, if it ‘primarily’ denotes a stake then it might sometimes denote a cross. A word that has a primary meaning inevitably has a secondary meaning, otherwise it would have a singular meaning. To insist there is no ev...

After convincing those listening that they only have an earthly hope, the brother announced the third question: Who partake of the bread and the wine? There is no doubt in my mind that what was taught here is thoroughly anti-Christian. Not only is it foreign to the Word of God, to the early church and to Christians for the past 2000 years, it has huge implications for those who, like the Jehovah’s Witnesses, claim to be Christian. From their founding in the 1870’s through to 1935, the then named ‘Bible Students’ had no problem partaking of the memorial meal. They believed that the Bible taught them that they should. So, what changed? New Light The story is told of a young man who was one of the first to hear of the change: As was true of all Bible Students back then, this sincere young man partook of the bread and the wine each year at the Lord’s Evening Meal. However, his entire outlook on life was changed by a history-making talk entitled “The Great Multitude.” That talk ...