Alec Holmes XJW

Adam and Eve sinned. They lost the paradise, mankind fell. Sin entered into the world. And now we're all born sinners, and need redemption. So Jesus comes, dies a horrible death just for that. Except mainstream Christianity does not believe that anymore. Not in just that anyway.

Mainstream Christianity which takes itself seriously today acknowledges that to ignore evolution and Charles Darwin's work--a man who belonged to the Church of England--is to risk looking stupid in the year 2014 Anno Domini. So they accept it, in fact, you'll find statements to the effect that 'evolution is totally compatible with our church's teachings'. What I still want to find is the creed which sets out in detail, whether or not Adam and Eve were literal hominids who received the first souls or if we should just not view their story as a literal account or something to explain the whole debacle.

Firstly, let's just for the sake of argument consider Genesis literal, even though we have mountains of evidence that totally and thoroughly disprove it as such. If Adam and Eve were the ones who sinned, then why do we have to pay for their sin? Wouldn't that be like going to jail because your parents were murderers? We didn't ask god to make us, so why the grudge against us?

Suppose you say evolution happened, but Adam and Eve were the first hominids to receive souls. Then, how is that compatible with evolution and mutation and genetics? It just isn't. And again, why do we have to pay for their sin?

Then we have the former Archbishop of Canterbury, who said Genesis is not literal. So if it is not literal, who were the first humans who sinned thus making us into sinners who need Jesus's sacrifice? And I must reiterate my question, why do we have to be held accountable for that?

Now, here is my view. For thousands of years, nothing challenged the theology of the Church as regards original sin. Then along comes Darwin and, oops, he discovers that Adam and Eve are no more plausible than the The Epic of Gilgamesh. Science gathers ever more evidence for evolution in the 155 years since. Christianity has a problem, how to justify the need for the redemption if we can't read Genesis literally? The solution: just don't. Just say we're sinners and we need Jesus and Genesis is a metaphor. Case closed. Well, if you can swallow that, it's up to you. To me, those books are spurious, they are man-made, not god-made, and they betray the scientific knowledge of the men who wrote them. Men made god in their image, not the other way round. There was no original sin, you are not a sinner, therefore, you don't need redemption, nor do you need scapegoat Jesus, who even if he was a real person, was not the son of god, or performed miracles.

The insidiousness of the mind control the governing body through the Watchtower holds over Jehovah's Witnesses was vividly illustrated to me personally when I briefly met my parents recently. In the absence of my sister, they related to me what happened when she had to go through an emergency operation weeks ago. Or glossed over the facts, I should say.

Firstly, the account of events my sister personally relayed to me on the phone did not match the one my parents gave me. And then I realized why and the conclusion was not surprising but revealing. They seemed to avoid points where I could ask them what had really happened or why they acted in the way they did.

My sister (who is a young adult) had wanted my father to call me to go visit her whilst she was at the hospital, he didn't. She told me the hospital staff "did not like it" when they were told she didn't take blood--she lost a lot of blood in the surgery. They didn't like it and told her she would be anaemic and would take much longer to recover, of course. My parents made no mention of this at all. Neither did they explain who spoke to hospital staff, just that my sister "saw" blood bags being taken to be used on her, told them she didn't take blood, and then they "had to" change procedure. In the middle of a surgery where the patient is losing a lot of blood? What about her blood card? I waited for that to come but nothing.

As obfuscating as this brief encounter was, it showed me how witnesses deploy doublethink as their Watchtower training prepares them for. Remember that Orwell coined the term in Nineteen Eighty-Four, where members of the party applied doublethink to be able to hold mutually contradictory beliefs without them causing cognitive dissonance. It was said to be the ability "to tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed."

Whatever really happened, my parents knew if they told me they would be giving me ammunition to confront them with the ultimate question: What if the choice was between a blood transfusion and my sister's life? Would they, would she, offer her life in the Watchtower's altar if that was what it came to? These are questions every witness must ask themself. So in order to avoid these and other questions my parents suppressed uncomfortable details and tried to convince me of a sanitized version of events, presumably working to convince themselves of what they were saying so as to complete the doublethink.

Restraints on foreign tourists fail to mask the hardship and mind control in country UN likened to Nazi Germany