The JWs read it as god personifies love, and justice, and merciful kindness and so on. We rationalized the brutality the way some of the other Biblical literalists seem to, that a god of incalculable power who created everything was within his rights to act as he pleased with it, while also trying to deal with the unease of that position by deciding that the victims must have been deserving (an understanding made unnecessary by the first part). That he occasionally showed exceptional love (ie, by offering salvation to the damned) was the part we focused on.
It seems messy to me because the rationalizations tended to come amid constant reminders that god was good and kind and loving and just and that he was all of those things on a level far greater than we could ever be. We were made in his image, so we reflect his qualities, but we are "evil" if we reflect some of his darker qualities, whereas he cannot possibly be evil. Yet we must reflect his qualities as exemplified by Christ, who told us to be "perfect, as your heavenly father is perfect." It's like a puzzle where only some of the pieces fit. I wound up with these clumps of pieced-together puzzle that cannot properly combine into a coherent whole.
It seems messy to me because the rationalizations tended to come amid constant reminders that god was good and kind and loving and just and that he was all of those things on a level far greater than we could ever be. We were made in his image, so we reflect his qualities, but we are "evil" if we reflect some of his darker qualities, whereas he cannot possibly be evil. Yet we must reflect his qualities as exemplified by Christ, who told us to be "perfect, as your heavenly father is perfect." It's like a puzzle where only some of the pieces fit. I wound up with these clumps of pieced-together puzzle that cannot properly combine into a coherent whole.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
