You would likely agree that today it is popular to equate critical thinking with abandoning belief in God and/or religion. Hence some of our opposers claim that Jehovah's Witnesses do not employ critical thinking for the very reason that they are still Jehovah's Witnesses. Obviously, such ones do not understand what critical thinking is. Others claim that we prohibit critical thinking. Is this so? What Is Critical Thinking? The fact is, critical thinking has less to do with what conclusion one arrives at and more to do with how one arrives at said conclusions. A person could accept the Trinity because he was told to accept it, or simply because he was raised in that belief system by his parents. He may then justify his belief by seeking support for it. Does justifying one's beliefs make them a "critical thinker"? Critical thinking is best defined as: "the analysis of available facts, evidence, observations, and arguments to form a judgement," as per Wik...

Originally posted Saturday, March 26, 5:47 PM. Updated. MOUNT EBAL, ISRAEL. The oldest occurrence of the name of God, in the letters YHWH, appears to have been found that may force archaeologists to accept the existence of the cult of YHWH possibly as far back as less than a century after the Exodus, some time after 1500 B.C.E., nearly 800 years prior to their previous estimates. The 2 cm x 2 cm folded-lead “curse tablet” (or defixio) amulet was found by Dr. Scott Stripling and his team at Joshua's altar on Mount Ebal in a mound of archaeological debris that was originally dry-sifted between 1983-1989. This find confirms Deuteronomy 11:29 which indicates that Mount Ebal is a place of curses. A Times of Israel article by Amanda Borschel-Dan says that Haifa University Prof. Gershon Galil assisted [with Stripling] in deciphering the hidden internal text of the folded lead tablet using [multi-spectral] scans carried out in Prague at the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. The ...