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PRECIOUS JEWELS, A SEVENTH-DAY ADVENTIST FAMILY SAGA

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DAWintsmith
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Re: PRECIOUS JEWELS, A SEVENTH-DAY ADVENTIST FAMILY SAGA

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reply to tat tvam asi: No proselytizing. It is, however, NOT an exposé, so don't expect any anti-Adventist verbiage. My ancestors made difficult choices and harsh sacrifices for their beliefs, and I respect their integrity and the strength of their allegiance to their beliefs. My only agenda for writing the book is to tell their story.
tat tvam asi wrote:I'll have to see what you've written. So then this is not actually an SDA proselytizing effort? By the tone of your last post it sounds like you've moved on. My family story must include Adventism as well, which was the sole cause for much of the exclusionary world attitudes that passed down. It's good to hear that you guys were able to move on.
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Re: PRECIOUS JEWELS, A SEVENTH-DAY ADVENTIST FAMILY SAGA

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That's cool, and having said that you may find more people at BT interested in reading about it. I'm sure you understand that the Adventist name immediately labels something as crack pot right away in most peoples thinking. Like Moronism, or Mormonism rather, Jehovah's Witness, and other Christ cult organizations of similar social standing. That may hurt book sales in general, but you'll just have to see how it unfolds. Good luck with it though in any case.
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Re: PRECIOUS JEWELS, A SEVENTH-DAY ADVENTIST FAMILY SAGA

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Ironically, the only people I know who regard Adventists as crackpots are former Adventists! My friend, the Methodist maestro and his Buddhist wife, admire them for their orchestra. My Jewish friends frequent the local SDA food market and restaurants, glad for a source of kosher food that doesn't require a two-hour drive, appreciate the SDA artist who created the tapestries that are displayed in the synagogue, and find it comforting that there are people in the Christian community who get the sundown-to-sundown concept.

By the way, are you aware that you are doing the same thing that you fault the Adventists for doing? You've changed your belief system, but you still condemn people who believe differently than you. Have you really moved on?
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Re: PRECIOUS JEWELS, A SEVENTH-DAY ADVENTIST FAMILY SAGA

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That's odd, every non-Adventist I speak to generally regards SDA's on the same crack pot level as Jehovah's Witness, Mormons, or any other Christ cult organization. That's why they don't join Adventism, although they may like some SDA people despite the crack pot indoctrination. Having some SDA friends in no changes the fact that it's a crack pot religion overall. :wink:

You're obviously are highly offended that I've outed SDA's here and your responses make that more than evident. If you care to proceed further, I'll go ahead and contast exactly where I am now as opposed to where I was when I followed SDA beliefs:

A) As an SDA following closely along with our belief system, I saw the world as the devils domain, a literal evil being who is running the whole of the secular sciences and the vast majority of all religion including the majority of Christianity. The only true faith in the world, as I was taught and believed, was the SDA faith, which, would produce the 144,000 remnant of Israel as per revelation.

B) Now, I don't believe that the biblical mythology is literal at all and so I don't believe that any such evil deity as Lucifer, the Devil, or Satan even exists to begin with. The sciences are not some elaborate hoax of the Devil's aimed at steering people away from God and I don't believe for one second that there are any chosen few or elect of God from within Christianity which Revelation is refering to as the 144,000 remnant of Israel. I don't believe in the concept of one true religion which trumps all others which are false. What can be proven beyond reasonable doubt as false, obviously includes the SDA doctrinal beliefs just as much as any other religion founded by a complete nut job. Whether we're talking about Ellen White, or Charles Taze Russell, or earlier to Joseph Smith we're dealing with very sick individuals suffering from mental problems who gathered together a following of people mindless enough to buy into their own personal delusions.

So no, I'm actually not doing what I was doing as an SDA. There's nothing wrong with realizing and acknowledging that there are incorrect beliefs in this world, but there is something wrong with asserting that your own false beliefs are in fact absolutely true and everyone else's false beliefs are false. :wink:

Unfortunately my family - and then later your family - were suckered into these cultish religious fallacies. It's pretty embarrasing really, but it's our history. Yours and mine both. What can we do about it? My only answer has been to make sure that the delusion goes no further. I can do what my ancestors could not manage to accomplish, which is to cut this delusional fantasy coming out of EG White's frontal lobe epileptic mind off from effecting and corrupting the minds of any more children in this family. And that, in a nutshell, is salvation in and of itself. Salvation from the grasp of his ignorant flavor of young earth creationism built up from a foundation of sand...
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Re: PRECIOUS JEWELS, A SEVENTH-DAY ADVENTIST FAMILY SAGA

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While I can ramble on about as long as Tat about Adventism, I will jump in just to say this much, during my time as both a baptist and later as a pentecostal, I was always taught Adventism was a "cult" every bit as much as Mormons. However, Adventists were few and far between in my "hometown" area, whereas DAW sounds like she is from a community where Adventists are a significant part, so that may account for the difference in experience there as far as how Adventists are viewed. Perhaps in Adventist heavy communities, the non-Adventists make less of a distinction than non-Adventists in an area with little to no exposure to Adventism.
I live about a half an hour south from Southern Adventist University in Tennessee, and about an hour away from the Wildwood Sanitarium run by Adventists in Wildwood, GA. Both of these communities thrive on Adventism, and there are a number of Adventist Book Centers, health food stores, alternative healing centers, and vegan restaurants, etc. in these areas. I imagine non-Adventists have a far more tolerant view of Adventism in those areas, for that very reason, because they are so exposed to it already.
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Re: PRECIOUS JEWELS, A SEVENTH-DAY ADVENTIST FAMILY SAGA

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I chose not to attend Southern College. Most SDA's in the southern conference go off to Southern or some other SDA college, but by that age I was done with the SDA system and wanted no further part in it.

I live in an SDA dominant community right now. The non-Adventists in this era certainly think that SDA's are pretty crack pot, their belief system that is. When I tell people that I'm from the SDA community but have since moved on and had my membership removed, they tend to open up and speak more freely. They're always interested in hearing about the strange belief's such as a future Pope being the anti-christ of Revelation, the belief in the absolute coming of a national and then global Sunday Law, and the belief that only those who refuse Sunday Worship - The Mark of Beast - will be saved at the second coming of Christ. Very crack pot indeed.

There's a website for questioning and former SDA's full of interesting facts called FormerAdventist.com: http://www.formeradventist.com/

But this geared towards people who have questioned adventism against the bible and found adventism in error, not people who have gone even further and questioned the bible itself and found all of the error in and of itself...
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Re: PRECIOUS JEWELS, A SEVENTH-DAY ADVENTIST FAMILY SAGA

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Bingo, Vishnu! I was just thinking that Tat and I are both correct, but that we are living in different parts of the country.

So...Tat... have you read the book yet? After you read it, we can discuss how I presented Adventism.
D. A. Wintsmith, Author of Precious Jewels, A Seventh-Day Adventist Family Saga and Voracious Reader of Other People's Books
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Re: PRECIOUS JEWELS, A SEVENTH-DAY ADVENTIST FAMILY SAGA

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Yes, yes, of course. I realize that I went into this blind and may have jumped the gun from the get go. It's just that I saw something about Adventism come up on the recent posts feed and went straight to refuting the belief system as crack pot and false prophecy based. I have no idea how you addressed it in the book. It's just that the opening post came off as very SDA proselytizing sounding, as if you were about to cut right into a stop smoking lecture and Revelation seminar. lol
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Re: PRECIOUS JEWELS, A SEVENTH-DAY ADVENTIST FAMILY SAGA

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Now let's look at the blog you decided to post about this thread here at BT, and indeed a few straw man fallacies you sought to raise about me in particular:

http://storystonejournal.blogspot.com/2 ... venth.html
The author of Precious Jewels: A Seventh-Day Adventist Family Saga, and Fireflies blogs about writing stories from real life.

Saturday, June 18, 2011EX-SDA BLASTS PRECIOUS JEWELS, A SEVENTH-DAY ADVENTIST FAMILY SAGA

I suppose it was inevitable that my book about an Adventist family would come to the attention of the anti-Adventist community sooner or later. There are several websites devoted to debunking Ellen G. White and Adventism in general, and these guys are vigilant, staying up to date on the latest news within Adventism.

I met one of them on a forum where I had posted a synopsis of Precious Jewels, A Seventh-Day Adventist Family Saga. He (I'll call him "Ex-SDA") posted his own commentary, calling my book a "proselytizing effort" and advising all who purchased it to view some videos produced by exAdventist Outreach in order to get a "brief history and evolution of the church."
Did I? Here's what I wrote:
tat tvam asi wrote:A brief history and evolution of the church is helpful when approaching a proselytizing book effort such as posted at the top of the thread
This was aimed at letting viewers know - before attempting to read the book not those who have already read the book - what on earth Seventh Day Adventism is in the first place. A history of the belief system and how it evolved from the mind of Ellen White before it was taken down the Missippi by her relative on the proselytizing voyage in question which is where your family tale enters the religion. I took it as a 'proselytizing book' because it begins with the White family's proselytizing efforts which converted your family into the SDA religion. That's what you've written about in the opening post describing the context of your own book.
Ex-SDA went on to say that he was ashamed that he had ever been an Adventist, but since his family had been Adventists from the time of the Millerite movement in the 1840s, he didn't have "a sporting chance to figure out what's what" until he was well into his teens…

Here's what I wrote:
tat tvam asi wrote:It's pretty embarrassing for me to have ever been a member of such evident error and nonsensical doctrine, but I was born into it by several generations - WTF? I didn't have a sporting chance to figure out what's what until I was well into my teens. But at least I did make it to that point, which, by the looks of things, the author in question here has not yet discovered in life...
I assumed that you had not discovered the truth about the cult because you write about striving towards a higher standard and such, which, is completely false. Adventism is based around giving people the illusion that they are of a higher standard than the paganized Sunday worshipping world of Christian, the non-christian religions, and the secular world. And it's in fact a big Whie Lie indeed, from the sick mind of who else but Ellen G. White.
The folks who crusade against Adventism argue that they are more informed because they read things that Adventists don't.

Yet this fellow was carrying on about what he thought my book was about without having read it.

This weakened his arguments considerably. Nevertheless, some interesting issues were raised.
It sounds like you're accusing me of intellectual dishonesty, but, as any reader can see for themselves, I've stated over and over again that I have not read this book. I was going by what is written and quoted by you in this thread of discussion and that's it. And I've just refuted Adventism in general, not your book in particular. Unless of course in the process of refuting Adventism I also refuted your book as well because of it's SDA content. I won't know the answer until I've read the book, obviously, which I have never claimed to have done:
tat tvam asi wrote:A) I'll have to see what you've written. So then this is not actually an SDA proselytizing effort?

B) Yes, yes, of course. I realize that I went into this blind and may have jumped the gun from the get go. It's just that I saw something about Adventism come up on the recent posts feed and went straight to refuting the belief system as crack pot and false prophecy based. I have no idea how you addressed it in the book. It's just that the opening post came off as very SDA proselytizing sounding, as if you were about to cut right into a stop smoking lecture and Revelation seminar. lol
I was paying attention to being intellectually honest about the book the entire time and it sounds like you're trying to raise a straw man fallacy on me here for the sake of the SDA's or who ever else your blog is addressed to. That is where the actual dishonest tactics begin to show themselves and you are the one guilty of making the dishonest claims right now.
First, is my book a proselytizing effort? Ex-SDA said he was proud of his family's other accomplishments, but if he ever wrote a book about them, he'd weed out the "cultic doctrine of Seventh Day Adventism."
Ok, so you've rushed into yet another straw man fallacy against me. Let's review what I've actually written and what is actually means:
tat tvam asi wrote:But best of luck to you in any case with your book sales. It is about family and heritage which whatever the case I can appreciate. I am very proud of my family heritage as pioneering the Florida Keys and settling the land, boat building, fishing, and just enjoying nature in general. I just set the SDA dimension of that heritage aside. And perhaps I'll write book someday about my own heritage, however the process of weeding out the cultic doctrine of Seventh Day Adventism out of our family would probably be the main line of focus in my case. You've actually inspired some interesting ideas and I do thank you for that.
This is mostly my fault for how I worded the paragraph in a very rushed way. I can see how you pulled the straw man out of the bolded area in question.

But what I was saying is that I have the same family history rich in Adventism. But at this point in life I tend to just focus the SDA part of growing up out of it and instead focus on more enjoyable aspects like all of the water sports and fun we had. That's just me personally. But if I were to write a book about my own family heritage it would be about how I was eventually able to pull off weeding most of the SDA doctrine out of the family, now, in this generation. My immediate family is completely removed at this point. I wasn't talking about a book where I ignore the SDA past of my family, in the book, but rather a book where I write about the SDA past and how it lead up to this generation where it finally began to dissolve. And the story of how that happened is in fact very interesting and I've disclosed a little of it here at BT concerning my grandfather passing down information and such. So whatever the case - my fault or yours - you did completely misunderstand what I was trying to say and then took off right away misrepresenting me pubically as the result.
I wish Ex-SDA the best of luck in writing his own family saga with the religion censored out of it, my family's story would be incomprehensible without the context of the religion. How can I write about Adventists without mentioning Adventism? Why would one even try? No, my book is not intended to proselytize, but reading my book is like a trip home, and home was an Adventist one.
Of course my family heritage would be just as incomprehensible without discussing Adventism, which is why I never suggested such a thing in the first place as shown above.
In the course of our interchange, Ex-SDA asked me if I had heard of some of the major books and people in the anti-Adventist movement. I have indeed. (In fact, one of the people on the forefront of the movement is one Dale Ratzlaff whose family were neighbors of my family during the time period of the later chapters of Precious Jewels.) In addition, I was alive in the 1980s when the current debunking movement began with The White Lie, and most of my immediate circle left the church over it. Today, there seem to be two camps -- those who have read the debunking literature and were unable to retain their Adventist beliefs afterward; and those who refused to read the books at all, and remain in the faith.

Clearly, the decision of whether or not to read the debunking literature is a very serious decision -- and that is my objection to those anti-Adventist crusaders who pressure people to read The White Lie and related material. If the bitterness of their remarks and the angry sound of their narratives is an indicator, their motivation isn't to help people live safer, kinder, more peaceful lives but to destroy a belief system they despise. Their destructive agenda counter-balances any merit their arguments may have.
You were doing pretty good until the end, when you tried to take a shot at the former Adventist movement as a whole. Some people are bitter because they have been given a nasty self serving lie as the absolute truth. And now they see and understand the lie for what it is. But once again, go read through the testimonies of former SDA's @

http://www.formeradventist.com/stories/index.html

The motivation is to shake things up and get people to open their eyes and investigate what they are being told is absolute, infallible, truth. To live a safer, kinder, mor peaceful life, isn't it necessary to take issue with these false beliefs?

Ellen White claimed that she saw in vision that she would be among the 144,000 remnant of Israel during the end times. Instead she died and no such event ever took place. She believed that "certain races of men" were the result of sex between man and beast. This is of course BS and an outrage to humanity. Did God reveal that to her? Of course not. And do exclusionary and racist oriented beliefs from a self proclaimed prophet receiving divine visions from God constitute a safer, kinder, more peaceful life? Of course not. See http://www.formeradventist.com for more details on which of the two is more peace oriented by people who have lived both the SDA and non-SDA perspectives. Don't take my word for it.
The main characters in Precious Jewels lived their whole lives believing completely in the Adventist way. They were colorful, even eccentric, characters, whose uniqueness was intensified by their unique beliefs. They lived lives of purpose and fulfillment, and their impact was so strong that we who knew them speak of them today as if they left us only yesterday. That is how they were and that is how I have written them.

My words to Ex-SDA and his fellows are the following: "You may disagree with me regarding what my book is about or how I have told the story, and that is your right, but…

before you draw a conclusion, please…

...READ THE BOOK!"

I stand behind my intial request, which is that readers should first look into what Adventism is (a cult of mostly eccentric and very odd ball types), and then go on and purchase and read the book so that the reader can better understand the big picture when reading about the lives of a Seventh Day Adventist family saga. That' it. I'd suggest the very same with respect to any story about Mormons, or Jehovah's Witness, or even a Hindu or Buddist family saga for that matter. I have taken issue with Adventism, not your book in particular, unless of course it actually is geared towards promoting Adventism after all.
DAWintsmith
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Re: PRECIOUS JEWELS, A SEVENTH-DAY ADVENTIST FAMILY SAGA

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This forum is more public than my obscure little blog where you feel I misrepresented you. (I have, what, 1 follower?) I used our exchange as a springboard of my blog entry because, in my experience, your biting rhetoric is typical of the anti-Adventist movement -- from Walter Rhea forward. However, it is easy to misunderstand you because it's difficult to filter through the sarcasm.

You sound like people in my experience who have been very aggressive in their attempts to destroy the beliefs of those still in the Adventist church, and that is what I have responded to. I believe one should consider very carefully before endeavoring to shake up someone's faith because the results can be devastating emotionally and psychologically. But as you have pointed out, you were directing your comments toward the reader who is unfamiliar with the religion -- and not necessarily toward those who are still in it. I agree with you that is a good idea to research a subject thoroughly. This would include reading the Adventist sites along with material written by the former-Adventists, as well as any unbiased material on the subject (if such an animal exists.)

As to the use of the words "higher standard", I concede that you are right in that it does ring of the old religious elitism that we have encountered in Adventism, although it is by no means unique to Adventism. We are all elitists when it comes to our own ideas and beliefs, or at least I am. Don't be surprised if I re-work that sentence and maybe even blog about it. Keeping to a higher standard, of course...
D. A. Wintsmith, Author of Precious Jewels, A Seventh-Day Adventist Family Saga and Voracious Reader of Other People's Books
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