Please don't take offence at this ...

by Joe Grundy 74 Replies latest jw friends

• 

  unclebruce

  My point was really that higher/professional education tends to teach critical and independent thinking and research, and that while WT publications seem to me to exhibit a superficial scholarship some/ a lot/ most of it doesn't stand up to close scrutiny, let alone independent peer review.

  Spot on Joe, pleased to meet you. God knows how my adult parents fell for such fakery. They were desparately needy, not well educated and not great readers. The Watchtower publications appear woefully lacking in even an apearence of scholarship to people like you and me but people like my parents place a much smaller burden of proof on books that tell then everything that they want to hear. All your worries are over, you can live forever under your own wine and fig tree. JW's are relieved of having to think. They are handed books and expected to believe everything written in them. There is no mexchanism to handle discussion or disagreement. A bright JW can hardly call Brooklyn and say "stop the presses, I've shot some holes in our theories".
  

  
  
• 

  Kudra

  mmm, I don't know about that...
  I was always told by my mom and other witnesses that "there are many doctors and highly intelligent ones that realize Jehovah's truth" (barf)
  And a couple of you guys just said it here on this thread. But can anyone name examples? What are their degrees in? I doubt they have degrees in Religion, Biology, HIstory or Geology. I think that they would tend to have degrees in Marketing, Accounting etc. And maybe it would be a BA or BS, not a PhD.
  It is just that people always told me that there were a lot of doctors in the "truth" but I think that no one actually knew of these "doctors"- like they were urban legend or something...
  I hope I don't offend the people that posted, stating the contrary, but could you please give examples- like what were their degrees in (subject) and what type of degree did they have- MS, PhD etc.
  Thanks!
  -K
• 

  Kero-kero

  Actaully..the tone of some publications does indeed come across..almost childish...I think the questions at the bottom of each page almost belittles any intelligence that I might have.
• 

  Kudra

  Does anyone remember the recent (Awake?)article about the guy who was a physicist who "found the truth"?
  It was like the society was touting this "poster boy" as an example of ALL the highly educated people that realize that there HAS to be a creator. -the tone of the article was, again, BARF!
  -K
• 

  Virgochik

  When I was a kid, there was a very respected brother at our congo. He was getting a doctorate in Hebrew studies at the U of Illinois, Urbana. Everyone was puzzled about why he was attending less and less meetings and raising questions about WT translations... He was written off as pulled away by a worldly environment. Nobody accepted that his studies exposed the NWT's atrocious mistranslating and he saw the hoax.

  Also, college education is kind of a generational thing, in my opinion. High school grads forty years ago often went straight to work, where twenty and thirty-somethings today tend to naturally go to college after high school, as it's more necessary for a family supporting income.
• 

  looking_glass

  But Unk - did your parent's generation as a whole get degrees. Very few of my grand parents generation pursued higher education. My grandparents were farmers. My parents were the ones that moved to the "big city". My father was much older then my mom, he did not have a college degree, but he owned several of his own businesses and excelled in it. My mom got her associates before kids and then stopped going to school to be a mom. After we left home, she went back to school and got her BA. Don't you think that yes, some it is the religion, some of it is generational and some of it access.

  Stalin - As for the magz being written in simpleton language, don't you think it is because they have to write to a wide audience. They run the risk of isolating a large group of their readers, it is not just the US and England that they write for. There are 3rd world countries that are booming with JWs because they want something, anything, that will promise them a better life to come. They don't want to isolate those readers.
• 

  dido

  Kudra, one example close to home was my bro` in law, he was a professor of mathematics at Reading uni in England, and i know many others that were mathematicians and teachers. There are a lot of very intelligent people in there (or rather now outta there, as is my bro` in law!)
• 

  Joe Grundy

  Thanks very much for the information and opinions (and greetings).

  I know that even if I were to believe the WT stuff I could never be a JW 'cos I just can't stop questioning things.

  I appreciate the point made by several people about vulnerability. I was a police officer for 30 years (mostly as a detective). It is a common pattern with conmen, who have seem to have an instinct that enable them to find the vulnerable and tell them what they want to hear. The word 'bullying' comes to mind, too.

  I suppose that my experience with interviewing people has taught me to go for the questions they haven't prepared for, and to persist until proper answers are provided. The pre-prepared questions in the magazines (as has been pointed out) made me wince, and the couple of occasions I went to a meeting and saw the magazine article and questions trundled out parrot-fashion left me cold. And yet the old guy who read out the magazine paragraphs seemed so proud. Is that one of the 'privileges of service' they talk about?

  Thanks again. You can read all you like, but nothing beats getting information from people who have been there.
• 

  dido

  Kero, the reason some seem childish is that they have to appeal to all walks of life, the thick and the clever, hence pretty pics!
• 

  james_woods

  I clipped out the original question:

  My question is this: in all the door-to-door canvassing and 'bible studies' do JWs attract what might be called 'academics' or professional types who have had a high level of education? Or do 'these types of people' see through it at the start? And do JW congregations contain any of these 'types'?

  I have known only a very few hard core JW's who actually had any educational credentials. I must honestly say that those few struck me as pretty disturbed people who needed an audience which could be easily impressed - as if they could not make it in "real" society. There are a lot of pretty crazy tenured college professors out there, after all. For example, Ward Churchill. If he is an American Indian, then I am from the planet Vulcan and can nerve pinch you into unconsciousness.

  Maybe the best example of this in WT land would be our own Freddy Franz of the fraternity of the brown shoes. If you hunt through the threads on him, what you find is a person who hyped up his own scholarship way beyond its reality while his organization told everybody else to stay away from college. Me thinks he was not really a "Rhodes Scholor" at all, but they sure liked to blow that smoke all over the rest of us. I also do not think that old Rutherford was really a Judge either.

  But it did sound better than "Justice of the Peace" Rutherford.