Did You Believe "The End" Was Going To Come In Your Lifetime?

minimus

I never did. When the Society came out in 1966 with the info that 6000 years of man's existence would come to an end by 1975, I thought it was a crock. For 9 long years, all JWs did was speculate about "when" the Great Tribulation was going to begin. I always thought of Jesus' words about "nobody knowing the day or the hour"----yet Jehovah's Witnesses figured it out?? .......Were you a true believer in JW "Bible" chronology??

greendawn

No I never really believed in it that's why I chose to go to university, and I couldn't see how the JW society that grossly lacked Christian love was fit to go through Armageddon if there was to be one.

under_believer

They were occasionally able to scare me into a state of great anxiety about it with their "deep, deep in the time of the end" and their "peace and security," but my default setting, even as a faithful JW, was to disbelieve it.
How could I believe it? My mom would say things like "I never thought I'd get married in this system, then I thought I'd never have kids, then I thought my kids would never be in school, then I thought my kids would never graduate, then I thought they'd never get married." Life milestone after life milestone was faithfully "never thought," and yet they just kept coming.
My mom's own example (even though she's faithful to this day) was one of the major reasons I never believed it.

minimus

Really, what are these people "faithful" for?? Or to? Or what?? It makes no sense.

Dune

I was told when i was 8/9 years old that armageddon would have been here by the time i was 16, i'm 19 now.

daystar

Oh, I totally did. I was raised in and since I was born in 1973 and my parents didn't become JWs until after, or about, 1975, they missed that whole scandal.

So, yeah, I believed completely that I was going to see the Great Tribulation, Armageddon, and, if I was lucky, survive through that into the New System or be resurrected shortly after.

I'm so glad I got the boot at 18, otherwise I might just now be starting to question things.

james_woods

I didn't (as per the paralell thread), but let me add - I think it was mostly on practical reasons in addition to the failure of the stated dates to come to pass.

I honestly heard one old lady proclaim at the WT study that "the new world will last forever because we know the sun is going to last forever"!

Such "logic" as this (as well as the pet lions, earth ecology infrastructure, etc.) gave me the willies the whole time I was in.

James

minimus

I guess logic is not a typical JW trait.

Mary

I'm embarassed and ashamed to say Yes, I absolutely believed it was coming in my life time. When I was a teenager, we had what we thought was a funny saying: "We'll never be old.....we'll either be dead or in the New System!" (The elders would laugh and assure us that if we remained faithful to the Borganization, we'd be in the New System.)

Actually, in retrospect, it's not funny at all, but just shows the sort of warped mentality that was fused into our brain cells.......not being prepared whatsoever for adulthood has been the undoing of many a-Dubs.

When I slowly realized that The End wasn't coming in my lifetime, it really shocked me and bothered me alot......pretty darn sad when you have to "readjust your thinking" to what a normal persons is eh?

drew sagan

Very much so. I was pretty much converted on the idea that we where so very close. Deep down I had reservations, but every time a new book or article came out that proclaimed in detail how 'far we are in the stream of time' I would jump right back on the bandwagon. 9/11 was a huge reason why my questions about the Society quieted for a while.
Funny, the JW mindset is that it's going to be within the next 10 years. That's all I ever heard people say. No matter what year it was, it was going to happen within the next 10 years. "Can't see this system going past 2010". Yep, I heard that in 2000. In 2002 it was "Can't see this system going past 2012". Just keeps going on.
Happy to say I don't believe it anymore.

Did You Believe "The End" Was Going To Come In Your Lifetime?

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