Is there anyone brave enough to show these articles to current JWs?
TIME Magazine Articles on Jehovah's Witnesses
by Wild_Thing 43 Replies latest jw friends
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truthsearcher
From the Magazine | National Affairs
Glad Assembly
SUBSCRIBE TO TIMEPRINTE-MAILMORE BY AUTHORPosted Monday, Aug. 19, 1946
Cleveland had rarely seen such concerted concern for the uplift of its soul. Evangelists cried out on street corners; windrows of leaflets clogged the city's gutters. Defiant placards atop caravans of clanking autos proclaimed the doom of Satan.
All this, including the fair warning to Satan, was the work of an extraordinary army of 75,000 invading and noisy militants—from Finland, Argentina, Scotland, Mexico and every corner of the U.S. They were encamped on the shores of Lake Erie for the Glad Nations Theocratic Assembly of Jehovah's Witnesses.
At their first triumphant postwar conclave, the Witnesses cast off wartime tribulations. In Germany, their disdain for human authority had tumbled 6,000 of them into concentration camps. In the U.S., their religious scruples against saluting the flag had vexed mobs to tar & feather them and burn their homes. Over 4,000 had gone to jail for refusing either to serve in the armed forces or to be classified as conscientious objectors; Witnesses claimed they were all ministers of the gospel. But the Witnesses had thrived and multiplied a bit on a diet of rough treatment.
The Locusts. They brought wives and children and grandmothers with them. In Cleveland's western outskirts, on a treeless sunbaked flat of weeds and dust, 20,000 of them made a tidy camp. There they parked their trailers, pitched tents, built their own privies and slept like Spartans on mats of straw.
Nearby filling-station attendants complained that their washrooms were clogged with naked Witnesses taking sponge baths. Mechanics sweated without charge over the creaking chariots of fellow zealots. Free haircuts were dispensed by an amateur barber who was thoughtful enough to bring along an electric clipper. Payless chefs, cooking in tin-plated oil drums and 600-gallon kettles, ladled out 75,000 meals a day.
At central headquarters, Witnesses methodically divided the city into 11,773 four-block sectors. Then, like locusts, they swarmed out, haranguing pedestrians, charging up doorsteps with portable phonographs (message: let Roman Catholics change their ways), hawking the limitless output of the Watch Tower Bible & Tract Society.
When fire broke out in an elevator shaft of the downtown Leader Building, the canvassers stopped firemen rushing in to quench the flames, handed them pamphlets describing the coming destruction of the world by fire which is part of the Witnesses' dogma.
The Fireballs. Having thus tried Cleveland's spirit of hospitality, Witnesses turned to their own affairs. More than 2,500 of them, togged out in bathing suits, playsuits, pajamas or long underwear, waded hip deep into Lake Erie to be immersed backwards in its waters. (Baptizers, chilled by the four-hour ceremony, swigged from a bottle of port wine.)
Attentive throngs of Witnesses turned out faithfully for lecture after lecture in mammoth Municipal Stadium. From a platform in the infield, speakers hurled Biblical fireballs into the packed stands. The joyous climax of the Glad Assembly came on Universal Peace Day. There Watch Tower President Nathan H. Knorr, successor to the late, mellifluous "Judge" J. F. Rutherford, denounced most human institutions, especially the United Nations. Cried he: "Display outright fearlessness of this world conspiracy. . . . God's vengeance is speedily coming against all conspirators."
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Wild_Thing
There they parked their trailers, pitched tents, built their own privies and slept like Spartans on mats of straw.
Nearby filling-station attendants complained that their washrooms were clogged with naked Witnesses taking sponge baths.
More than 2,500 of them, togged out in bathing suits, playsuits, pajamas or long underwear, waded hip deep into Lake Erie to be immersed backwards in its waters. (Baptizers, chilled by the four-hour ceremony, swigged from a bottle of port wine.)LOL! When I read that, I thought ... in the words of Cartman ... "g**d*** hippies!!"
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uninformed
Truthsearcher,
Good Find.
mellifluous "Judge" J. F. Rutherford, denounced most human institutions, especially the United Nations. Cried he: "Display outright fearlessness of this world conspiracy. . . . God's vengeance is speedily coming against all conspirators."
Uninformed
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Ironhead
Thanks for posting this Wild Thing, when my wife, being nosey as always, read this last night you should have seen the look on her face. It look like she'd caught me in bed with her worst enemy. This morning she said she felt betrayed by the wts, and she didn't go to the meeting this morning. Today was the nicest she's been towards me for months. You could possibly save my marriage. Thanks again.
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Wild_Thing
Wow Ironhead ... you have no idea how you just gave me goosebumps!
I found another TIME article about the Judge and his California mansion.
Monday, Mar. 31, 1930California CultsBig, blue-eyed Judge Joseph Frederick Rutherford, 60, lives in a ten-room Spanish mansion, No. 4440 Braeburn Road. San Diego, Calif. Last week he deeded No. 4440 Braeburn Road, an adjacent two-car garage and a pair of automobiles to King David, Gedeon, Barak, Samson. Jephthae, Samuel and sundry other mighties of ancient Palestine. Positive is he that they are shortly to reappear on earth. Said he: "I have purposely landscaped the place with palm and olive trees so these princes of the universe will feel at home when they come to offer man the chance to become perfect."
Judge Rutherford's deed can scarcely be considered eccentric, for his conviction that the sunny boulevards of San Diego are soon to be trod by men with the light of ages in their eyes is presumably shared by the 1,000,000 members of the International Bible Students Association and the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, of both of which Judge Rutherford is President. In 34 nations these members have read his declarations as editor of both the Watch Tower and Golden Age magazines.
Judge Rutherford was born on a Missouri farm, practiced law at Boonville, acquired a circuit judgeship, continued practice in St. Louis, Kansas City. He accompanied the late William Jennings Bryan on his first Presidential campaign tour, announcing him as "appointed by God to straighten out the problems of the world." Mr. Bryan's example inspired Judge Rutherford to wear habitually a black bow tie. In 1916 he succeeded the late Charles Taze Russell of Brooklyn, founder-president of the International Bible Students Association.
Members of this organization designate themselves as Bible Students. Their creed holds that Biblical prophecies govern all earthly events. By careful scrutiny of Holy Writ, the Bible Students have discerned that three periods of time, termed "cosmos," prevail in human affairs. Cosmos I began with Adam, ended with the Flood. Cosmos II began with the Flood, ended with the World War. Cosmos III, begun in 1914, will end in 2874, when "The Kingdom of God" will fill the whole world. An erroneous prophecy that the year 1928 would provide a cataclysm— ''Nations will battle; the dead will be dung on the earth"—upset considerably the Bible Students' calculations, but the major tenets of their belief are as yet unshaken.
Newsmen last week asked Judge Rutherford whether he would not be troubled by bogus Davids applying for admission to consecrated No. 4440 Braeburn Road. Said he: "I realized the possibility of some old codger turning up bright and early some morning and declaring he was David. The men whom I have designated to test the identity of these men are officers of my societies. . . . They will be divinely authorized to know impostors from the real Princes."
It would be idle to deny that organized religion is sore beset in the present age. Agnosticism and atheism are on the rise.
Protestantism is struggling for Unity. Catholicism reiterates its commands but has a hard time enforcing them. In Russia is the unprecedented spectacle of the Communistic anti-religious crusade. Thousands of persons, dissatisfied with the faiths of their fathers, seek new spiritual footholds. Thus, as always in such troubled times, there is a flourishing of cults, of religious novelties and new fashions in faith. Flowery, sun-drenched California, where Nature exhibits herself in mystical opulence, where plenty of people have plenty of money, where there are many invalids contemplating eternity, is particularly propitious for this flourishing.
Recent years have witnessed a great burgeoning of California cults. Examples : The Rosicrucian Fellowship. In Oceanside is a fellowship founded by one Max Heindel who wrote a book called Cosmo-Conception while living in a Manhattan boarding house on a diet of milk and shredded wheat. Object of his cult: to distribute literature on Western learning, to practice spiritual healing through agents known as "Elder Brothers" and "Invisible Helpers." There are no public ceremonies; a maxim of the fellowship is in substance: "Know all things but remain unknown." Founder Heindel died in 1916. his work is now continued by his wife and her associates. The Rosicrucian Brotherhood in San Jose, directed by H. Spencer Lewis, Imperator for North America, onetime Jew ish salesman, is joined to an international brotherhood conducted, like Freemasonry, on the lodge system. It extols good citizenship, patriotism, scientific and cultural self-improvement. Its primary significance is not religious. It claims descent from an occult and ancient line supposedly including the Egyptian sages and Sir Fran cis Bacon. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson.* Its ritual is elaborate, archaic, Egyptian in symbolism. Imperator Lewis recently threatened suit against Mrs. Heindel of Oceanside because she employed the term Rosicrucian in connection with her fellowship.
Theosophists. On Point Loma is the International Headquarters of the vast Universal Brotherhood and Theosophical Society, founded in Manhattan in 1875 by Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, long led by the late Katherine Tingley. The late Lyman Judson Gage, San Diego banker, Secretary of the Treasury in the McKinley and Roosevelt Cabinets, was an ardent Point Loma Theosophist. The cult attempts to harmonize with all great faiths, but is deeply colored in its observances and specific modes of thought by Eastern philosophers and prophets. In glass-domed buildings on Point Loma children may attend a Theosophical school. Excellent is the musical education obtained therein.
The Order of the Star in the East recently established a 1,000-acre colony, one of four world centres, in Krotona, Ojai Valley. It is the U. S. headquarters of 82-year-old Dr. Annie Besant's Theosophical Society, a schismatic offshoot of the Blavatsky-Tingley cult. Constant is the conflict between the two; each is anxious not to be confused with the other. Dr. Besant's teachings are very closely linked with Eastern thought, occult and mystical. She has proclaimed her famed, sloe-eyed Hindu protege, Krishnamurti, to be the vehicle of the World Teacher (i.e. the divine spirit at times appropriates his physical organism, speaks through him as it spoke through Jesus, Mohammed, etc.). Once an avid tennis-player and tea-drinker at Oxford and on the Riviera, he arrived last week in Krotona to begin new vigils and meditations. The Besant Society believes that children born on the Pacific Coast, Canada and Australia (or other fresh, unexhausted lands) are creatures of a new, sixth race, capable of seeing ethereal spirits, possessed of clairvoyance. All other people living are said to derive from the fifth, or Arian root race. Another Besant belief: California is highly electrical, hence occult manifestations are frequent. Great is the hope of the Society that Krotona will prove a breeding place of strapping, golden children.
The Apostle Faith Movement has a branch in Los Angeles, claims to heal by correspondence, dispenses blessed handkerchiefs.
The Holy City in the Santa Cruz Mountains is for men only. Its inhabitants wear long hair, sell barbecued pork and gasoline to travelers, broadcast from their own radio station, post signs reminding the countryside of the likelihood of Death. Their hillside retreat includes a dance hall from which feminine shouting frequently echoes down the mountains.
The Great Eleven lapsed after the imprisonment of May Otis Blackburn ("Heel of God"). From one Clifford Dabney it is claimed she stole $40,000, having promised to reveal universal secrets. Mr. Dabney declared that she told him he was the Christ but could not prove it.
*Certain 17th Century religious reformers called themselves Rosicrucians: creditable historians, however, have discovered no evidence that they were fraternally organized.
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ICBehindtheCurtain
I found this footnote interesting, since as far as I know Rutherford was a Lawyer who served as a judge for a week or two, but was not really a judge, why would it say here that he served as a circuit judge for 14 years? If any of you know, please share this with us. Thanks for posting these Time magazine articles, I am sharing them with a few active JW's I know, since the source of the info is "non-Apostate" they will read it.
He was for 14 years a circuit judge in Missouri; "consecrated myself to the Lord" in 1906. He is now 58 years old.
IC
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Wild_Thing
I found this footnote interesting, since as far as I know Rutherford was a Lawyer who served as a judge for a week or two, but was not really a judge, why would it say here that he served as a circuit judge for 14 years? If any of you know, please share this with us. Thanks for posting these Time magazine articles, I am sharing them with a few active JW's I know, since the source of the info is "non-Apostate" they will read it.
He was for 14 years a circuit judge in Missouri; "consecrated myself to the Lord" in 1906. He is now 58 years old.
IC
I think it is pretty common, even today, for reporters to take information like that at face value. I am sure if Rutherford told him that, he printed it with the presumption that it was true without verifying it. I would be interested to know what can be dug up on his history here in Missouri.
