Is there no one else who finds the rather one-dimensional character of apostate discourse on the Society's third president a bit empty?
Even if it didn't end up that way, isn't it likely he was initially motivated by a concern for the truth, the same way many are drawn to the Witnesses even today? To paint someone as a villain is to invite incomprehension as to how they could have acted as they did. Isn't there more room for a bit of tragedy in the portrait we carry of this man? A tragic figure challenges us to identify with their weaknesses; appreciate the tiny increments of a person's life through which they become a personality most of us are repulsed by - a resultant figure whom even the young Rutherford may have rejected if he had somehow been miraculously presented with foregleam of the 'Kingdom' autocracy he truly would have part in fashioning. One prominent ex-Witness suggested Rutherford may have had anti-social personality disorder, which explains his unabashed hypocrisy and selfishness. But such neat resolutions are unhelpful because they promote numb incredulity, even self-satisfaction in the knowledge we could not have acted the same way given the same circumstances because we don't share his 'mental affliction'. Perhaps it would do us good to contemplate the more frightening possibility that his only mental affliction was that he believed he had access to the truth, and convinced himself that he had a key role in the outworking of God's plan. How many believe they have the truth? Many of us can remember that feeling. And what fine line of circumstance separates such 'faithful believers' from the conviction that God is speaking to them, even giving new instructions.
You may condemn him for his actions during 'satanic' Prohibition for instance, which to us seem as blatantly self-serving as they do ridiculous. But isn't all religion fundamentally self-serving? How do so many doctrines proliferate? Is God sending mixed messages, or doesn't it simply reflect the changing concerns of different interest groups? In some ways I feel Rutherford is picked out by apostates because his 'badness' was incomplete and more complex than that of Russell or Knorr. It seems a widespread view that two changes would render Jehovah's Witnesses a lot less egregious (not to say harmless) to former members: if they abandon the blood ban and stop disfellowshipping. Rutherford formulated neither of those practices; harmless old Knorr presided over that. Plus weaknesses in the current historiography reveal an agenda to cover over indications that Russell was every bit the autocrat in his own right, and could even have taught Rutherford a thing or two. So why does Rutherford still loom so large in apostate villainology?
Widening the scope somewhat, on a scale of evil, if we condescend to envisage such a crude notion, how does Rutherford compare for instance with a man who forbids the use of condoms in Africa resulting in the suffering and death of untold thousands of innocent (by the same man's standard of 'innocence') women? That is qualitatively as much as quantitatively more evil than anything Rutherford did in my estimation. But of course Rutherford was a tin pot dictator of a small time sect, not the 'spiritual leader' of a mainstream faith. The language means everything and nothing here.
These are a few of the reasons why I think it's time to look at Rutherford from a different angle, even empathy?
Slim