by is there help out there 25 Replies latest jw friends
I love it when the pedants come out to play! But I do agree with the thread title and foregoing thoughts.
I wonder if those Bethel computors are wired in so that each one can be spied on by the Bethel Gestapo-Stasi ? Will a Bethel member dare to accessJWD/JWN,let alone more risque sites?
Love
Wobble
Jeremy C, you almost have me swooning!
Sylvia
I have noticed that I get all the "extremely important" announcements on these apostate boards long before the witlesses get them at the Kingdumb Hell. And usually it is nothing more than putting lipstick on a pig.
A quote from an article - "The Truth vs. the TRUTH" - http://libertyunbound.com/archive/2003_10/cox-truth.html
Meanwhile, the Society's foes continued building their own institutions. H2O remains, and it has been joined by other well-mounted message boards, such as the Jehovah's Witnesses Discussion Forum (jehovahs-witness.com). The conflict between the Internet and the Society is decidedly unequal. The Society's task is, first, to convince people that it has a comprehensive and fully consistent explanation of reality; then, to organize these people into a force that can support a vast profusion of things: printing plants, assembly halls, local churches, mortgages, investments, legal offices. The task of the Internet dissidents is simply to show that the Society's ideas aren't true, and to organize such inexpensive virtual institutions as may be useful in spreading that message. The dissidents have a considerable economic advantage.
Can the Society, or anything like it, have a future in an Internetted world?
Perhaps. There are several options available to it. The most obvious is to do what Raymond Franz tried to get it to do, a quarter-century ago: admit it was wrong. But this, of course, is the least likely option to be taken. Only one modern American institution has ever admitted that it was fundamentally in error — the Worldwide Church of God, an Adventist church that, influenced by the Witnesses, once referred to its members as "in the Truth," and to everyone else as out of it. During the 1990s, the WCG leadership surveyed its distinctive teachings and announced that they could not be squared with the Bible. The reward for its courage was the loss of 50–60% of its membership. This is an example that the Watchtower Society will be very reluctant to follow.
It is much more likely to choose one of two other options, roughly the same two that confront all other truth-challenged institutions in the modern world.
The first option is for the Society to keep trying to isolate its own version of truth from the checkable truth of the Internet. If it does that, the Watchtower movement will become a living fossil, a fellowship confined to people who, like the Amish, are content to remain in a world that predates the net.
The second option is for the Society to adapt its version of truth, bit by bit, to the fact-gathering capability of the Internet and the free society that the Internet exemplifies.
This second option is almost certainly the one that will be taken. Like other earthly authorities, the Society has a will to live at almost any cost. It will try to live even if the cost is a quiet coming to terms with its own mistakes. The real question is whether the speed of the Internet will give it time for an orderly evolution. We have seen, in Eastern Europe, how quickly glasnost can be followed by oblivion. The crucial factor may be the morale of the leadership, its ability to live with the same truth that normal people live with, while simultaneously acting as if it were still in possession of its higher truth.
Raymond Franz told me the following episode from the life of his uncle, Frederick Franz, the fourth president of the Watchtower Society. In old age, Frederick Franz was taken to an eye doctor, who found that he couldn't read even the first line on the eye chart. The doctor pronounced him almost totally blind, with no possibility of improvement. "Well," Franz said, slapping his knees, "as long as I'm here, I might as well get my eyeglass prescription brought up to date!"
That's morale for you. Does the Society still have enough of it, at a time when morale has so few ways of evading the embarrassments of truth? We'll find out — because the Internet will tell us.
An incredible article, from a "non apostate" site. Great read. Probably old news for many here.
I hope the internet is their downfall.
Then maybe we can all get a refund.
