Jehovahs Witnesses - Mainstreaming, Like It Or Not (page 5)

RubaDub

I agree with Minimus, who in turn agrees with R&R.

Rub a Dub

I agree with Password Prot. While many JW can spout certain overemphasized verses ( Matt 24:14 comes to mind) I find that few are familiar with anything Scriptural and only familiar with the most recent WT studies or other publications.

Lady Lee's points also stand out as well. Many of the cost saving tactics are unimportant in comparison to the continual dogmatic pressing of dubs not straying, doubting or being critical of anything the WTS prints. There's also the WT constant reminders about "rebellious talk" and "independent thinking", that stops even the mildest of witnesses from asking questions.

Mickey mouse

I concur with the "Decaying rather than mainstreaming" hypothesis.

mkr32208

Howard Johnson is right!

While an elder, I was asked by a young MS about a verse in the Bible he was struggling to understand. I asked him if he'd prayed for understanding from God from the Holy Spirit. At this a sister who'd been eavesdropping piped up that he should also 'go to the faithful and discreet slave'.

I hope that you took her in the back room and beat the hell out of her! Doesn't she know that sisters aren't suppose to open their mouths?

Here's the thing about the witnesses and the reason that they CAN'T mainstream. JW's are an end times church, they don't believe in a soul or in reincarnation. For their religion to last there MUST BE AN END DATE. See Catholics are about heaven and doing whatever it takes to avoid hell they can last maybe not forever but for a long long time. However you can't just say "the end will be here soon" forever.

easyreader1970

Another issue causing the decay is the lack of a "date". In order for a cult to work, there has to be a date where everything will culminate. Even after 1975 came and went, there was a specific time period even though there was no specific year. The system surely would not last another twenty years, no youths in the organization would reach adulthood before the end came, definitely things would have changed before the turn of the century.The turn of the century happened, people who were in their teens, twenties, and thirties are now older, some working in terrible fields or are unable to change their professions because they were herded into window washing or sand blasting.

With no date, you've got no cult. People aren't storming out of the kingdom hall doors in disgust; they're just slowly slipping away. The money problem just makes it worse.

Alpaca

Easyreader has an excellent point about an end-times cult needing a date.

Dates are what made the BORG successful for so long.

And, what made the dates believable, to those who bought into it, were the seeming scholarly examinations of the scriptures which led to the fanciful numerological contortions to make the predictions. It is a formula they have used over and over, with success. Of course, the pseudo-scholarship was accompanied by self-proclamations of having God's spirit exclusively.

The problem now is that they have painted themselves into a corner with dates that are immutable with respect to the foundations of the whole set of doctrines.

Of course, it would be foolish for us to count them out. They could always pull something creative out of their ass and feed it to the faithful who are hungry for anything that would bring Armageddon back onto the horizon.

sir82

Dates are what made the BORG successful for so long.

Right - even without a hard date, an implied date is important.

Even after 1975 passed, and the publisher count actually dropped for 2-3 years thereafter, "God's promise" that the end would come "before the generation of 1914 died" kept most people hanging on, and growth was actually pretty robust - it more than doubled from 1975 - 1995. Since 1995 (with the 2nd-most-latest change to the defintion of "generation"), the organization is like a spent spinning top, slowly wobbling down, the only growth coming from 3rd world countries (and 3rd-world country immigrants to the 1st world).

The wobble will continue without an explicit or implied end date. At some point, they either have to re-spin the top by picking or implying a new date, or watch it spiral down to just a few hundred thousand hard-core believers. However, it seems that no one has the nerve to actually pick a new date.

willyloman

After three pages of posts, there's not much to add to this excellent topic except to express my thinking that if mainstream ever does come to the dub organization, it will come from the bottom up.

You can see evidence of that happening already.

Jehovahs Witnesses - Mainstreaming, Like It Or Not