How did 1975 effect your family? here's mine...

by Aussie Oz 35 Replies latest watchtower scandals

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  Aussie Oz

  There is a house in Ballarat with a stash of literature and bibles buried under the floor of the garage...

  part of our 'dress rehersal' no doubt. We all dug the hole and placed it in so we could go back and get it during the persecution or after armageddon or during the dusctruction etc.

  funny how you suddenly remember things!

  oz

  edit: i think many who swear black and blue that nothing big was said/done are not forgetful at all. They simply are humiliated and ashamed/embaressed that they got sucked in. They will attempt to save face till the day they die.
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  Quentin

  1975....Yup, from 1960 to 1975 were the jw, wt salad days. Strong growth, I new several jws that had 3, 4 bible studies going on. Thoes were the days. But, I left in '74, so I never kept up with the blame game that came down from Brooklyn.

  1975 was going to be the end of this "old system" and the start of the "new world". The ones who stayed afterward and denie what happened are a sad group of folks.
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  Scarred for life

  The ones who stayed afterward and denie what happened are a sad group of folks.

  Yes, they are. I've always felt very sorry for my relatives that were so sure that it would happen. And they were even more sure that my grandmother would never die and she would see Armageddon and the New World. She died in 1986. I think they were even more disappointed at that.
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  OnTheWayOut

  I am sure it wouldn't have worked out eventually, but my father lost my mother to the JW's when Mom heard the end of the world was coming in 1975 and she became a gung-ho JW. He lost her and found comfort elsewhere. He figured out what a mistake that was and after the divorce, they actually started dating again, but Mom still said the end of the world was coming in 1975.

  Drunk, Dad phoned Mom on Jan. 1, 1976 and said "I am still here." Well, that was it- she didn't try to work it out with him.

  Mom was distraught over her disappointment and got herself disfellowshipped sometime after that for smoking, but it was really a way of walking away from JW's because she stayed away for a couple of years. She found a new man and lived with him.

  One day, the end of the world stuff got to her and she was concerned about how many years passed from Adam's creation to Eve's creation. She had to get back to the Kingdom Hall. She got married to the man she was living with and started sitting in the back at the meetings. As a teen, I did not go back with her. Heck, I didn't even know about the shunning process, but I didn't want to go.

  I became a JW as a young adult in my 20's because during a person crisis, Mom sent the JW's to help me. I thought it was God's direction to me.

  Not that I live in the "what-if" but if there were no cry that the sky was falling in 1975, Mom would never have become a JW nor would I have become one. The reason I don't live in "what-if" is because one of my close co-workers was a Mormon. I might have joined the even whackier cult or I might have gotten the help I really needed- who knows?
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  Scarred for life

  Thanks for your story, OTWO.
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  freddo

  I was 14 in 1975 and remember well the hype through my childhood from about the age of 5 onwards. I remember that 68 Awake and the buzz about 75 and how I wouldn't leave school. I was scared of demons and wet the bed until I was ten, but none of us realised the major cause of my anxieties. What a croc - I was only a kid and my gullible parents either sang 1975 from the rooftops and in the neighbourhood (my mother) or went a long with it and provided no alternative direction (my father). It was driven from the travelling overseers and it came to them from Fanatic Freddy and was efficiently managed by Nutter Knorr and his underlings.

  Then it was "the middle seventies" and "we may be out by a year or two" because "we don't know how long Eve was created after Adam and the 6000 years starts from when they were thrown out of Eden but Eve hadn't had kids so it could only be a year or two at most".

  And the "backstop" of the generation - so 70 or 80 years from 1914 might mean 1984 (and later 1994).

  And then the generation change of 95' (by then mum had died and taken her irrational zeal to the grave). And I had the glimmerings of an awakening further fuelled by the wonderful internet and lurking on this site from 2003 which helped me realise I wasn't alone in my thinking.

  So my UK town was no different from your Yankee city or your Aussie street or your German neighbourhood or your Italian piazza - and the current leadership tries to say it was a few brothers that ran ahead. Yeah right!
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  man in black

  Unbelievable stories, and the aftereffects of a foolish prophecy. Everyone, thanks for sharing them !

  I came in the religion in 1979 at 18 years old.

  Even then I felt that something was not right, it reminded me of walking on thin ice when everyone else was telling me that it was really secure.

  "go on, keep heading out, it's fine"
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  ana_dote

  I wasn't born until 1981, but it still affected my life. My dad's side of the family was always around the religion in some way, so he was basically raised in it. BUT....apparently 1975 disillusioned his parents and they began to drift away and finally DA'd themselves. Because of this I only have one very faint memory of my granparents from when I was a very small child....and the rest of my memories of them are from when they were in the hospital/nursing home dying.

  I never got to know them. And it makes me mad and hurt. Since they were DA'd we obviously didn't associate with them. In fact, we associated more (even though it still wasn't that much) with my mom's parents who were "worldly".

  It angers me because I feel deprived of my heritage. I feel ignorant about my history and who I am/where I came from. I feel like I was givin the facade of familyhood without there being any actual family bond.

  yes, i'm pissed.
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  Gordy

  I'm in England, started studying with JWs in March 1971, baptised January 1972, I was 20 yrs old.

  The Elder who took my study , only brought the 1975 date up when studying the "Freedom everlasting" book.
  And then it was , 6,000 years since Adam created.
  And that was it, no Armageddon is going to happen then.
  It was never mentioned again.
  In fact I very rarely heard it mentioned at meetings if at all.

  There were no sisters running round saying "Armageddons coming"

  In 1973 I met the JW sister who was to become my wife, and we never discussed 1975.
  We married in July 1974.
  Had our first child in OCTOBER 1975!
  No one in that time ever said to us about having a child so close to "the end"

  The congregation continued to grow after 1975, we had to split in two.
  Then by late 1980's we had to get a bigger KH.

  I always put it down to, that we had Elders who had their heads screwed on.
  They were guys who were 50 - 70 years old, either born JWs or had been most of their lives.
  I think they played a keep it calm and wait and see attitude.

  I have met other ex-JWs here, who have spoken how in their congregations it was taken seriously.

  I've spoken to a guy, ex-JW Elder, whose parents sold up their business and home to go and preach.
  They died still believing the WT was right.

  I have come across a wide range of stories.
  Some like mine were 1975 didn't figure at all.
  Others were it was taken up, seriously.

  It just seems to vary from congregation to congregation.
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  Scarred for life

  I agree with you that it varied somewhat from congregation to congregation or maybe circuit to circuit. In my case, it wasn't really mentioned much officially in meetings. It was more the talk before and after the meetings. There were brothers and sisters running around saying that"Armageddon's coming." Our elders were screwballs and we had a few fanatical, weirdo people that kept the 1975 alarm going. My memory is that our "elders" were in their 40s. And I don't think they had all been JWs all their lives. In fact, I know they hadn't. They did nothing to try and keep things calm and encourage a "wait and see" attitude. I remember clearly my father having discussions with them about how he did n't believe that we knew a date and he used that scripture about how we don't know the time or the hour. (Is it in Matthew?) He and another man in the congregation( a fairly well-off and well-educated lawyer) were the only 2 that believed that everyone else was going down the road of hysteria. In fact, if my memory is correct, the lawyer was made an elder in 1971 but by 1973 he was brought into a JC and removed as an elder and put on "probation" because he was so vocal about not believeing that 1975 was THE date. I believe that my father was counseled also. But I don't know that for sure. I left shortly after all this and I don't know what happened after that first hand. I couldn't take it anymore. I would have committed suicide if I had stayed.