Is it not true that the leaders knew that it was a blatant lie when the 1975 teaching was propagated in the 60's?
Why did the WTBS endorse 1975?
by jay88 42 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
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OUTLAW
Probably not..The WBT$ is run by Idiots..
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...OUTLAW -
thetrueone
Of course they knew but they still needed a proverbial carrot to hang in front of people's faces to keep them working
for them at the various printing presses and the door to door work via their mentally indoctrinated followers.
This is how apocalyptic fear mongering religious charlatans operate.
Was 1887 wrong
Was 1914 wrong
Was 1925 wrong
Was 1975 wrong
Was 1995 wrong
Will any future dates proclaimed by the WTS be wrong ? of course !
This is how this particular religious publishing company works, finds naive gullible people who are intricately ignorant about
bible theology, then exploits these people for free labour and money and to develop a self discerning power base.
Using fear as a catalyst to grease the wheels as it were .
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Ding
I'm not so the WTS leaders knew that their 1975 hype was a lie.
In Crisis of Conscience, Ray Franz says that when the end didn't come in 1975 as anticipated, the GB scrambled to try to figure out what had gone wrong.
This indicates that they really believed it themselves, probably because they believed that Freddy was a genuine Bible scholar.
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thetrueone
The 6000 year dating calculation was a farce perpetrated to stir up the followers to stay with them and to work harder at circulating
the organization's literature. When it was realised eventually that it was a pretentious farce, the WTS lost the greatest amount of their
members in its entire history in the years preceding 1975.
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sabastious
They have always had their "carrots" for the rank and file, this one was just too obvious.
They learned from the experience.
Then they made another mistake in the 80s with the 1914 generation sales pitch.
They learned from that mistake as well. Now we have Watchtower literature that is just a bunch of vague riddles and commandments to follow a group of men.
-Sab
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Bonnie_Clyde
I'm not so the WTS leaders knew that their 1975 hype was a lie.
In Crisis of Conscience, Ray Franz says that when the end didn't come in 1975 as anticipated, the GB scrambled to try to figure out what had gone wrong.
This indicates that they really believed it themselves, probably because they believed that Freddy was a genuine Bible scholar.
So do you think that Freddy knew it was a lie?
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sabastious
So do you think that Freddy knew it was a lie?
He knew it was a stretch I would guess, but he also "knew" he was being directed by Jesus and Jehovah, so....
-Sab
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Ding
I may be wrong, of course, but think Freddy really believed his own 1975 date.
When it failed, he came up with the Adam-Eve creation gap theory to buy up to a year.
What was the point of that unless he really believed it himself?
On the other hand, on another thread Brotherdan posted a pre-1975 talk given by Freddy in which he was telling someone (Gilead graduates, I think) all about seeing Russell and Rutherford's dates fail, laughing as he told the stories. That was so bizarre, I wondered if he had any idea what he was saying.
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fulltimestudent
I'd agree with Ding's assessment.
My view is that the whole thing was driven by Freddy's expectation of the end. But Knorr has to accept some responsibity also. During Rutherford's approximately 20 year rule, Freddy had been a research assistant and ghost writer. After Rutherford's death, Knorr took on the role of the practical organiser, and allowed Freddy to take on a more or less official role of "Bible Scholar" and that's how he was viewed within the organisation. At assemblies, the audience hung on Freddy's words. There does not seem to have been any practical method of 'review' of what Freddy said. So the general expectation within the organisation of an approaching "end" allied with Freddy's uncritical acceptance of both Daniel and revelation as genuine prophetic documents meant that the wording of certain key paragraphs within "Life Everlasting in Freedom of the Sons of God, " does not seem to have received the questioning that it should have recieved. And, the book did touch a nerve within the membership. I recall my own feelings of appreciation and reinforcement of my own hopes, when it was released. I did (and not in hindsight) have some qualifications about the way Freddy argued his way to the date, but in general accepted it.
I do not think that it was a 'blatant lie' as Jay88 suggests. Assuming, for a moment, that the WTBTS, was a group of men concerned only with making money, so that they would tell a 'blatant lie' like this, just how would they be advantaged? Any group of real 'con-men' would know that there would be a day of reckoning.
More, I was present at a meeting of Sydney elders at the Greenacre Assembly Hall in about September (from memory) in 1975, when Nathan and Freddy came to Australia to 'explain themselves'. By that time the troops were starting to wonder what was happening about 1975, it was becoming clear to many in the organisation that all the things that were supposed to happen before Armageddon, had not happened and there were no signs that they were going to happen.
In his talk, Nathan discussed those points and admitted that it did not seem likely that were going to happen any time soon. What else could he say? But to me the most telling thing was the 'tension' between the two men, in spite of the 'nice' words, the body language conveyed a feeling of tension between them. (Of course, Nathan was recovering from a cancer operation)
So it's not 'blatant lies', but disappointed (again) hopes that affected the organisation. I have no doubts that the WTBTS genuinely believed that Armageddon was coming and Freddy's chronological arguments convinced them that around 1975 could be it. Many of us knew that it was approximate, the Biblical dating is too loose to set a precise date, even if all the proof texts were true prophesies from some all-powerful God.
The following year, they sent out Doug Held, a former branch servant, to rally the troops - but Doug set me on the road to freedom, by telling me, "well, it may be 20 years away." Which timing could be consistent with what Freddy had said in the Life Everlasting book, because it all hinged on how long Adam was alone in the garden before Eve's making and their supposed rebellion. That time period may have been one year or it may have been a hundred years. As I realised that, I saw I had to work these things out for myself, and that's why I am a post-christian.
The other truth is that the WTBTS were and are, just another group of disappointed Christians who have built their hopes on so-called 'promises' of the Bible. And that dear friends, is a process that has been happening among claimed "Christians" from the start. The early church vacillated between expectation and disappointed hopes. Today's Christians do the same.
