"Wondrous expansion is now taking place!" - the reality...

by cedars 26 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

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  cedars

  Thanks for those suggestions irondork. I may well mention that the growth rate is actually falling, but even if it remained at the current level....

  I agree that many JWs would answer "yes" to the 1 in 500 scenario. I've tried to mitigate that somewhat by mentioning a number of hypothetical scenarios including varying worldwide death tolls. The idea behind this is to get the reader thinking it through properly, which the Society doesn't encourage you to do. A true narcissist will see themselves as that "1 in 500", whereas a balanced/thinking individual would see that the very notion of 499 deaths for every Armageddon survivor is ridiculous - and that's assuming Jehovah saves nearly double the amount of active Jehovah's Witnesses.

  Cedars
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  jemba

  Fascinating, thanks Cedars.. Hopefully some poor brainwashed dubs will think about this. Look forward to the next 3 installments.
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  Fernando

  Hey Lond111!

  Loved your song! What are the chances of a YouTube video?
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  Aussie Oz

  I take solace in the fact that my ex wife has managed to put more people OFF the JWs than she could ever hope to convert in 1000 years of preaching.

  oz
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  Room 215

  Brilliant, Cedars... and YOU TOO Londo111!!
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  donny

  Great article Cedars! This data fits into my reality that I have encountered since leaving the Witnesses. I am continiously amazed how little the "world" knows about the JW's apart from the blood transfusion issue and not celebrating holidays.
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  blondie

  Just spending 10 hours a month is no guarantee of making a disciple. I know many who never ever connect again with the person they talked to and/or placed literature with; jws that don't want to be tied down to a "bible" study and give it to a pioneer or an elder. People who never prepare an interesting topic, or listen to the person at the door, or know themselves what is in the publication or the bible. I remember elders who had studies but not from cold calling; they cherry picked the people who called the congregation interested in a study. I remember the older brother who took his 3-year old grandson for a walk along the beach and played in the sand and counted 3 hours.

  The last CO who visited our old congregation said if it were not for the "increase" in the foreign language congregations, the US would have no increase; that 1/4 of the elders leave each year; the COBOE who said that in 10 years only one person was baptized that was not a child f rom a jw family (and that person had been df'd recently).

  I figure that it's a case of publisher musical chairs; a family a five moves into a congregation and they think it's an increase whereas 3 have become inactive, 2 df'd, and 10 moved to other congregations.
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  WTWizard

  There is expansion--among people that are leaving right-hand path religion altogether. Many wind up totally without any belief in any God, while a growing number are exploring the left-hand path. Pretty soon, there will be more spiritual Satanists than Jehovah's Witlesses--and that without knocking on doors.
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  cantleave

  Cedars - any idea how many active / doubting witnesses read your blog?

  It needs to be spammed it out to as many WTS drones as possible.
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  cedars

  Thanks everyone!

  cantleave - I do keep tabs on the website statistics, and the blog entries are quite popular - although it's impossible to tell for certain which of those visits are from active witnesses. Hopefully, as the word gradually gets out, more and more active witnesses will read the articles and take the survey. I've certainly written the last few articles with active Witnesses in mind.

  An interesting indicator of visits from active witnesses are the keywords used to land on the site. We had quite a few visits over the past few days purely through people googling keywords related to the domestic abuse Watchtower article, which I found interesting. I can just imagine people being shocked by the article when studying it for the meeting, and then googling it to see what came up.

  Cedars