What would be the most important things you think someone should be aware about JWs if they are planning on getting baptised as a JW?
Imagine you are on a plane and get talking to the person next to you. You find out they are considering becoming a JW but they are not sure. You tell them you were a JW and you used to believe in the Watchtower but you don't any more. They seem interested and open to hearing your perspective.
What would let them know about JWs during the remainder of the flight. Here are my top six:
1. That once they get baptised they will no longer be allowed to openly question what the Watchtower says. As a Bible study they may have been humoured when asking awkward questions or saying they don't find certain things in the magazines believable. But once they are baptised that will no longer be tolerated. Openly questioning or expressing doubts about Watchtower teachings after baptism will lead to them being marked as bad association or outright expulsion and shunning.
2. They will be stigmatised in the congregation if either they or their children decide to go to college.
3. JWs do not believe in making the world a better place. They shun community attempts to improve social problems and the environment. They view the United Nations as a beast of Revelation that God will destroy.
4. They have promised that the end would come at various times over the past 140 years and all their predictions have failed. Most recently they claimed that Armageddon would come within the lifetime of the generation who saw 1914. When that prediction failed they changed their interpretation, made no apology for misleading people, and continued to insist the end is near.
5. They have changed their policy on blood and organ transplants over the decades and Witnesses died in the past refusing treatments that are now allowed. Some day the Watchtower may give up on the blood ban altogether, so why put your life on the line for a shifting doctrine?
6. That a man called Raymond Franz who used to be on the Governing Body wrote two books about his exit from the group and how the organisation cares about its own preservation more than the well being of ordinary JWs.
Issues I would not raise in such circumstances.
1. That Rutherford was a drunkard and a womaniser.
2. That the Watchtower joined the United Nations int the 1990s and left only when they were caught out by former Witnesses.
3. That the NWT inserts the name Jehovah into the New Testament without manuscript support.
4. That Watchtower publications misquote sources to support their position on issues like the Trinity and evolution.
5. That the Watchtower quoted the spiritist Greber to support their translation of John 1:1.
6. That Watchtower publications once taught that Jehovah lives in the Pleiades.