by Monsieur 36 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
Yes Finklestein, the Watchtower is a farce. Imagine how it is that the org arrives at biblical understanding: a committee of old timers gets together and determines what doctrines will be the most palatable under the prevailing circumstances and then proclaims that what they have decided it is "divine truth". How shallow... how corrupt... how foolish!
If there was a God and the Watchtower really had divine truth they would never need to change the doctrines ever.
The foundation that their religion is built upon is 1914 and the choosing of the FDS around 1919, based upon 1914.
The reasons for the GB's claimed authority are these two inter-connected dates.
I believe they know very well how a few minutes spent investigating these baseless claims on Sites like JWFacts.com will prove to any person with two sparking brain cells that the GB are self-appointed bul**itters.
So, I do think that they have paved the way to make 1914 fade away like 1925 and 1975 did, but that they have a problem with totally dropping the whole nonsense. For a good while these dates have simply been obliquely referred to, and JW's have to accept them as a "given".
I think young and new JW's do so, feeling that older and more studious JW's have done the study on this and proven the nonsense to be true, so as they accept it, it must be, Millions of JW's cannot all be wrong can they ?
But in this age of freely available information and thought from a multitude of sources, surely the days of JW Bullcrap are nearly over ?
I am not so sure, (at least at the moment), there is a deliberate effort to abandon 1914. That said, it could happen at any time. It will likely be one of the last of the esoteric teachings to go, however.
More to the point, much of what is going on is just normal social evolution of an end-times religion. After a while, the supporting structure for end-times belief becomes less of such a structure. They didn't plan for this, but the end of the world never happened, so they naturally need to water down proprietary doctrines that support that belief in order to survive. It is obvious to those on the outside looking in, not so much to those too close to the organization.
The organization is slowly evolving into a lifestyle religion, not unlike the LDS. Doctrines progressively mean less and less, and the social "norms" of identification, (however poorly supported by logic), as a JW become increasingly important. This is not so much a well designed strategy as it is just normal social evolution.
d4g
The WTS over the years has proven the intrinsic power of the printed word and how it can mentally engage people with idealogical suggestions of unusual proportions.
What made the WTS organization so undeniably corrupt is that it exploited the already established belief in the bible and of Jesus Christ as something truthful and used that to support its most notable doctrines such as Jesus's invisible return/presence and the casting down of Satan from heaven in 1914.
They got essentially lucky when World War 1 broke out in 1914 and that just elevated the belief of what the WTS under C T Russell had professed about that year. the WTS then carried on for decades from that as a basis of appealing support.
