by yadda yadda 2 35 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
Ablebodiedman - It's an insignificant little cult that was nothing more than a sect of 19th century Protestant Millennialism.
Cofty,
If you believe that it is an insignificant little cult then you will have to wait until yet another Christian Denomination fulfills ALL the bible scriptures in such an extraordinarily profound way as the Watchtower Society has fulfilled them.
abe
No not really. Not until somebody succeeds in showing that the "bible prophecy" isn't an oxymoron.
Thanks but I would rather stick pins in my eyes than spend another hour of my life listening to somebody trying to prove that Jesus said anything prophetic.
It's all confirmation bias.
Thanks but I would rather stick pins in my eyes than spend another hour of my life listening to somebody trying to prove that Jesus said anything prophetic.
It's all confirmation bias.
Cofty,
It's all good!
Your role is very necessary for the proper fulfillment of bible prophecy.
If you and others like you were rare then I would have doubts myself.
You have helped a great deal in cementing my convictions.
So ............... thank you!
abe
There's no arguing with "faith".
There's no arguing with "faith".
Cofty,
It's no longer faith.
It is now a conviction.
There is a difference.
I no longer need faith because what Jesus Christ said would happen is REALLY HAPPENING!
Faith in what he said is no longer necessary.
abe
With the the two live internet streams (e.g AGM & Zone visit) in very short succession, i have wondered if the meetings will become more televised, as it becomes increasingly harder to get elders.
As paper becomes less popular, and more expensive I suspect a more digital format in 1st world countries, while still printing for developing or 3rd world countries.
Because they are getting a hammering with the internet. They will be forced to make this another avenue of the preaching work. They just have to get a more +ve fibe on the internet! and drown out the voices of places like this.
I don't think they will drop the 1914/ blood/ 144K thing in one big hit. They are aware of how hard they got hit with the generation teaching, so they will opt to gradually faze it out, and hope no one remembers e.g I remember back in the day when they would have a meeting when the blood cards would be issued, and I can't remember one lately. I think you just go and get one privately off an elder now.
Drop the world wide report as this opens them up to further scrutiny.
Unless they do something pretty stupid my bet is on a leveling off on growth, rather than a mass exodus e.g people coming and going.
I have come to realize it won't be until they are backed up against a wall, or the situation becomes so bad with people leaving that they will change. This will be the only thing that will do it.
As paper becomes less popular and more expensive I suspect a more digital format in 1st world countries.
This is happening already.
There are JW computer tablet users in Kingdom Halls strewn around the wealthier and modernized countries.
Since they've put ATM machines at Assembly Halls now, what would stop them from putting up Visa credit card donational payments on JW.org ?
Must look awfully weird to a new comer to a Kingdom Hall seeing people looking at Tablets instead of bibles, oh these modern times.
I left the Org in 2008, a few months after the letter re. the abolishment of home book studies was read. Back then the Org was riding a cusp, particularly locally in the Glasgow, UK area; many foreign language groups had been started (I was part of the Farsi one in Glasgow for a while), a few foreign language congregations had been started.
But now I know that behind closed doors the WTBTS was starting to fight fires in terms of the child abuse cases.
How much of a toll have they really had on the resources of the corporation? And with no end to them in sight, I can only imagine further claw backs sanctioned.
Is the WTBTS moving more "mainstream", as high-control religious groups go? Are they trying to draw their head back in, what with no more tract campaigns denouncing all other religions and attacked big politics?
Does the Governing Body intend to keep flexing its control over the R&F, while minimising the religion's already tiny footprint, keeping it out of the news - below the radar, so to speak- all the while gradually lightening the expectations of works on the R&F (ie. numerous meeting attendance and double-digit ministry hours), reinventing themselves as a religion for families who just want a secure, moral framework to bring their kids up in (from the outside, at least)?
The foreign language field, I'd have to imagine, is shrinking, and I'm seeing more and more "ministry carts" popping up in big cities; is the emphasis moving away from actually speaking to people at their doors to just standing on a street, hoping "interested ones" will approach? Such a tactic lessens the public's consciousness of the religion; they aren't at the doors on a Saturday morning, they just blend in with the street architecture in city centres?
abe, abe, abe, you have fallen into the very same trap the Watchtower has fallen into: Making something big and significant out of something that is startlingly small. The Watchtower is peanuts in the larger scheme of things. But it's huge to us because we have been on the receiving end of its power. Down the road, are other people who have been scarred by other religious groups they also deem to be evil and even more evil. And on it goes.
Each strict religious group attracts narrow-focused opponents who swear the group is the very epitome of evil and who see "prophetic" significance in every nuance emanating from the religion. Who can forget Rutherford's mad claim that a series of Bible Student conventions in the early 1020s fulfilled specific parts of the Book of Revelation on the trumpets. Really? John recorded that striking vision to put in code there'd be conventions in the USA in the very distant1920s? To believe that, one would have to be pea-brained.
