by smiddy 31 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
I dont think anyone has a clue either. I have been in, half my life. I converted and my family would not be able to tell you what the life saving message is. We spoke about the bible and religion at length over the years, but they always told me I was being brainwashed. LOL! Turns out they were right.
DD-good idea, something productive to say when door knocking
Kate xx
The one thing missed here that I think many householders would say is that JWs are always predicting the END of the WORLD.
Armageddon, Armageddon, Armageddon. That's their message.
Doc
The Olympic movement has been around for about as long as JW's. It is also a global organisation. What % of households (globally not just western countries) have heard of the olympics and have at least a vague idea what it stands for? Now compare this to the % of households that know the message of JW's - how huge would the difference be?
The actual Olympic goal:
"The goal of the Olympic Movement is to contribute to building a peaceful and better world by educating youth people through sport practised in accordance with Olympism and its values."
mmxiv
When I tell people I used to be a JW they almost always say they don't know anything about them. A few people know about not celebrating Birthdays or Christmas, but that's about it. So the preaching work is a failure at its stated purpose, to announce God's kingdom. Millions of hours in preaching, all those millions of magazines printed, results; zip.
I told a coworker once about my past, she told everyone I used to be Amish.
What % of householdeers know the JW message?
Far less than 5%. Probably less than 1%.
I've made this comment before: If there really was a Jehovah as the JWs paint him, and he really did assign them to "preach a vital lifesaving message", he'd execute the lot of them on the spot for the piss-poor job they've done.
100 years of preaching, and half the world's population has never received a witness.
80% of the rest get a 20 second ill-prepared non-scriptural magazine presentation.
100 years of preaching and JWs are "the guys who don't believe in Jesus or celebrate Christmas or take blood, and who sell the Watchtower on Saturday mornings".
People probably know that JWs have a magazine called The Watchtower.
They may know about the no blood and no flag salute practices, because those have gotten bad press.
They may also know that JWs talk a lot about Armageddon being around the corner.
But I think most householders probably would just say, "Jehovah's Witnesses go door to door trying to get people to convert to their religion."
That's probably the extent of most people's understanding of the message, and probably more than most of them want to know about it.
Most people on this planet don't know any Jehovah's Witnesses, don't know what they believe and could care less if they found out.
Public school is where many people have contact with JW's. Their impression of the group is about non-observance of holidays, the pending Armageddon and they go to church a lot and even preach in public. Because so many JW parents are now 'homeschooling' their kids, I see this initial contact becoming a thing of the past.
The notion that JW's are held in high esteem by the 'world' for their honesty, conviction and faith is promoted by the WT Society's writers. It's part of the delusion we're fed through the publications, talks and experiences.
ginger
I saw a documentary on television about religions that preach Armageddon. They mentioned several (can't remember the names), but I know that Jehovah's Witnesses were not even once mentioned. At least in recent years, I remember the Society telling us that we should put our emphasis on the new world and not on Armageddon when we're at the doors.
Marked.
A favorite topic!
What compelled me to find out anything about WTBTS was the fact that my ex decided she was going back and made our continued relationship conditional on that, if at all. I took instruction for months following the example of my late parents who were of mixed faith but definitely not of this persuasion.
After months of weekly visits and so-called instruction from the onerous tract, "What the Bible Really Teaches", I found that most of what I was told was about the limitations of other people and organizations, or else a search for my own vulnerabilities. I. e., Did I want peace of mind in this life or did I want to reunite with family and friends? Did I feel like I was a prisoner or a felon within this system? Back to that last question below.
There were some revelations though:
I discovered that despite Jehovah having created the world and being the benevolent force watching over it, my instructors also asserted that Satan owned it. ????
But that didn't matter, say, when it came to destroying cities; because Jehovah eradicated Babylon forever for messing with his people ("Wouldn't it be nice to have a guy like that on your side?"). At the same time though, Jehovah was using the Babylonians to punish the Judeans! Now how about that! Something did seem amiss from what I could recall about Babylon. I looked up Babylon and discovered it prospered for centuries thereafter actually, that Cyrus thought it was his kind of town, as did many other ancient commentators, including Biblical authors like Ezra and Nehemiah. And finally it dawnd on me that it was Assyrian Senacherib who did Babylon in as described in Isaiah. And it was a 100 years before Nebuchadnezzar touched Jerusalem. So I really don't know what to make of this idea of Jehovah being a city destroyer and being in my corner, other than that he was being maligned to the advantage of the Org. But I never would have investigated all this if WTBRT and my instructors hadn't brought it up.
Another remarkable thing about this was a mystical date. 607 BC. I was surprised what you could do with that date if you were good with arithmetic and oblivious of everything else in the encyclopedia or history books, and assured yourself that Daniel was a sober account of ....what?
So what else did I learn?
Anyway, Israel eventually lost this covenant to the church based on the Ransom. But the church got derailed by Greek beliefs and the Nicene Creed before they compiled Jehovah's word, the OT and NT. This was all inerrant but it had to be re-translated into the NWT - and then distributed and retranslated to all the world in native languages( including Greek) so that all peoples would know Jehovah's name. But only English speakers would have to pronounce it with a J like "jazz". A Y sound is adequate elsewhere.
It was unclear in the WTBRTeaches who exactly Jesus Christ was except that he was not part of the Trinity. In the appendix, it said he was Archangel Michael, but no one would comment on that. That was much akin to commenting on J T Russell or Rutherford.
Nor would anyone comment on the quake in Haiti, other than that it meant we were closer to the end. I sent some donations through other religious organizations that had aid workers there. My instructors looked very pained about that.
Also, that if you should take anything you read in the Bible seriously, it was the number 144,000. The universe needs certain constants like the speed of light, the permeability and dielectric constants for it to work and I guess that 144,000 annointed after the return was one of them.
They also drew my attention to chapter 3 in Genesis - and for the first time in my life I noticed something odd about it. It said specifically that the snake was a snake and the wiliest animal in the garden. Then the OT dropped the subject.
Many times they tried to back me in the corner. They said, are you going to believe this or not. If you don't, you will have to accept the consequences. I wasn't sure what they were in their minds. The consequences in my mind were that my ex was going to walk out of my life, which she did anyway over a verse in Luke (23:38-40), a dialog between Christ and a felon like alluded to above. It was clear how they "believed" and it was contemptible.
