2014 in JWlandia has begun with a tired embrace of the hoary 1914 doctrine. Any speculation they'd 'ignore' the centenary of this doctrinal embarrassment is thus shown to be if not wrong, then premature. The wind-up Watchtower toy prattles the same old nonsense.
Look at the public edition Watchtower for February 2014:
The lead article "The War That Changed The World" could easily be a re-tread from earlier publications. Same old, same old. But the astute reader will notice a couple of interesting omissions in this otherwise unremarkably predictable article.
The article makes absolutely no mention of Jesus's words that "this generation would by no means pass away until....etc" and, rather astonishingly given we are supposedly so very, very deep - oh, about 100 years - into the time of the end, the article lacks any of that old Jehovian urgency that once informed all articles about 1914.
Call it the calmly clever 'mainstreaming' of a once-urgent message. My grandparents believed - because the Watchtower told them - that they were that generation that would not die out before the end arrived. All four JW grandparents died decades ago. I recall my maternal grandmother - easily the most zealous of my grandparents: You could not mention 1914 without her adding, "So we know the end is so very near". She died 1972.
Now, flipping over that February 2014 article, with my grandparent's words ringing in my ears, I am struck by the sheer stupidity of it all. A doctrine is not true because its advocates say it's true. A doctrine does not become any less false because it is promoted. It is a nonsense beyond words that the organization is like a wind-up toy, spouting the same old trash about 1914 - but with an odd twist or two to accommodate the fact that the Watchtower's predictions about 1914 - both before that year arrived, and since - have to a last one been wrong, wrong, wrong.
