Proof isn't proof at the WatchTower.
"Proof" is a reconstruction like Frankenstein's monster kept alive by flashes of "new light" made up as needed to revitalize a quivering monstrosity.
At first glimpse it looks like science. When the smoke clears it is madness and obsession riven with fierce contrarian nincompoopery.
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Charles Taze Russell had been privately tutored as a boy developing articulate skill in writing and speaking. He found himself attracted to lunatic fringe people and zealous self-promoters.
The self-styled "Pastor" met a radical feminist (Maria) whom he married and began a work of publishing various viewpoints which might promote non-mainstream ideas. The Watch Tower Corporation was the perfect delivery system for fringe thinkers.
ENTER THE DRAGON
At this time, (post Civil War) a pseudo-historian with extreme hatred for Catholicism named Alexander Hislop published a pamphlet (later enlarged into a book) THE TWO BABYLONS* and promoted it thru the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society.
This book would play a large and influential role in establishing a methodology for Jehovah's Witnesses in doing their own crackpot pseudo-historical analyses.
Russell's own writing took on a tone of scholarship, reasoning and extrapolated history so similar to Hislop's that it borders on compulsive.
Russell's successor, J.F.Rutherford, carried on using this methodology by relating scripture, phony history and imagination as a new Theology.
(*Alexander Hislop was rabidly anti-Catholic. He made Martin Luther pale in comparison.
Taking his cue from Luther's own references to the Catholic Church as "Babylon the Great", Hislop set about writing a scathing pamphlet comparing ancient Babylon, pagan worship and devilish influences with the practices and core beliefs of the Church.)
Hislop used four combined processes to accomplish his screed and puff it up into compelling "proof" which might convince those predisposed toward his theories.
1. Hislop cherry picked minutia. He strained seeming connections where there weren't any and drew conclusions through false analogies. He drew on similarities and ignored differences.
2. Hislop partially quoted historical sources, misquoted and often misrepresented his connections by simply distorting the facts. He drew parallels of practices into a false conclusion of cause and effect influences.
3. Hislop invented out of whole cloth significances which weren't called for and used them to build even greater strained arguments. He used partial information and not entire contexts.
4. Hislop painted with a broad brush while amassing a mountain of irrelevancies. He employed a scholarly tone of academic neutrality while employing ad hominems to poison the reader's conclusions. He failed to emphasize when his speculations were passed off as fact based.
Because Hislop wrote in the mid-1800s, the books he refers to or quotes are now quite old: books such as Layards Nineveh and Its Remains, Kittos Cyclopedia of Biblical Literature, Wilkinsons Ancient Egyptians, as well as old editions of Pausanias, Pliny, Tacitus, Herodotus, and many more. When I checked his footnote references, in numerous cases I discovered they do not support his claims.
Example:
Hislop taught that Tammuz (whom he says was Nimrod) was born on December 25, and this is the origin of the date on which Christmas is observed. Yet his supposed proof for this is taken out of context. Having taught that Isis and her infant son Horus were the Egyptian version of Semiramis and her son Tammuz, he cites a reference that the son of Isis was born about the time of the winter solstice. When we actually look up the reference he gives for this (Wilkinsons Ancient Egyptians, vol. 4, 405), the son of Isis who was born "about the time of the winter solstice" was not Horus, her older son, but Harpocrates. The reference also explains this was a premature birth, causing him to be lame, and that the Egyptians celebrated the feast of his mothers delivery in spring. Taken in context, this has nothing to do with a December celebration or with Christmas as it is known today. Consequently, his references are an invention of imagination and muddle.
Both Pastor Russell and Judge Rutherford employed these self-same methods regularly and without much conscience not only promoting opinion as "god's words, not ours" but blending wild speculations with historical citations to "prove" the unprovable.
Pastor Russell and his wife promoted Pyramidology and a Divine Plan of the Ages chart to weld a theology of End Times "logic" which was nothing more or less than silliness and flim-flam passed off as Truth.
Rutherford's magazines promoted quack beliefs on health with the same disregard for Truth as he shovelled manure into a heap predicting the return of "ancient worthies" while planning a mansion in California for them (i.e. himself) to live in.
Fred Franz regularly employed Hislop's reasoning style in defending against Christendom's views on Romans 13:1 for the purpose of making Jehovah's Witnesses the only true Christians in not obeying Governments as Superior Authorities appointed by God. Later, the Society reversed this "Truth" by aligning themselves with Christendom after all! Scholarship was willy-nilly whim!
Scriptures, historians, experts, authorities and bible scholars could be made to say only what the Watchtower wanted them to say and nothing more!
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Hislop set the tone and the Watchtower has ever followed as pseudo-historians, chronologists of elastic dates and circular reasoners who can make wrong right and day night to suit their own purposes.
Defending the New World Translation's idiosyncratic interpretation of the anarthrous Greek in John 1:1, the Society (mis) quoted authorites and scholars as saying the very opposite of these scholar's correct views!
The Watchtower Society taught nothing about the fall of Babylon the Great in1919. Yet, they claimed to do so! They pinned their own identity as "watchmen" and "anointed" on this non-announcement!
When was this obvious misrepresentation revealed as a lie?
In 1963 the book Babylon the Great Has Fallen! God's Kingdom Rules! was published.
January 1, 2000 Watchtower:
Paragraphs 11-13 state:
In June 1918, Satan frantically tried to wipe out those Bible students ... He also sought to destroy their legal corporation, the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society. Responsible officers of the Society were imprisoned ... But in 1919, these officers were released, enabling them to continue their ministry. Later, they were fully exonerated. What did this watchman see? Again, Jehovah's watchman, his witness class, announced: "She has fallen! Babylon has fallen, and all the graven images of her gods he [Jehovah] has broken to the earth!" ... This time, following World War I, it is Babylon the Great, the world empire of false religion, that is toppled from its perch of authority... In 1919, Babylon the Great could not prevent the Bible Students, as Jehovah's Witnesses were then known, from escaping from their inactive state and embarking on a worldwide witnessing campaign that still continues... That signaled a fall for Babylon the Great, just as the release of Israel in the sixth century B.C.E. signaled a fall for ancient Babylon.
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The above is a lie!
Starting in 1963, for the first time, the Society (Fred Franz) began teaching that "Babylon the Great" fell in a spiritual sense in 1919. But since the Watch Tower gives the nearly certain impression that the "watchman" announced this in 1919, we can see that the WTS writers are bold liars when they print otherwise. (As they have since 1963)
Clearly the same methodology as Alexander Hislop might use proving something non-historical actually happened.
Hislop's flagrant dishonesty has been absorbed into the Society's DNA.
