I’m approaching 90. Many of the things that shocked people here I saw develop and change. This includes doctrinal shifts, editorial changes, apostate movements lost in the mists of time. I read everything I could get my hands on back when I was a new Witness. (In the mid to late 1940s.) I remember reading Millions Now Living will Never Die with some shock. We had a few old timers who lived through the 1925 nonsense, and they filled me in on it. What made it easier to take was a short apology from Rutherford’s pen in one of the Vindication volumes.
I believed then and still do believe that individual Christians mature in conduct and doctrinal understanding. I’m willing to give credit to someone who corrects a mistake, no matter how silly the previous belief was.
The number of Witnesses was small when I was new. Those in authority were consequently more approachable. I was more tolerant of human foible then. I’ve become a cranky, sometimes intolerant old man since. One of the most enduring problems for me was the behavior of those who thought themselves specially God-appointed. If one assumes a prophet’s mantle, others have reason to expect more from you than of themselves. Naming names is fruitless, mostly. Most of those I have in mind are dead. But a few stand out as self-anointed and on the creepy side. F. W. Franz would top the list. The long time head of the Service Department, an ex-Marine who never got over being one, is another. His name was Miller. The word Obtuse always crosses my mind when I recall him. Harry C. Good, a long time circuit and district overseer, was abusive to everyone. He was intolerant of age and infirmity marking reduced activity as lack of zeal.
There was an approach to fellow believers back when that always disturbed me. When Knorr sent out the first traveling brothers as “Servants to the Brethren,” he told them to look for trouble. If you look for trouble, you will find it. Because of the difficulties that caused, that approach was pulled back, but never went away.
Personal opinion in place of scripture was and is another issue for me. You find this in the Watchtower. But it’s most pronounced among elders. The Watchtower does not train its elders. Anti-intellectualism taints the authority structure among Watchtowerites. Kingdom Ministry School is a failure as an educational tool. It does not teach the Bible’s content. It teaches organizational structure. Watchtower elders are not taught at the feet of the apostles, but at the feet of men detached from reality and from the Bible.
There are things that many who post here find disturbing that don’t bother me and never have bothered me. The great pyramid? Never an issue for me, for all the reasons cited in Schulz and deVienne’s A Separate Identity. (Buy it and read it!). Rutherford a drunk? Best I could ever tell is that’s a false trail. You’ll find a photo somewhere on here purporting to show him drunk. In the background is an old-fashioned root beer dispenser. Fake evidence such as that is troubling. Mantley’s letter to the Watchtower never upset me. He raved over the Society misrepresenting him. In fact, Mantley’s name didn’t belong on the book. Mantley did not write the passage in question Dana did. Dana was dead when Mantley added some revisions, but he had nothing to do with the quotation. Mantley made it up. But people here are willing to parrot that. I’d never let my students get away with that. You shouldn’t tolerate it either.
The greatest issues for me have always been the conduct of those in authority. It’s often self-serving and abusive. Or they make decisions without having heard the evidence, or they express personal opinions that have no place in Christian discourse.
Revising publications to hide stupid statements is unethical. The Watchtower does that. They fake footnotes or they did way back in the when, citing many references when they all came from one source. I was teaching history back in the 1960s (still crawl out of retirement to lecture on occasion.), and had that discussion with a Watchtower writer. It made no impression on him.
