A very good friend of mine who’s also a professor of English Literature and Humanities at a large, well-known University is also a Libertarian! He is quite a remarkable person, who has written extensively on many and varied subjects including a book on the Titanic disaster, Ayn Rand, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Isabel Paterson, a contemporary of Ayn Rand. He knows more about JWs than even most informed apostates, although he has never been a JW. Furthermore, he’s a big fan of my writing on the subject and has even encouraged me to write a book on the subject. So, if he is nothing else, at least the guy has good taste.
In 1993 he wrote an essay on Isabel Paterson for Liberty Magazine and I have a copy of it. At the end is a collection of snippets from her various writings.
He states, “Isabel Paterson was a memorable writer of aphorisms, epigrams, maxims, and other annotations on life. The best of Paterson’s writings in this manner would fill a book. Here is a small sample.” (I’m not going to reveal his name, because all of his accomplishments are only exceeded by his own modesty. It’s a wonder he and I ever became friends then, huh? J )
In reading over these quotes from Paterson, I couldn’t help but make a connection between them and Jehovah’s Witnesses and their leaders. Those of them which are not noted to be verbatim quotes I’ve ever-so-slightly changed so they can apply to dubs. Here goes:
On WTS rules and regulations:
“Next time any one says, ‘There ought to be a law,’ you know the answer – ‘There is.”
On meetings, field service, personal study, assemblies, quick-builds, and the “full life” JWs lead:
“What this religion needs is a lot less of all sorts of things.” (Slightly altered by me.)
On the many laws and “conscience matters” in the JW religion:
“We have been asked, Don’t you want the law enforced? We can only reply: We’re not so darned sure, and neither would you be if you knew what the law is.”
On disfellowshipping:
“There is practically nothing you can’t be disfellowshiped for now.” (Slightly altered by me.)
On the idiocy of WTS rules and regulations:
“A lot of religious principle is contained in the two words: “Just don’t.” Much of the rest is encompassed by the suggestion of minding one’s own business. The whole is summed up in the word “liberty.” (Slightly altered by me.)
On how apostates explain to dubs why they are so glad they are no longer dubs:
“When we say free speech, we mean free speech, even if you don’t know what we mean.”
On answer to the standard dub question, “but where else can we go?”:
“Freedom is dangerous. Possibly crawling on all fours might be safer than standing upright. But we like the view better up here.”
On dub leaders:
“A Watchtower official is a man who would cheat even at solitaire.” (Slightly altered by me.)
“The biggest pests are the people who use altruism as an alibi. What they passionately wish is to make themselves important.”
On WT history and its current leaders :
“Anyone who has been continuously wrong for 125 years is just wasting his time at the Brooklyn Bethel.” (Slightly altered by me.)
On the best way to force change in the WT religion (hit ‘em in their pocketbooks where it hurts them the most):
“Kingdoms are more likely to collapse by a deficit than to perish by the sword.”
On the price they pay for the foolhardy way R&F dubs allow their leaders to interfere in their lives:
“Destitution is easily distributed. It’s the one thing religious power can insure you.” (Slightly altered by me.)
On the true nature of WTS power-brokers who cherish their absolute power and who puff themselves up with such terms “shining ones” and “glorious ones”:
“Equality among men is in fact the inevitable ideal of a high civilization, since men of lofty minds and gentle nature feel as much repugnance to possessing privilege for themselves as they do to tyranny exercised upon themselves. It is the inferior man who clutches at power.”
“The craving for power is in itself a sign of inferior abilities and unfitness for responsibility.”
“The enemy of every honest man is a religious leader seeking power.” (Slightly altered by me.)
On the WTS’s claim that their entire goal is to help people:
“The power to do things for people is also the power to do things to people – and you can guess for yourself which is likely to be done.”
On the foolishness of being a “progressive organization” by trying to figure out what happened thousands of years ago in order to predict “God’s Will™”:
“If you go back 150 years you are a reactionary; but if you go back 6,000 years, you are in the foremost ranks of progress.” (Slightly altered by me.)
On the quality of writing in WTS publications:
“The first qualification for a writer on any subject is to be able to write.”
“We have known exactly two people who simply loved writing, enjoyed it, write with fluency and without compulsion. They’ve been at it for twenty years…Their stuff is simply terrible.”
On Fred Franz’s insane prophetic ramblings:
“The events of a creative writer’s life are imaginative, not material.”
“We don’t enjoy, for any length of time, a book in which it is impossible to be sure what the author means.”
“Practically the whole art of writing consists in getting rid of superfluous words.”
On why the WT writing department in their ivory tower insulated lives dish out so much crap:
“The great problem with the writer is that if you do anything else you have no time to write and if you don’t you have nothing to write about.”
On 1984, 1925 and 1975:
“Nothing is worth reporting if it doesn’t cause the subject to deny and repudiate it violently.”
“It is perfectly impossible that any forecast should be correct.”
On dub history:
“All philosophies are merely graceful exits from the problems they profess to solve.”
On dub doctrine:
“The natural tendency of the human mind is to get rid of facts, and if obliged to retain a few, to mutilate them beyond recognition.”
On Circuit Overseers:
“They do as they like, and that would be fine if they’d let other people do the same.”
On the difference between what is actually said at the Kingdom Hall and what is said in the door-to-door work:
“Nothing is so vitalizing as a few robust prejudices, so long as one knows when to disregard them.”
On Chuck Russell:
“It is sad to reflect that Russell would have liked to be the sort of person legend makes him.” (Slightly altered by me.)
On all the “eyes only” letters the society sends to elders and other WT leaders:
“Letter writing is a frequent sign of madness.”
On the hypocrisy of the Governing Body:
“All the virtues require some one else to practice them upon, which seems to us rather hard on the object.”
On “keeping the congregation clean”:
“Respectability is a strange thing; the one virtue for which it has no use is the truth.”
On why the GB will eventually be forced to change:
“We can’t have everything both ways, and not very much one way.”
Good advice on why dubs should jump ship instead of continuing to “hang on,” hoping for things to get better:
“People do not realize how important it is to have a good time until it is too late.”
On how the society can fail at proclaiming a physical event and then get away with making it an INVISIBLE event:
“Nothing ever works out but sometimes something else does.”
On dumb WT leaders and dumb dub followers:
“The mental defects of other people, such as Russell’s, Rutherford’s and Franz’s followers, do not constitute genius on the part of the leader. Multiply one half-wit by six million half-wits, and still the result is not a genius, strange as it may seem. Take anything whatever in any magnitude as you choose, and it will still be whatever it is as a lot more of it, that’s all.” (Slightly altered by me.)
On the sad plight of JW youth who try so hard to be “theocratic”:
“The saddest spectacle imaginable to us is an anxious youth endeavoring to like only what the current GB approves.” (Slightly altered by me.)
On the narrow mindedness of dubs:
“What we really don’t understand is why more people are not interested in more things.”
On dub life in general:
“People will believe almost anything that isn’t so.”
On why I will not forgive the WTS leaders:
“The moral consequences of doing whatever you do is that you will be the sort of person who did that.”
What an ex-dub finds out soon after he leaves the religion:
“We hardly know what the consequences would be if everybody suddenly realized how many things there are they don’t have to do.”
On why I am no longer a dub:
“If there were just one gift you could choose, but nothing barred, what would it be? We wish you then your own wish; you name it. Ours is liberty, now and forever.”
Farkel