by Sea Breeze 156 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
Rutherford lived for himself, the building of those lavished homes in San Diego, driving the most expensive cars he could find, wearing the most expensive cloths, diddling with his female assistant while being separated from his wife ..... etc etc .
He was a true player in the gist of corrupt religious charlatanism.
He knew how to legally twist and exploit the local governmental laws and regulations but also how to exploit the venerable, naive and ignorant of the general population.
His modern day equilivant could be Creflo Dollar, maybe jimmy swaggart also
The only reason the Watchtower Corporation succeeded and did what it did is because C T Russell left a good sum of money in it, Rutherford knew exactly how much.
All it needed was a corrupt devious opportunist to take over the publishing organization and put it use and operation, enter J Rutherford the rest is history.
Do technologies exist for all electric power in the USA to be produced solely from renewable energy sources at low cost? What about automobiles needing only a little gasoline or even not needing gasoline at all? Back in the year 1928 Rutherford said YES to both of these questions
One thing you would have to credit Judge Joseph Boozerford with, he certainly knew how to tell a good story (and some of it could even have been true!)
Typically, that spiel he made in Government was long on extravagant claims, but very short on actual detail. There have been many crackpot ideas about how to run an internal combustion engine on a minute amount of fuel, but these all have one thing in common - they don't work. Also, in Rutherford's time, the technology simply was not there to harness wave action for the generation of a usable supply of electricity (bloody hell, I would have hated to see the waveform that resulted from those efforts!) No wonder he failed to mention which US Patents were involved.
As others here have already noted, Rutherford - the typical religious charlatan - was certainly full of it.
two words, miracle wheat.
Actually Russell was the guy who sold the miracle wheat.
These men were both commercial salesmen at heart, its just that they immersed themselves in religious charlatanism, which eventually created the JWS religion which we have today.
The JWS religion has a very corrupt and tainted beginning, once you review and realize how it got started through these two men.
Here's a much better image of Rutherford's Cadillac and west coast crash pad. I'd love to have that caddy today...Sweet.
I think he owned two identical ones. One for the east coast and one for the west coast.... not sure though.
Here's another example of what that car looked like, it sold for $6,900 back in 1930
The average yearly income back then was only around $1,800
So you can see only the super rich could afford one.
Don't forget it was the Great Depression when he bought these (yes there were two). There is a story that they were "gifts" from wealthy power families in the jws but really?
Imagine how many dirt poor and possibly starving jws gave pennies to this organisation thinking it would be spent on god's work only to see it spent on a bachelor pad in trendy 30's L.A. etc
I always found it interesting that Rutherford did not participate in the required ministry. His excuse was he was too busy running Watchtower business. Do as I say and not as I do. - Rutherford
Rutherford is no different to most higher-ups in the Org. It's actually quite surprising how little ( if any ) actual door knocking is done by the prominent ones in the Society. Ray Franz mentions in his books that most of the GB and other higher-ups did very little actual ministry.
I worked in London Bethel for a while and was struck by how little ministry was actually done by anyone - they were supposed to go out on Sunday but very few bothered ( in fairness , most of them were pretty depressed and knackered - back then it was 5 1/2 long days a week , getting up at 6am - much of the work very boring and mundane ( such as cleaning or working in the printing press or laundry ).
Where I lived there was a house where Bethelites used to stay almost every week on vacation ( a JW living abroad had it as a holiday home & allowed free accommodation for Bethelites ) and they very , very rarely even did a token hour of ministry all week ( or 2 weeks ) they were there. Many times they didn't even turn up at a single meeting even though the Kingdom Hall was five minutes drive away ( my wife was a keyholder and we would often clean the house so we knew when people were staying ).
