@finishedmystery: that’s exactly how 18xx, 19xx, 1975 and 2000 was treated. Everybody believed it (there are even recordings of it being announced at conventions) and then when nothing happens it was “a small group” of people being misled but “not me”. Cognitive dissonance at its best, you cannot find a single witness that would’ve admitted “they” believed in 1975 after the fact, hell, I set the goal of 2000 myself as a child (if the end hasn’t come by the time I’m an adult) and then completely ignored the promise I made for myself because a pioneer girl made my baptism a precondition for her and then she still rejected me in favor of a ministerial servant. I did try to leave after that by getting a worldly girl, then I met another JW girl, a little redhead that wasn’t too strict with the rules… I was really thinking of another kind of salvation and paradise back then.