What is an Amateur but a person who does something because they love doing it rather than a specially trained professional serious about study?
What would you expect if you went to the Emergency Room at the hospital and an Amateur doctor examined you and recommended surgery?
Would you trust them because they love what they are doing? Or, would you...umm..oh, I dunno sort of want a 2nd opinion by a REAL doctor?
Or, what if something went wrong with your expensive automobile and your next door neighbor walked up and peered under the hood and suggested
some radical repairs nobody else ever heard of? Would it be worth trying? Would you turn it over to them? Naw, didn't think so!
One of the big problems with the Amateur is they have nothing at stake except their ego. They didn't invest time going to special schools and earning a degree and passing strenuous exams. They don't have multi-thousand dollar student loans to pay off. They don't have a brick and mortar establishment to operate out of with insurance indemnity against malfeasance. There are no watchdog agencies guarding you against their malpractice.
An Amateur is just a big grin and a lot of opinion and not much else!
Until it comes to Religion.
What about Religion founded by an Amateur? What would the doctrines look like? Would they seem normal or slightly off-center?
Would you expect an amateur theologian to come up with some really wild, weird and crackpot "truths" they'd defend? Sure.
Why? Because, like the amateurs who write books about the Kennedy asassaination, imagination is all it takes to reach a conclusion. Evidence can be bent, warped, twisted, ignored or misunderstood. Amateurs read other amateurs for ideas. Why? Because they aren't schooled in difficult texts by real experts.
Religious amateurs go with their whims, deuces wild and end up so far away from mainstream they are convined they MUST REALLY BE ON TO SOMETHING.
When they predicted something wacky and IT DIDN'T HAPPEN wouldn't you expect to hear, "Aw, I was just enthusiastic--I didn't mean any harm. You shouldn't have listened to me so seriously."
Yep.
And with the Watchtower Society you have over a hundred years of Amateurs and more Amateurs teaching other Amateurs until stuff has to be changed, fixed, repaired, turned around and explained away constantly.
Why?
Because they do it for the love of the subject. They do because of their egos. They are easily self-duped.
That's what you get with amateurs.
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Professionalism means you are vetted.
It means there must be evidence, standards, testing, judgement and oversight.
Without a baseline you have nothing but imagination and rhetoric.
The JW's thrive on teaching ignorant people inside "tricks" that appear to refute a mammoth load of historical bullshit.
But, they don't go far enough!
The basis of everything they claim comes from that all-important BIBLE which has nothing but tradition on which to rest.
Non-experts who tell you what an ancient language really "means" are kidding themselves and you as well.
Jehovah's Witnesses are the blind leading the blind. When they fall into a ditch they call it New Light.
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An amateur (Frenchamateur "lover of", from Old French and ultimately from Latin amatorem nom. amator, "lover") is generally considered a person attached to a particular pursuit, study, or science, without pay and often without formal training. Amateurism can be seen in both a negative and positive light. Since amateurs often do not have formal training, some amateur work may be sub-par.
Not to put too fine a point on it, dedicating your entire life and putting all your trust and hope in a Religious doctrine invented and sustained by Amateurs
is what got many of us former JW's into a bind.
The result is what tests the quality.
How fine a job have the amateur theologians such as Fred Franz and his magic chronology chart done in the long run?
The religion swarms around fake dates the way flies swarm around doggie poo.