When I was a child, and being raised a Jehovah's Witness, I remember a lot of key members of the local congregation. There were the elders who always seemed to be there for my family. There were the families that were the central figures of the congregation and even the local Witness community. All of which were seen preaching one solid message from door-to-door and on the platform.
"The end is near, millions will never need to know what death is like."
Which, in a online community of former Witnesses, the basic message to what I am saying should be easily understood. Basically, these people were always talking about the last days and they had hope that they would never die. I too, felt this was possible and even imagined seeing these people with me in that paradise earth, that was soon to come. Yet where are those people now, now that I am no longer a Witness?
The sad truth is this, many of them have grown old and died? They spent all their lives preaching about the end and about the possibility of never dying and yet they are all dying. I am forever reminded when I make this comment, that Noah preached for many years and yet the end took a great deal of time to arrive. Yet the often overlooked part of that illustration is this, "Noah was kept alive in the legend, to see the end, and did not preach about something he would not Witness actually happening." So basically, he got a reward of some kind for his hard work in the legend. What did the Witnesses, I knew so well as a child, get for their hard work?
Well many got to live a life of no advanced education, no high paying jobs with the possibility of purchasing some items they dreamed of and in some cases the option of raising a family. Why? Because the end was coming the they would not have to experience death. A promise that simply never came true. Does this mean Witness adults lie to children?
Well I thought about this tonight, as Christmas approaches, and reflected on some reasoning Witnesses used with that holiday. Telling children that Santa Claus is real and then letting them learn he isn't, as they get older, is a very damaging element to grow up with. Something that makes children build a lack of trust for adults in the earlier years of their life. Well, perhaps the blinders are on! Because being told by people I trusted, loved and looked to as an authority. That the end was near and death would not be something many would experience, and then later attending memorial after memorial to their lives. I began to have some trust issues with their message, when hardly any of those people even exist today.
So perhaps it is time religion, adults and anyone who does the same, to start learning a lesson. Children are only small adults that have not been lied to enough to learn the truth about life. So lie away, but we humans do figure it out in time. Santa is not real, and neither is the paradise earth that is soon to come. They all reside in the imagination and memories. The memories of being told stories by people who only have one location to be seen in now, in the memories of our mind. As they died, even though they said, "they wouldn't!"