1975 !

by Sea Breeze 51 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

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  Balaamsass2

  Yes Rivergang. Disagreeing with Watchtower(or following them) didn't go well then or now.

  Some extended family sold everything to move to a small Midwest town. They were not welcome by JWs or townspeople. They left a few years later broke$$ and broken.

  I remember a nice sister who was pregnant in 1973. An Elder was giving a part on the closeness of the end and "Woe to the pregnant woman" and how ignoring the END showed a lack of faith and may result in losing a child during Armageddon! That poor sister started crying and sobbing got up and ran to the back room. Poor thing. (PS that baby is a middle aged man now).

  Fred Franz came up with the bogus theology...and when proved wrong, was promoted!!

  It's a CULT.
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  LongHairGal

  LIAM:

  I get your point.🤣 I wasn’t in the Witness religion yet so I also never experienced the hype and fervor that has been written about.

  If 1975 was the End I wouldn’t have known what hit me.. I was still a Catholic girl.

  The bad part about all the younger people like yourself not having experienced 1975 and consequently not caring about it — is that the JW religion wins.. It gets to bury yet another mistake. History repeated itself. I am sure the one thing the JW religion loves is when old timers pass away.. Then there are no living witnesses to point the finger!

  I came into the JWs several years after and I may have experienced a leftover harsh pre-1975 mentality with busybodies trying to get me to quit my job.. I Thank God now that I paid no attention to those people!
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  Slidin Fast

  I was witness to the extraordinary fever that grew to a crescendo from 1966 when the book "Freedom of the Sons of God" was published to the year 1975 and the gradual realisation that the year had finished and nothing had happened. I was 18 years old when it broke and that time represented peak dub to me.

  The current line that minimises the fever that existed during that period completely encouraged and unchecked by WT and it's representatives no matter how senior completely misrepresents the truth. We have all seen the published heavy hints in print. They weren't the half of it. The absolute faith and fervour that almost all showed was almost tangible. I was told that buying a house with a mortgage was dishonest since I would never pay it back.

  I wanted to believe it but when I looked at what was going on in the world it seemed very far fetched especially when the "nobody knows the day or the hour" scripture still sat there in the bible as it always had. My wife and I expressed our doubts to each other but never outside the home, the atmosphere was far too febrile for that. Most people at the time just seemed to see it as a coming event, like a forthcoming convention or vacation, just a fact of life that was going to occur but much more exciting.

  So, any one that lived through it cannot possibly deny it. If they do, they are misrepresenting to the point of outright lying.

  Then the 1976 WT article that blamed the R&F for overreacting was hard to swallow. Of course many didn't but we did, we continued dented and shaken but disillusioned somehow hanging on. Poor shmucks.
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  St George of England

  This is a great thread. The majority of our congregation were not even born in 1975!

  I well remember 1st January 1976, my wife and I had a walk around the garden after breakfast, not sure what we were expecting but of course nothing had changed. We did what what always did on a Bank Holiday, drove to the KH and went on FS. Nobody was interested then as always and ever since. We should have walked on that day!

  George
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  Biahi

  Yes, I remember thinking that I would be killed in Armageddon because “Jehovah reads hearts”, so of course, he would read mine, and, knowing I hated being a JW, would kill me. What a way to grow up. Btw, I have that book, Life Everlasting…Freedom…bla bla bla. What a crock of 💩
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  Sea Breeze

  Most people at the time just seemed to see it as a coming event, like a forthcoming convention or vacation, just a fact of life that was going to occur but much more exciting.

  This is exactly how it was in my home. When Nixon won the 1972 election, my father turned the TV off and announced that Nixon was the President that would end this "old sysem".

  At 9 years old, I did the math and calculated that I only had about 3 years to live.

  @Balaamsass
  
  

  I remember a nice sister who was pregnant in 1973. An Elder was giving a part on the closeness of the end and "Woe to the pregnant woman" and how ignoring the END showed a lack of faith and may result in losing a child during Armageddon! That poor sister started crying and sobbing got up and ran to the back room.

  Your story, in my opinion captures the utter hysteria, calousnessness and pompous attitudes of JW's, still present in much the same measure today. I remember my father screaming while whipping me with a belt, "you are void of all feellings for other people"! Must have been quite shocking for him to witness skepticism from one of his sons at such an early age.

  In the end, I won. He never was able to beat it out of me.
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  TonusOH

  My mother once showed me a letter she received from her sister in February 1968, expressing excitement that my mother had begun to study with the JWs. My sister and I would be born later that year. My mother claims that --even back then-- she understood that the WTS wasn't making any definitive predictions. I don't believe that; I think she began the Bible study with them because she believed that the end was imminent.

  Interestingly, she did not get baptized until 1977. Did something happen to change her mind between 1968 and 1975? I'll never know, because she rarely talks about that time, and never in-depth. I'd love to know what happened during that time period, but I think those are secrets she will take to the grave. I know that she would immediately reject any information about the JWs that isn't directly from the GB, so there's no sense in pointing out how strongly they pushed the 1975 stuff.

  Remember that in 1969 they told young people that it was a "fact" that they would never grow old in the present system of things. And the Kingdom Ministry in Sea Breeze's first post originally stated that there were "months remaining" before the end of the present system of things, then was updated with more ambiguous language. They lied, and they covered it up, and then they blamed the people who had been lied to. They praised the people who sold homes, then admonished them for doing something that had been praiseworthy just a year earlier.

  If you claim that God is whispering in your ear but you make big claims that turn out to be false, it must be one of two things: you are imagining that someone is whispering in your ear, or the person whispering in your ear isn't God.
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  HereIam60

  I was studying in 1985, when concerned friends and relatives brought up the 1975 predictions, of which I was unaware, I asked the young couple studying with me, and they gave me the standard answer "Oh, some Witnesses thought that...but the 'Society' never said..." Of course they were just repeating what they had been told. Had I been alert I might have asked "But I thought you all spoke in agreement! Why would they think that?" But I didn't, and when I pressed for more information they gave some goofy reply about "We don't know how long Adam was in the Garden of Eden before Eve was created"

  Our Kingdom Hall had an extensive library, so researching myself, I saw the statements that were made in Watchtowers, but it was so far removed from where I was mentally at that time that I was puzzled but it didn't really impact me. Some time later, the older brother who conducted the then-in-private-homes Group Book Study, and liked to reminisce, recalled a Convention where "...Brother _______(I've forgotten the name...)...really made it sound like it was 'comin' that year.."

  Later when I heard that some had bought cars, gone into debt, thinking they'd never have to repay, I was extremely puzzled, because the brother who first studied with me, though young, was very severe, and had heavily emphasized that we were to be NO part of the world, it, and its Religious, Political, and Commercial systems were passing away, and if we were tied into it, in any way, we would pass away along with it. This led me to believe (for a time) that we should not own property, have insurance, or debt. Later, reality set in...

  As many others have proved amply, much was printed and said to raise, promote, and encourage expectations. And there used to be that blurb in the magazines about "a peacerul new world, sure to come, before the generation thst saw the events of 1914, passes away..
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  Ding

  I knew a presiding overseer who left the borg over 1975 -- not because the GB got it wrong but because they blamed the rank and file for the fiasco.
  
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  blondie

  I remember 1975 hype. My family were 3rd generation and my grandparents had lived during the 1925 hype that the end would come then. They were not on the ship though, they remembered this scripture: Matthew 24:44 On this account, you too prove yourselves ready, because the Son of man is coming at an hour that you do not think to be it." So we thought it could not come in 1975, because Jesus said it would come "at an hour that you do not think it to be" like a thief in the night. Thieves don't tell their victims when they are coming, nor would Christians be told by god. But we kept it to ourselves and did not make any crazy decisions.