At a JW assembly (or convention) sometime between 1995 and 2005, there were so-called apostates protesting peacefully outside of the convention building (while the convention was in intermission, or maybe before the day's session started, or maybe after it ended). They had signs that listed dates pertaining to what the WT predicted would happen on those various dates, or of which they had said supposedly did happen). The dates included the following: 1874, 1878, 1914, 1925, 1975, and others. One sign (or a person speaking through a megaphone) urged JWs to read the April 1, 1972 Watchtower article called "They Shall Know a Prophet is Among Them" in which the organization called JWs a prophet. [That claim is important because if the WT claimed that JWs were prophets, while the WT was making false predictions (which the JWs had spread) that they claim they learned in some way from Jehovah God, then that would be proof that the WT is a false prophet. Most JWs are certain that the WT never claimed to be a prophet.] The ex-JWs from a distance told the JWs they don't need to talk to them (where other JWs could see them and thus get them in trouble for talking to 'apostates'), but instead that after they get home they can secretly look up the claims for themselves in the WT's literature, with the aid of the internet. I already knew that some of the dates pertained to failed predictions. Since I had doubts about the religion (even though I was probably still a MS at the time), I did secretly look up the claim about the WT saying the JWs were in some sense a prophet. I found out it was true (though the article by the Society had the word "prophet" in quote marks, perhaps to imply "like a prophet") and the failed predictions associated with various dates, and discovery of them made an impact on me! It made a difference. The so-called apostates were telling the truth - no lies (or even misleading statements/context) at all in what they said in their public protest and no lies (or even misleading statements/context) at all in what various ones had posted online (when quoting the WT literature, and in many cases they included images of the pages of the WT literature from which the quotes came from)! All of that made a big difference for me. I was stunned. Later in life, after I had stopped attending JW meetings (though I still
attended the Memorial for several years until I became an independent Christian, which was before I became an atheist) I purchased books (mostly at a
thrift store, but some through eBay) by Russell and Rutherford and I saw the dates in them and
the failed predictions that were made about them. Such confirmed that the images I found online at 'apostate' sites were authentic copies of the WT publication's pages.
