I dedicate this post to all you courageous souls who have fought and continue to fight for principles worth living and dieing for.
The Watchtower is the world's largest publisher of plagiarized religious doctrine. It is made up of an army of more than 5 million unpaid booksellers. The current leadership is just a group of administrators that will rationalize any decision that favors it's financial interests and power, regardless of the adverse consequences to the rank and file conscripts. It's world headquarters sit on some of New York City's most expensive real estate and its holdings worldwide are vast but secret. It is immune from prosecution and judgment proof due to two factors:
1. It hides behind a cloak of being a religion
2. Having a large corporate legal department with vast resources that it will marshal against any insurrection that may arise internally or externally.
The founder CT Russell was an eccentric WASP who in my opinion started out with a sincere search for a logical explanation of God and his purpose for mankind. Russell's logic in time led to him becoming pathological with his mystical theories. Russell as history shows plagiarized the ideas of other contemporary renegades against the established religions. Russell a self proclaimed pastor but first and foremost a businessman used his financial expertise to set up his brand of religion as a corporate holding company. In the early stages he financed his "spiritual enterprise" and as it grew it began to be self-supportive. Once he saw that there was a market out there for his message via literature sales he recruited more and more full time salespeople. All these recruits were sworn to a vow of poverty and allegiance to him due to the fact that they had been deceived buying into the idea that they were serving God.
The next leader was a very angry alcoholic lawyer who hated the Catholic Church, women and anyone who questioned his "divine" opinions. Under Rutherford's rule any attack or criticism on his representatives was the same as against him and God. Not unlike Bill W. the founder of AA he had grandiose ideas however JF Rutherford believed quite the opposite paradigm. Bill W. built his empire based on the following 12 principles:
1. We admitted that we were powerless over our addiction, that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God, as we understand Him.
4. We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. We admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. We were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. We humbly asked him to remove our shortcomings
8. We made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. We made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. We continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. We sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to addicts, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
If we juxtapose the principles of Rutherford (written and unwritten) we can better understand where the roots of the current tyrannical Watchtower come from. Rutherford died a tired bitter and lonely old man paying out his karmic injustice.
Rutherford built the legal insulation and the marketing inertia needed by his successor NH Nohr to expand by training key corporate people (missionaries) and then exporting them to the ends of the world as watchdogs for his organization. Nohr was on a marketing mission to give new life to this tired fighting group of company salespeople. He permitted them to marry and to enjoy more secular comforts as fringe benefits for their unpaid labors. He softened the message and this became more palatable to the masses and the corporation grew.
Enter Fred Franz an egocentric self-proclaimed spiritual guru. He came up with all kinds of types and anti-type spiritual theories that the Watchtower leadership would like to erase from its history. He was a heartless taskmaster when it came to policy and procedures of the company, but he rationalized it as righteous stewardship. He had a governing body that had been imposed upon him that he now he used to carry out his agenda and viciously attack anyone who disagreed with the company's beliefs and or rules and procedures.
This gave way to the fifth Watchtower president who was just a puppet for the power brokers of the governing body and the service department. These scoundrels are nothing but a hodgepodge of all the previous leader’s beliefs. They are old and facing their own mortality as death beckons at their door. As the new leadership now takes the helm they sail into uncharted waters. All the holy wars waged on their enemies are gone and now they have turned on former members and their own employees. The internet makes them vulnerable for they can no longer hide behind a wall of secrecy. The more they pound their membership with tyranny the more they expose their true self. In the future their worst enemy is themselves.
Victor Escalante
"All men must die, few men really live" ............Brave heart