Terry:
There is a well educated man (master’s degree) that became a friend of our family when I was a child. He was not a JW, but continued to visit with us on and off for the past 20 years or so. I embraced the JW faith when I was an adolescent, and the metamorphosis I underwent was palpable. He took an interest in my beliefs, and I would spend lots of time talking to him about the Bible. Even though he is well-educated, he was superstitious and had a fear of impending doom for our planet. On one occasion the subject turned to the book of Revelation. He has traveled through much of the world and had made good friends with a Seventh Day Adventist couple many years ago. He learned a lot of the content of the book through them. Of course, being the good JW that I was, I explained to him that our religion had uncovered the true meaning behind the prophecies in Revelation. I placed the red Revelation, It’s Grand Climax is at Hand book with him. He returned about a week later. He politely handed me the book and made no attempt to touch the subject. I couldn’t resist, so I asked him what he had thought. He said he found the book interesting, but it reminded him a lot of SDA teachings. I figured that, since he knew very little about the Bible (only JWs know anything about the Scriptures, so I thought) he was easily confused. He repeated that comment almost every time we would talk about the Bible. I even managed to get him to join me at a couple assemblies. After a while, it became obvious that I wasn’t going to get anywhere with him and that he no longer wanted to talk about the subject. He was deathly terrified of the year 2000. He was certain that something big was going to go down. Nothing happened as we all know. Yes, even well-educated men can get caught up in believing in prophetic and superstitious nonsense.
Well, several years after baptism, the image of God’s happy organization began to crumble. I felt that I was just serving a religion for the sake of serving a religion. I no longer felt like I was part of God’s special life-saving movement that would be the precursor to Armageddon. In short, doubts began to crop up. I found a really nice guy out in field service who was a staunch SDA. I offered him a Bible study, and he accepted. I found that his knowledge of the Bible rivaled or surpassed my own. He kept asking whether we had any prophetic interpretation of the cleansing of the sanctuary. I had no idea what he was talking about. Right around that time a Watchtower article was published about that very thing. It mentioned the Millerite movement and how their 1844 prediction had led to the Great Disappointment. As was to be expected, the WT article was written in such a way that did not make it easy for us to connect the dots between Miller and Russell. The guy I was studying with eventually moved away. I left him my contact information. He was a really sincere guy so I was sure I’d get a call from him one day telling me that he had become a Witness. I never heard from him again.
As time passed, I still was unable to connect the dots. I came to realize that the 1914 doctrine was hogwash because it was built on a series of assumptions (I didn't know about 607/587 until after I became inactive). If any of those assumptions were wrong, the whole teaching was wrong. I couldn’t understand how such an important doctrine, arguably the doctrine most central to JW theology, could be so misunderstood by rank and file JWs. No one I knew could explain the doctrine without reading from the Reasoning book. Very few could explain the core concepts of how that date was arrived at in their own words. Yet I still could not bring myself to do any research outside of WTBTS materials. I would occasionally view anti-JW sites (followed by crippling feelings of guilt), but with time, I came to figure out a lot of what was wrong with JW teachings by myself, and I became inactive. After about a year and a half of being inactive, I was able to bring myself to regularly view anti-JW material online. The result was quite surprising. It validated my doubts about the organization. The well-educated man’s comments to me that our theology reminded him of SAD theology finally made sense. I realized that JWs were nothing but an offshoot of Millerism, the movement that had produced SDA as well. William Miller’s prophetic chart and “proofs” looked remarkably a lot like Russell’s. I was finally able to connect the dots.
I wonder what I would have done back then had I had access to all of this information. There was no internet back then and the only anti-JW material available was mostly in the possession of “nutty” religious types. I wouldn’t have accepted anything from those guys. Nor did I ever have the curiosity to enter into a religious bookstore to research my beliefs. People in other religions seemed crazy to me, but I’m almost certain I would have researched the religion online. It’s a lot easier to get impartial information that way. It’s all water under the bridge now, but I have a funny suspicion that I would not have given the Watchtower the best years of my youth had the internet been around back then. Thanks for posting insightful posts such as this one. This is the type of information that would likely have stopped me from ever becoming a JW. I’m sure there are many potential converts that read this and go running for their lives when they discover what JWs are really all about. I believe the internet is already having a huge impact on the religion’s lack of growth in the industrialized world. Let’s hope that this information soon becomes widely available in the developing world as well. Keep up the good work.
NEJ
