Yup, it was Freddy Franz all right. And you are right to be disturbed by those images. :-)
I was amazed myself that Klein made it on the GB. I guess technically he met all the requirements, but his articles were ridiculous. So while Ray Franz ("anointed") and Ed Dunlap ("other sheep") were assigned (by Karl Adams, Writing Department Overseer and also "other sheep") to write study articles and study books, Karl was assigned to write articles for Awake about things like dung beetles and banana trees. Other writers told me that it used to burn him up with envy. So he played a key role in the 1980 "Franz/Dunlap" incident, thus eliminating his rivals. Finally, he got to write some "outstanding" Watchtower study articles. My favorite was his classic about "tacking into the wind." In that article, he destroyed any credibility the WTS may have had by revealing their secret: that no one at WT HQ had divine direction, nor any clue as to what they were talking about; that they were all just feeling their way along like blind mice looking for their tails. Or is it "the blind leading the blind?" That was adapted from one of his service talks. (I'll bet Karl Adams was ready to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge when that one got published.) Yes, Karl was one of a kind, a true "Watchtower man."
Tom
Tom Cabeen
JoinedPosts by Tom Cabeen
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Warren Schroeder from Bethel on Freddy, Kline and the apostate books!
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Tom Cabeen
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Warren Schroeder from Bethel on Freddy, Kline and the apostate books!
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Tom Cabeen
For Jeff Schwehm regarding your post on page 2 of this thread:
Regarding that couple that had a Down's Syndrome child... As little respect as I had for Karl Klein, I am amazed that he told that story as an example of God punishing someone for their actions. I guess that says something about how he thought about God.
The couple in question was Colin Lake and Maggie Maes. Maggie and Colin got infatuated with each other and ran off together, at almost exactly the time that the Eagles song "Lyin' Eyes" was released, I think around 1975. I remember listening to the song and thinking about them. What they did scandalized Bethel, and that was not easy to do.
Colin was in Dispatch, and Maggie was the wife of one of my dearest friends, Fred Maes, a former Spanish Circuit and District Overseer. Colin's wife Dorothy was a good woman. (At the time, she looked very much like Dustin Hoffman as "Tootsie") She was more than an acquaintance, but not really a close friend.
Fred later left Bethel, remarried, went back into the District work for a few years, then dropped out of the org. He had a pretty good life. He was never df'd, to my knowledge. He died of cancer about ten years ago, in December, 1998, I think. I spent a few days down there with him just before he died.
I remember being so sad, both for Colin and Maggie and for their mates, Fred and Dorothy, all of whom I knew pretty well. I believe that Maggie wanted a child so badly, but the end just wouldn't come and her biological clock was ticking away... She must have been in her mid-forties when their baby was born. Dorothy was still at Bethel when we left. I wish them all peace and God's blessing.
A little side note about Karl Klein. One day I was sitting in Dan Sydlik's office. We were shooting the bull as we did almost every day. Suddenly the door burst open and Karl Klein was at the door. He was so excited, he didn't even look to see if there was anyone else there in the office. When he opened the door, I was sort of hidden behind it, because Karl didn't come right in, but stood there in the doorway, gleefully announcing his big news: "I've made it, Dan!" he said. "I'm finally at the top of the heap! I'm the Chairman of the Governing Body! Can you imagine!?!" Dan looked at him as he was speaking, then he sort of shrank a bit in his chair, then he looked at me, then back at Karl. Karl stopped in mid-sentence. He said "Oh, I didn't know anyone was here." I excused myself and left, leaving him to exult over his new job (which he only held for a year, as the chairmanship rotated). Dan and I never discussed it. I think Dan was embarrassed for Karl. But I don't think Karl was embarrassed for himself.
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Warren Schroeder from Bethel on Freddy, Kline and the apostate books!
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Tom Cabeen
Hey Warren,
Just a note about Nestor. His wife's name is Toni and their last name is spelled Kuilan. They are both living in Puerto Rico. I have been in touch with them in the past few months. Send me a PM if you want their email address.
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Warren Schroeder from Bethel on Freddy, Kline and the apostate books!
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Tom Cabeen
Hey Warren,
Glad to be in touch again!
Shortly after I came to Bethel, around 1968, I was invited to go down to the sauna on a Wednesday night once with Freddy and Nathir Saleeh (who seemed to always be around him), and a couple of other new boys. I remember Freddy pulling on the big chain connected to the steam valve to let in lots of steam, and saying "Ooooh, hoooh, ooooh, hoooh" over and over again. The place smelled of musty wood and dampness and the whole experience was a little too weird for an Arizona farm boy. Once was enough for me. I never joined them again.
Boy, there is something I hadn't thought about in nearly forty years!
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Warren Schroeder from Bethel on Freddy, Kline and the apostate books!
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Tom Cabeen
Hi Mary,
Leo and I were in the same Hall when I was first a PO in the early 1970s (he was in the Greenpoint cong, I was in Greenpoint Spanish), then later were in the same congregation (Newark French). He was always pretty quiet, and pretty funny in the rather light conversations in which we shared on the long rides from Brooklyn to Newark. I was surprised to hear later that he had to leave the GB and move south (was it New Orleans?), but that was long after I was df'd. Was that in Toronto that your parents were married by Leo? He looks so young, but I recognize the face.
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Warren Schroeder from Bethel on Freddy, Kline and the apostate books!
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Tom Cabeen
Blondie was much closer... ;-)
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Warren Schroeder from Bethel on Freddy, Kline and the apostate books!
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Tom Cabeen
NHKnorr's nickname before he became President after Rutherford's death was "Brownie". Can you guess why?
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Warren Schroeder from Bethel on Freddy, Kline and the apostate books!
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For Mary,
RE your question: "Does the Governing Body/Writing Dept. send out letters to the "anointed" all over the world, when 'new light' is going to be released, before they put it down in the WT?"
I used to think that same kind of thing. By dad was a believer in all the big Bethel legends about divine direction, etc. It is all a fairy story.
The entire teaching about two classes was a Rutherford fabrication. It is all theory, no practice at all, a total fiction. And it always has been. The suits up there at HQ don't have any idea who the "anointed" are, except the ones they know personally, and perhaps they could guess in the case of JWs who were active prior to 1935. But most of the "born before 1925" set are more concerned with whether or not their Depends need to be changed, than they are with any "new light".
One of the still-major figures up there (I won't say who to protect his tail) believes that the entire 144,000 number (which he still takes literally) was filled in the first century (most credible Christian historians think there were at least a million Christians by the end of the first century, when the Revelation was written), so this guy thinks that there haven't been anything but "earthly class" since then.
One of the big surprises for me at Bethel was to find out that the vast majority of the material in the publications, including study articles in the Watchtower, study books and any other thing that could possibly be construed by JWs as "New Light" is written, published and enforced by "other sheep". The only notable exception besides Ray Franz was Freddie Franz, and you could always detect his stuff a mile away because its style is what one would expect from an author who was given to fantasy fiction.
The other big surprise for we was that hardly any of the people who write the publications believe what is written in them in the way they expect the average WT reader to do. They are nearly all "apostates" in that sense. But they are all willing to publicly toe the party line to avoid the kind of unpleasantness that honesty begets in a place like that.
In the mid-70, when I was at Bethel, my friend Dan Sydlik told me that the other sheep of John 10 were the Gentiles. That made so much sense to me, and it fit so well with the actual state of affairs, that I rejected the two-class fiction then and there, even when I thought that the WTS was still God's organization.
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To ex-JW's who became real "Christians"
by startingover ini have a question.. what is your belief now regarding hell?
a place of torment?
the grave?
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Here is what I believe about hell, SO. I posted it before somewhere else.
Catholics and the Orthodox, following the teachings of the earliest Christians, believe that it is impossible for God not to love us, his earthly children. Love is his very essence and he made us expressly so that he could love us. God loves us so much that he sent his only-begotten son to save us and demonstrate the length he would go to to show us he loves us.
Out of love for us, he made us in such a way that our deepest longings, our most profound needs, are satisfied in Him. He made us to find our fulfillment in the best he had, Himself. He made us to be his lovers; thus we will never be satisfied until we are in perfect relationship with him. When that happens, we will also be in the correct relationship with all other creatures who are in relationship with him, a huge loving family of giving and shared experiences. That is why he made us, so that he could love us and share his life with us.
Love, by its very nature, must be spontaneous. It cannot be forced or coerced and still be love. In order to meet that condition, God had to give us free will, along with the qualities of character we would need to exercise that free will, including intelligence, curiosity, and the capacity for faith and love. As a consequence, we must make a free choice to obey God; we must come to him in pure loving response to what he has done for us. God would never try to force us into obeying him, even though He knows we will never be completely happy until we conform our thoughts and actions to His.
But free will also has a corollary. Since we have the God-given capacity for choice, He must also give us the right to reject Him. If that were not true, we would not truly have free will. If we choose to go down that path away from our Creator, God will use every means at his disposal, short of violating our free will, to call us to repentance. He offers free forgiveness and He demonstrates his love for us over and over again, in hope that we might come to realize that only in full, complete relationship with him will we ever realize our potential as his children, made in his own image. But ultimately, we have the right to reject him, even to hate him, to substitute love we ought to have for Him and give it to other, lesser things.
In the words of C.S. Lewis on this subject, it boils down to this: "In the end, we either say to God: 'Thy will be done' or God will say to us 'Thy will be done.'" God knows (because he made us) that once we get to that point, despite all his efforts to demonstrate his love for us, that our hatred will grow until we hate Him with all our heart (just as Satan does). Those who ultimately will end up hating God will seek to be away from his presence, even if they would be welcome there.
So as a final act of love for them, he provides them a place where they can be shielded from his love and light, which otherwise permeates all existence. God will abandon such creatures to their own devices. They will be in what Jesus called "outer darkness". Just "where" that will be is not the point at all. Even if God were to allow such people full access to his presence , they would hate to be there. Like a Rock & Roll fan at an opera, or an opera fan at a Heavy Metal concert, the same "place", God’s presence, would be heaven for one and hell for the other. Imagery like fire is used in Scripture to represent the pain of separation from God (which is the Catholic definition of hell, by the way).(BTW, some Christian mystics have suggested that heaven and hell are the same place, that only the perception of the individual makes them different.)
A clarification about eternity. Eternity does not mean an endless succession of days; millions, billions or trillions of them. Eternity means being outside of time, timeless (that is the literal meaning of the word). All of our linear, sequential time is included in timelessness. One way to envision that is to think about the relationship of our linear time to the "time" in storybooks on a shelf. We can open a book and enter a particular "time", the succession of events found in that story. Then we can close the book and be completely outside of that "time", then later reopen it and be right back in it. That is how some orthodox thinkers have compared the linear time we live in to the eternity in which God dwells. It is mysterious but not impossible to imagine.
Those who reject God will end up living in timelessness also, but without the one thing they need to be happy: God. But it will be their own choice about the matter. They will not just be sent somewhere because they inadvertently broke some little rule or other. It will be because they have made a fully informed choice, of their own free will, knowing full well the consequences of their choice, to live without God, and, when offered the chance to change their mind and repent, will refuse. Those who do that will be, completely as a result of their own choice, in hell.
I would recommend C.S. Lewis' "The Great Divorce" for a more complete (and much better) exploration of this subject, which was also very difficult for Lewis. It was very helpful to me.
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Tom Cabeen on EWTN's Journey Home tonight. I enjoyed it.
by Seeker4 inwatched tom tonight, and thought he made some excellent points.
i called, and actually got through, but the producer didn't put me on.
i wanted to ask tom if his leaving bethel in 1980 had any connection with the whole ray franz/ed dunlap incident,which was happening then.. as tom knows, i'm one of those ex-jws who became an atheist, so i took quite a different path than he did in leaving the jws, and i certainly don't agree with his conclusions.
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Tom Cabeen
S4, Steve Lupo! There is a name I haven't heard in over a quarter century! Yes, I knew Steve, but not well. He was among the small group of people who were meeting together in small groups and happily questioning things, until the old guard got wind of it and, in standard WT style, set off the nuclear weapons as the first line of defense, frying friend and foe alike. I actually think that the WTS has never been the same since. Haven't heard a word about Lupo since 1980. If he is still a JW and an elder, that would explain it. Tom