As a practicing Witness in my teens and twenties, I looked for consistency. That is, I looked to see if the behaviors of the group leaders, the local agents of the leaders, and the group members, matched the professed group teachings.
So often they didn't. At first my efforts went into trying to get the people, who's behaviors did not conform with teachings, to comply. Failing that, I tried to justify their behaviors. Failing that, I labeled them and pigeonholed them; good, failing, failed.
The good and the failing, this group of people I did not know, and when I got to know them, I lowered their ratings.
The Watch Tower Publishing Corporation's volumes of publications highlight the distance between the presented teachings about the behaviors of the group members and the actual behaviors. For example: Teach love and practice the hate of shunning; teach unity and divide families. All of us could expand the list to infinity.
As former Witnesses, much of the discussion centers on the difference between the teachings about the behaviors and the actual behaviors, i e. the United Nations affair.
Many of our early contacts with practicing Witnesses have had as an agenda, the goal of acquainting them with the difference between the teachings about the behaviors and the actual behaviors. Like they don't already know. Then they are put in the position of seeing us as their attackers, and they defend that which they must defend. They are trapped.
To accept that the teachings and the behaviors do not match, never did match after Rutherford took over, and that they never will match, is to be close to resolution.
Resolution does not confront or need to expose conflicts to believers or to affect exits. Resolution is comfortable and does not try to re-write history or rescue the players in our personal dreams from their own delusions.
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