i have posted on here a couple of times that i am reading alan rogerson's excellent book entitled "millions now living will never die.".
this book was published in 1969. notice what mr. rogerson (a non-jw) observed in his research.. .
jehovah's witnesses do not expect the literal destruction of the.
All of this serves to highlite the very strange issue of the "7,000 year long creative day."
Forgotten now, perhaps - but it was a fundamental part of the failed 1975 prophecy.
I never understood what "scriptural" basis this ever had, and now that the wise old Freddy Franz is gone, probably I never will.
just wanted to start this to get a pulse on how many young jw's are exiting percentage wise recently in the witness organization.
in my family i have 8 young people aged 21 through 35 .
these are my son and two daughters and my older siblings 5 adult children.
Between my family and my JW ex-wife's family: more than 3 dozen people. Maybe 4 dozen, and not counting really young kids.
All in the 1978 to 1984 time frame after the 1975 and the Ray Franz episode.
in an act of pure self-masochism, i listened to this talk:.
http://www.archive.org/details/whatisthesignficanceof1975.
his manner of speaking is so aggravating!
I remember being over-awed by him as a teenager. I thought that someday I would acquire enough wisdom to understand him. Didn't realize it was all BS.
And so you did eventually acquire enough wisdom to understand him -
i was talking to my husband and we were trying to work out how many meetings we actually came away from feeling enthused or excited by what we had heard.
not including pre and post meeting association how many wow moments can you recall?.
we had to conclude that most of the time in the organisation the meeting was something you endured.
I was going to say absolutely none - but there was one after all. I had forgotten it.
Two elderly ladies in our congregation in Oklahoma City went on the around-the-world JW trip back in 1968. They were pretty good amateur photographers and made a 2 hour series of 35mm slides of all the foreign countries they visited. It was a fascinating presentation - they were smart enough to not include anything of the various "international assemblies" - but rather interesting travelogue type pictures.
Both are deceased now - I have often wondered what ever became of this historical photography.
the organization for security and co-operation in europe is a political organization commonly called the "osce.".
of itself, the osce says, "the osce is the world's largest regional security organization whose 56 participating states span the geographical area from vancouver to vladivostok.".
among its activities it lists:.
They partnered up with the Seventh Day Adventists and the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgendered groups.
Hey, they just needed some "special" library books that they could not find anywhere else...
All of this really shows the cold-hearted political maneuvering that goes on with every leadership change in the Watchtower Society. It has happened every time: Rutherford had to dispose of an old guard from the Russell era; Rutherford was in fact deposed during the last years of life by Knorr and Franz; when Knorr died Franz really only gained a sort of ghost presidency because of the Governing Body setup; and so on.
Nobody gets much adulation after their time is over. Probably today's average JW would hardly know who Rutherford even was, or have any idea that his burial place is still something of a mystery.
does everyone remember a few years back, when the km directed that nobody should wear shorts after the convention while out and about?
i don't have the reference, but i remember a brother in our hall made a comment that night at the meeting while it was being discussed.
he was a very poor brother, with 3 children.
Over the past few years, our DC's have had some pretty exciting stuff happen. Two tennage girls got into a fight in the corridor one year over some guy. LOL
I will hazard a guess that this was the ONLY exciting thing to happen during that DC...?
It has been mentioned before, but this thread is a good place to comment again:
I (and others) have personally thought for a long time that this was evidence of the long-held antagonism between Knorr/Franz and Rutherford. It is entirely possible that Knorr and Franz wanted to minimize the burial place of Rutherford specifically to avoid it becoming a shrine. After all, post-era the death of Russell, a wide fraction emerged in the society and Knorr the businessman was not about to have this repeated. Russell himself had a sort of burial monument erected (the pyramid) by his grave, and probably they did not want a repeat. Note that if a respectable gravesite was desired, they did not exactly have to put up the Crypt at Beth-Sarim; the Society could have put it in a suitable legal cemetary if they wanted.
Along the same lines - they did not waste much time in getting rid of Beth Sarim and the other property, as well as the two famous Cadillacs.
Equally interesting is the treatment of the burial service - absolutely secretive, even if it actually took place.
Apparantly, Rutherfords own living family (and even the mistresses) had nothing to do with it.
in 1954 a controversial court case, douglas walsh vs. the right honorable james latham clyde, m.p.c.
was held in scotland to determine.
if jehovah's witnesses should be exempt from military service and granted status as "ordained ministers".. what is of outstanding interest is that testimony in this trial is extraordinarily revealing.
Just for what it is worth, I was aware of this transcript back in 1970 when I was still in the WT. It came up, of all places, in the two-week overseer's school in Pittsburgh, Pa. which was being taught by Al Schroeder.
They verified pretty much the transcript, but the spin was that it was a "fine example" of how the world did not understand Jehovah's unified organization and the concept of "new light". The 30 or so JW congregation overseers in that class bought Schroeder's BS hook line and sinker.
via the brooklyn heights blog, a former jehovahs witness, now a convert to orthodox catholicism, recounts his days as a bethelite in the witnesses' brooklyn heights headquarters, in a series of recent blog posts.
part i -- the journey from jws to the orthodox church.
http://orthocath.wordpress.com/2010/02/27/the-journey-from-jehovahs-witnesses-to-the-orthodox-church/.
Glad you quoted some of this for us, LeavingWT. I have to be very careful going to outside unknown links here at work - probably others do too.
