Gillies Gray writes:
What are the main lies apostates spread about Jehovah’s Witnesses, and why are they lies?
While it is unfortunately true that there are a few former members who spread lies against the Jehovah’s Witness religion, a far more common occurrence is that ex-members are wrongly accused of lying when they state facts concerning the Watchtower and its doctrines.
Whilst reading anything written by critics of their religion, Jehovah’s Witnesses are invariably on the look out for any little detail that could possibly be used as an excuse to accuse the author of lying.
The motivation for doing this stems directly from the fact that Jehovah’s Witnesses are desperate to affirm the narrative that their religion is uniquely fulfilling bible prophesy. In order to maintain this illusion, opposers of the religion must be vilified and their opinions discredited.
Jehovah’s Witnesses try to force fit current events and circumstances to match prophetic bible verses and they look for any small pretext on which to base a belief that the prophesy pertains to them, thereby reassuring and convincing themselves that theirs is the true religion approved by God.
For example, in 1 Timothy 4:2, Paul talks about Christians in the ‘latter periods of time’ who will fall away from the faith and go on to ‘speak lies’. Because Jehovah’s Witnesses wish to believe that they are the only true followers of God and are living in the ‘last days’, they are constantly on the alert to find ANYTHING that resembles the fulfilment of that ‘prophetic’ scripture. As a result, they find any excuse to be able to accuse their critics.
This frequently leads to false accusations against their critics, claiming they are promoting lies about the Organisation and its teachings. JWs often assume a critic is saying something that they are not.
Jehovah’s Witnesses tend to take criticism of their organisation personally and are hypersensitive to legitimate negative criticisms. They are not accustomed to hearing the truth about their religion without the sugar coating which allows them to overlook the negative aspects of their theology. This results in false claims that lies are being told.
The irony is that the majority of objective, informed critics of the Watchtower Organisation go to great lengths to ensure that what they say is as accurate as possible. On multiple occasions many of them have actually argued against people who make false accusations about Jehovah’s Witnesses. These critics are genuinely offended when people promote misinformation about the Watchtower Organisation because it works against their objective of exposing the truth about the religion.
Jehovah’s Witnesses will always be swift to accuse their critics of lying if doing so confirms their prophetic narrative. However, on Quora and elsewhere, there have been countless occasions when Jehovah’s Witnesses who have accused a critic of lying have been asked to point to the alleged lies, but invariably, the JW either withdraws from the exchange, deliberately ignores the question or deflects onto another topic.
There is absolutely no good reason or excuse to lie about the Jehovah’s Witnesses, because inventing falsehoods about them works in their favor. Ex-JWs don’t need to invent lies when there is an abundance of genuine reasons for valid criticism. The most effective and efficient way of exposing the faults in the Jehovah’s Witness religion is to use their own literature, as well as highlighting the fundamental flaws in their apologetics.