now we know how stupid we look..when we knock on peoples doors... with the wbt$ message... .
"armageddon is just around the corner!".
..................... ...outlaw.
Their own literature condemns them:
- Awake of October 8, 1966 (p.19)
- Watchtower of May 1, 1968 (p.272)
- Watchtower of August 15, 1968 (p.494)
- Awake of October 8, 1968 (Front page "Is it later than you think").
- All these magazines had much to say about 1975, and a lot of that was quite pointed, too! (Particularly WT 8/15, 1968, at page 499)
For the WTS to subsequently blame individual JWs for the 1975 debacle is - to say the least - grossly unfair.
Bill.
It is not as if little was ever put into print by the WTS about 1975:
- Much was written about this date in the Awake of October 8, 1966, page 19 (so much, in fact, that when my non JW mother finished reading this article, she concluded "they are saying Armegeddon will happen in 1975.")
- The date was mentioned again in the Watchtower of May 1, 1968 (page 272)
- In case anybody slept through that one, the Watchtower of August 15, 1968 (page 494) ran an article entitled "Are you looking forward to 1975". On page 499 of that same magazine, it used the expression "weeks or months, not years" to describe the time interval between the completion of 6000 years of human existence (i.e. the fall of 1975) and Armegeddon.
- Then again that same year, Awake of October 8, 1968 featured an article "Is it later than you think". That, too, had much to say about 1975.
What was said may well have exceeded what was written about 1975; but still, enough was said to still be damaging.
Maybe this just proves that their two magazines are mainly destined to go straight onto landfills!
Bill.
loved this article in australia.
five other end-of-world predictions: .
1. followers of william miller believed the world would end on october 22, 1844.. 2.the jehovah's witness religion has predicted the end of the world in 1914, 1915, 1918, 1920, 1925, 1941, 1975 and 1994.. 3. charles wesley, founder of the methodist church, predicted the world would end in 1794.. 4. famous forecaster nostradamus predicted doomsday would happen in july 1999.. 5. english mystic joanna southcott predicted the world would end on october 19, 1814, when she gave birth to the messiah.. .
willyloman,
Interesting - yet I recall none of it! (Despite having been an avid reader of everything that that lot printed, for the 28 years up until 1994).
Oh for sure, I, too, knew how to add 70 or 80 onto 1914, and come up with the years 1984 and 1994:
- but as to anybody placing any emphasis on this data, I knew of no such instance.
Perhaps I - and just about everybody else that I knew - had seen the 1975 letdown, and weren't going to get overly excited about a second (or third or fourth ) prediction. Also, I was never one for paying much heed to the JW "rumour mill."
Which has probably a lot to do with the fact that what you see depends very much on which lens you are looking at it through!
Bill.
loved this article in australia.
five other end-of-world predictions: .
1. followers of william miller believed the world would end on october 22, 1844.. 2.the jehovah's witness religion has predicted the end of the world in 1914, 1915, 1918, 1920, 1925, 1941, 1975 and 1994.. 3. charles wesley, founder of the methodist church, predicted the world would end in 1794.. 4. famous forecaster nostradamus predicted doomsday would happen in july 1999.. 5. english mystic joanna southcott predicted the world would end on october 19, 1814, when she gave birth to the messiah.. .
I don't ever recall the WTS saying anythng about 1994, 1996 - or even 1984, as I have heard some claim.
Then again, perhaps I did hear it, but automatically dismissed it out of hand as just total nonsense:
- having lived through the 1975 debacle.
- having personally known those who had lived through the 1941/1942 mini-debacle.
- and having learned the truth about the 1925 debacle!
Bill.
have you ever seen a stop sign?.
what if it were a "decelerate until stationary!
"sign, instead?.
"Intelligent JW Apologist"? Certainly on matters such as the finer points of Koine Greek, rather a mythical creature, I would have thought! This is not at all surprizing, though, given the WTS's anti-education hard line.
To justify their date of 1914 does require a goodly measure of creative accounting. In particular, notice that Russell did not arrive at the date 1914 from counting forward "Seven Times" from 607 BCE:
- rather, it was the other way around!
This date of 1914 was borrowed from Nelson H. Barbour's Second Adventists - who arrived at it by a particularly nebulous bit of creative accounting, after their prophecy of 1873/1874 being the date for Armegeddon failed. Then, the psuedo-science of Pyramidology appeared to support this date.
Bill.
part 1:.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkikbn39xq0&nr=1.
part 2:.
There is nothing at all new in this:
- the pyschiatric wards of most hospitals have always had more than their share of patients who claim to be either Jesus, God, the Seventh Angel of Revelation , or something similar.
I vividly recall one evening when I had to bring somebody into the Accident and Emergency Dept of a major hospital:
- while medical staff were attending to badly injured or acutely ill patients, two psychiatrists were dealing with a badly deranged woman, who was adamant that she was the "Seventh Angel" mentioned in the book of Revelation. To prove her point, she was quoting heavily from a green-covered version of - guess what - "our" own New World Translation.
Needless to say, despite then being a very active JW, I kept right out of that one!
Bill.
now we know how stupid we look..when we knock on peoples doors... with the wbt$ message... .
"armageddon is just around the corner!".
..................... ...outlaw.
All I know is that - on this side of the International Dateline - we are already now well into the afternoon of Sunday, May 22nd 2011. Nothing significant has yet occured, and nobody has been yet raptured that I can see!
How do things currently look on your side of the International Dateline?
- or has it got something to do with midnight, May 21st 2011, local time in Jerusalem?
Bill.
PS: What a crock of #!%t!
There was surprizingly very little said in the media about this:
- I do recall one newspaper reporter in Australia making some sarcastic observation that "Armegeddon may be late!"
- Apart from that, the only other media commentary that I have ever heard of was from John Dart, the Religious Affairs editor of the Los Angeles Times. Hereported that JWs had expected the end of the world to occur during the fall of 1975, but that now, this "isn't all that certain."
Fred Franz's predictions could not have been that newsworthy! (I wonder why?).
Bill.
it seems that religion has always been considered the opium of the people.
or at least many tend to gravitate towards religion to have or solidify some sort of future with a supreme being overlooking them hoping to have a reward either in heaven or in the jehovah's witnesses case - living forever in a " paradise earth ".
it seems that people can't just live day to day and let each day come to them with whatever happens.
Ditto Slimboyfat!
Bill
i studied the paradise book, you may remember there was a whole chapter it in about the dream, the tree getting chopped down, time, time and half a time etc.
now i was very young ( but of course spirtualy mature (!
) when i studied this but i remember seeing the person explain this doctrine to me and it was like.... " ok now you see this scripture here?
When I was first introduced to it, the events of WW1, 1914, 1919 etc. etc. etc. were less than 50 years previous; "The Generation" was that of my grandparents, who were still very much alive in their late 60s; and "The Balloon was going to go up" in 1975, less than ten years in the future.
All very plausible stuff!
Even after the 1975 #%*&$-up; as others here have noted, the WTS mounted an offensive in the 1980s, and things still looked positive.
As time went on, though, one had to face up to it that the WTS was going to have to do some fast talking to explain way their previous utterances about "The Generation" :
- once it became plain even to the dimest of dimwits that that "Generation" had in fact departed, yet still nothing had changed.
That was about the time I woke up to the sham that the WTS is, and decided that I had already heard enough fast talking to last a lifetime!
Bill.
