The Bible students were only a new name on a continuum of Adventist
belief. There was no evidence of any divine intervention at the emergence of
Russell’s attempts to fix a date for the return of JC. His contribution was a cunning one, he said: “It did happen after all, just as the
Adventists predicted; that in 1874 he did come... but invisibly”. Snake oil never worked better than this! For on this exquisitely
unprovable statement, the whole wretched edifice of the Watchtower and
subsequently Jehovah’s Witnesses was built. Fudging and moving the dates as
time proved them to be entirely false...thus setting a template for Watchtower tactics and morality.
The Adventists too were part of a longer experience of human
imaginings. Not just 1844, the year of " the great disappointment" and 1799 etc. The “end of the world” has forever been a part of human culture.
The oldest reference I have found goes back to Mesopotamia;
“According to Isaac
Asimov's Book of Facts (1979), an Assyrian clay tablet dating to
approximately 2800 BC was unearthed bearing the words "Our earth is
degenerate in these latter days. There are signs that the world is speedily
coming to an end. Bribery and corruption are common." This is one of the
earliest examples of the perception of moral decay in society being interpreted
as a sign of the imminent end.”
This innate idea leads me to think that our being aware of
our own mortality is just another way of saying that “It is all going to end”. Sublimating perhaps the idea that we individually
die and projecting that onto the world?
Whatever the psychology, the WTBTS like all doomsday cults,
feeds off this entrenched idea and rakes in the money. We have
records of the society making a million Dollars in the early days and one
hundred and forty years later they are making tax-free billions.
One significant change that we can observe is how they will present
their credentials to any potential new punter that they have God’s special
attention. Formerly they deceitfully pointed to 1914 and conflated it with World
War 1 as if that were their prediction by God's hand. On this basis they then falsely
predicted “the end” before the demise of the generation which saw 1914. With
the pathetic “overlapping generations” cop-out this must now be seen as a
farce. But we should not underestimate or ever forget the tragedy of countless millions of lives misspent and sacrificed in pursuing Watchtower deceptions.
Doomsday merchants rely on the grim ignorance of both their
members and the public, their history shows that they can and do earn prodigiously from "ramping up the urgency" and perpetual disappointment... but now we have universal information...how long can
they last?
