Poster Westiewilly quoted on another thread the
Biblical proverb “expectation lost is sickness to the heart”. The KJV puts it
well, “Hope deferred makes the heart sick but a longing fulfilled is a tree of
life”.
Does this not encapsulate the emotional tone
of the JW organization today; “heartsick”?
Those who saw the total failure of the
Watchtower promises of the twentieth century must be heartsick from the
disappointment. What I am exploring is how would we expect the faithful to respond
to this fundamental problem? Their lives were geared to this hope, the rigid
certainty of the Kingdom by the end of the last century was guaranteed by none other
than the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society-- "the generation of 1914" was often quoted, it was
undisputed, JWs thought it was a Bible certainty, it was their ticket to paradise. . .
Psychologically even wearing the mask of a kingdom
smile, today the heart has gone out of the whole enterprise, the abysmal attempts at
squaring the generation of 1914 to accommodate successive generations by “overlapping” has only meant a further loss
of confidence, and the GB must know it.
How then have the flock reacted?
As we know, what the JW org offers the public
is a quick fix to all life's problems: never dying, a life of bliss in paradise; the hope of a permanent world of “no worries” with cuddly pandas thrown in for good measure. As we also know this is
moonshine but the world is full of sad punters who in the past have lapped it up.
So with
the expectation now lost, for those who didn't leave the organisation, the first thing was a re-evaluation and this meant finding justification
for what has happened. It was akin to having foolish parents who made a very foolish
mistake, you don’t blame them do you? You put up with them ‘cos they are the
only ones you have.
For those unthinking and infantilised JWs, the governing body had become the surrogate parent.
So the remaining JWs at the turn of the twenty first century then started to look for new dates,
not a promising line of enquiry since WT dates have always been wrong in the past.
Outwardly the remaining JWs continued performing the meeting and preaching rituals but egged on by HQ, shifted the emphasis away from a date limit to stressing the imminence of Armageddon. Having lost a marker point JWs were
now focused just on the nearness—always round the corner, always round this
enormous one hundred and forty year long corner. Are Jehovah’s Witnesses round
the bend yet? Of course, The Watchtower has always been round the bend!
What other alternatives are available to the
JW?
Stay put and enjoy your friends and family? As
the WT told the flock in 1980 after their previous major prophetic disaster of 1975,
“we still have our brothers and sisters don’t we?” Yes it's a good social club if you are partially brain dead.
Or one could just leave-- however leaving the
JW club carries a big penalty. The cult goes to great lengths to avoid
defectors and the flock knows it well. Being ”sent to Coventry” as we say in
England or shunning, is the technique used to harm the feelings of the would-be leaver to induce them to stay. It often works, and the consequence of this is that the
kingdom halls are filling with physically present but mentally alienated
members. . . lots of them. . . it’s part and parcel of the heartsick membership.
There is however one significant response not
often discussed and that is the hidden token protest JWs are practising now by not contributing money.
Have you practised this or heard of others
doing it?
( And by the way, has anyone found the tree of
life Proverbs mentions?)
