What is it about some JWs that they can't see the flip-flops of the WT's CHANGING DOCTRINE?
Some of the Flip-flops involved the death of many of it's members, and it was not even Biblical based. Yet for some reason they can't seem to grasp the significance of the matter.
This can be really frustrating when it involves someone you love like a parent, a husband, wife, or children.
Here is an example from reddit;
My elder father chooses to believe that god lies to JWs rather than to believe that some doctrines are man-made
A little backstory; I had always been perceived as an "exemplary" JW, I had all the "privileges" a young JW man could have; MS, Pioneer, running the sound system, I even gave public talks in other congregations, which was pretty rate for a MS.
But at the same time, my family and close friends knew a different side of me. I was always a little mentally rebellious. If a doctrine didn't make sense to me, I would say so, and explain why. Or if a CO came around spouting some nonsense rule he made up, I would show him from the publications where he was wrong, which got me counseled more than once.
When I gave public talks in other congregations, I always carried with me, right in my folder under my talk outline, a print-out of a watchtower article saying that it was improper and pharisaical to try to force someone to wear a plain white shirt when giving a talk, because I always wore a colored shirt in a pretty conservative area. (Sadly, I never got to rub that in anyone's face.)
In short, I was outspoken and loved a good argument, and didn't back down easily.
My father, on the other hand, was a life-long, second-generation JW, and was the very model of a company man. He became an elder in his early 30s, and he went along with everything anyone said, as long as they were "higher-ranking" than him, because he viewed that as loyalty.
Some rando CO comes into town and tells us to stop working rural territories and focus on the main town only? Sure, dad would go along with that, in spite of every article I could show him proving that the branch didn't want us to do that. "Maybe the CO has a secret letter from the branch he hasn't shown us" dad would eventually say, and I would roll my eyes, exasperated.
Anyway, one day, as I was on my way to being mentally out of the cult, he called me up to discuss some of my "doubts", and we got into it for a few hours. We argued about all the same old stuff again, just like we had many times over the years.
But then I threw something at him that we had never talked about; the flip-flopping about organ transplants. In case you don't know, JWs were fine with organ transplants until the mid 60s. Then from the mid-to-late 60s until the early 80s, JWs considered organ transplants to be a form of cannibalism, and therefore wouldn't allow them. T
hen in the 80s, they were allowed again. For those 15 or so years, some JWs surely died for lack of an organ transplant, when they apparently didn't need to, since they flipped right back to being acceptable again in the 80s. So my question was, who is responsible for their deaths; god who lied to us about his feelings on organ transplants, or men, who made up a doctrine that god had to "correct" back to the right thing?
He didn't have an answer, and kind of floundered, but he seemed to be landing on the side of men getting it wrong for a few years, and then god stepping in to correct it, until I reminded him that it was correct in the first place. Why would god have allowed men to introduce a wrong doctrine that got JWs killed? He backtracked, and then floundered again.
So I then asked my dad why there were multiple examples of flip-flopping doctrines like that. ("Who are the Superior authorities" is another example where they had one belief, changed it, and then changed it again back to their original belief.) He tried the classic "light getting brighter" defense, but I didn't let that fly.
I eventually pinned him down. There are only two possibilities; All JWs doctrines are created by god, and he sometimes lies to us about what he wants us to believe, thus resulting in doctrines flip-flopping, or at least some JW doctrines are made by men, who are essentially just making it up and getting it wrong.
He tried to weasel out of that dilemma for quite a while, but I was determined to get him to pick one of those choices.
When he finally was forced to think it through and make a choice, he chose that god sometimes lies. I was flabbergasted. I remember literally yelling into the phone "No! What?! NO!" My wife came in to make sure everything was all right at that point, because I sounded so distressed. I just couldn't believe dad would go that far, and even directly against the bible, just to avoid blaming men.
Dad's explanation was that god lies, but only to protect us. He said that in the case of the "Superior authorities", maybe god caused them to flip-flop certain ways during certain times in history to maintain political neutrality. Maybe the organ donation ban protected JWs from a hidden medical danger. (I pointed out that his favorite author, Isaac Asimov died from an organ transplant that carried AIDS after the JW ban had been lifted, so that was a pretty ineffectual ban if it ended right before the AIDS threat showed up.)
His basic thesis was the classic "god works in mysterious ways" trope, which I pointed out to him that he was now just parroting "false religion's" defense of things that their beliefs can't explain, but that didn't phase him.
I also pointed out that the bible explicitly says "god CANNOT lie", but he said it wasn't "really lying, because he was protecting us". I pointed out that's not the problem. The problem is that if god can lie at all, then that means that you can't trust anything he ever says again. He's all powerful, he can cover up or manipulate the evidence of any lie he wants, even erasing it from your brain if he wants to. The very fact that he CAN lie, means that you can't ever trust him again.
He never changed his mind. In his view, it's better to accept a lying god than it is to accept that his beliefs have been manufactured by men.
It was a huge blow to my estimation of my father's intellectual honesty, and it made me realize just how deeply brainwashed he is.
On the plus side, when I told my wife that whole story, she was still mentally in, and that definitely helped to push her more toward being mentally out, so it did help to save the person I most wanted to save.
EDIT: This was all several years ago, my wife and I are now both completely out of the cult, and we've never been happier.