a while ago the user vinman started a forum thread called: "ray franz was an idiot".
the reaction to it was quite negative but i have to admit that the title of that thread was intriguing to me.
by nature i am an iconoclast.
No need to apologise; you raise some good questions. But I interpret the changes he was involved in as precisely the struggle. The late period you refer to is when he had basically already lost and the org started recoiling from the changes he had been pushing for. To me, that invalidates your argument that he was fighting for a high position (in the meretricious sense) in the late 70s.
Ok I really will disappear now ;)
a while ago the user vinman started a forum thread called: "ray franz was an idiot".
the reaction to it was quite negative but i have to admit that the title of that thread was intriguing to me.
by nature i am an iconoclast.
Hi SB,
You're not really addressing my points. Ray was deeply involved in changing organisational structures (with resistance from Knorr and Freddie regarding the GB) at a very high level much earlier than 76. The struggle coming to the fore in 77 is simply a sign that the org had gone hardline and what Ray had hoped for was clearly not going to happen. It doesn't mean that's where the struggle started.
And yes Ray eventually recanted from the idea of GB as part of recanting from the org as a whole. That doesn't change the fact he also helped implement it much earlier.
I'm interested in the topics you're talking about but I find your interpretation unsatisfactory, even as the devil's advocate. With that I will bow out of the thread.
a while ago the user vinman started a forum thread called: "ray franz was an idiot".
the reaction to it was quite negative but i have to admit that the title of that thread was intriguing to me.
by nature i am an iconoclast.
By the late 60's Covington was a washed up drunk and so after Knorr died in 77 all power now concentrated in Franz.
Not true - the Presidency was turned into a figurehead by the GB by that point. And who had played a major role in that?
a while ago the user vinman started a forum thread called: "ray franz was an idiot".
the reaction to it was quite negative but i have to admit that the title of that thread was intriguing to me.
by nature i am an iconoclast.
@SaintBertholdt
I disagree with your characterisation because my impression is Ray was already heavily involved in restructuring the org prior to 75. He didn't just wake up in 75 and say "I want control of the theology". By his own account in CoC, the GB was becoming more hardline; he had already essentially lost the power struggle, whatever it entailed. The shift to GB meant Freddy Franz has already been disempowered in a sense, anyways.
IMO Ray portrays himself as fundamentally responsible for initiating the shift from Presidency to GB in CoC. Obviously there would have been many people pushing towards that at the same time, but it gets written down in CoC as if Ray "did the research" and then officially triggered it. The GB officially appears the same year Ray joined it - 1971.
Your characterisation doesn't square with what Ray says in CoC. Ray was definitely a player, but my impression it was in the late 60s / early 70s. By the late 70s, the writing was on the wall and I don't think being the successor to his figurehead uncle meant anything. Plus you impugn a certain cravenness to his actions which I don't think is accurate; he could have easily towed the line if all he wanted was "the position".
my husband has a brother he has not spoken too in years not even when he became an adult.
there is a big age gap between them and when his brother was df'd he was still a small child.
his brother was 17 when he was df'd for sex and when he turned 18 he left home and never looked back.
a while ago the user vinman started a forum thread called: "ray franz was an idiot".
the reaction to it was quite negative but i have to admit that the title of that thread was intriguing to me.
by nature i am an iconoclast.
Saintbertholdt
I'm going to be blunt here: I think Franz was making a power play for chief theologian in the late 70's after the 75 failure.
I think he was probably already involved in "power struggles" of some sort ie. changing the power of the presidency and bringing in the GB. It didn't just start in the late 70s.
John Aquila
I had to step out for a while but I did catch this post. What do you mean by Franz making a power play? What's higher than a GB member? Elaborate please.
By changing the nature of the organisation, instead of just being part of it.
a while ago the user vinman started a forum thread called: "ray franz was an idiot".
the reaction to it was quite negative but i have to admit that the title of that thread was intriguing to me.
by nature i am an iconoclast.
I definitely think Ray was involved in some sort of power struggle and lost. This is not an indictment of his character, in the sense that I think he was trying to change the org from within. If you read between the lines of CoC, he seems to have been behind the reformulation of the BoE and then the GB itself; those were huge moves organisationally speaking. Then the Aid book was some sort of attempt to align WT background thinking with secular scholarship. Unless he was lying about what he did, what kind of higher moves could he have made?
I agree he never completely opens up about what went on. But it would be naive to assume he wasn't involved in trying to effect change, and I don't see why he should be criticised for that.
jesus received his mission orders from jehovah.. the apostles received their mission orders from jesus.. .
philip received his mission orders from an angel.. paul received his mission orders directly from a vision of christ.. .
barnabas took paul to jerusalem where he met james (jesus brother and peter) for fiteen days.
I agree Terry.
What was new for me in your post was the explicit linking of the creation of the GB to the failure of the 75 prophecy, which is a genuinely interesting point. I don't remember Ray Franz really mentioning many details of the GBs emergence in CoC, only that Freddy Franz was vehemently opposed and he railed against it in the gilead graduation class talk of 75 (I think) etc. Maybe I'm forgetting something obvious though...
I guess regardless the GB was a reaction against the Presidency (Knorr and Franz), however you look at it.
many jws don't know the basic doctrines we all use to debate the clergy with.. .
jws don't know the bible, the know a few proof-texts but can't handle the bible like the witnesses of 1950s-1990s, what happened?.
the caliber of the new elders is horrible when compared with the elders of 1950s-1990s, they don't know how to use their bible, they are turning towards orgnazational minor details while ignoring the bible and gospel message.. .
@Steve I would definitely say JWs were frequently forced not to think or do research, particularly born-ins who were discouraged, implicitly or explicitly, from higher education through social pressures. This happens from an early age and would be the precise definition of forcing someone not to think or do research IMO.
How many do you know with stunted lives? For the born-ins, this was by design if they had a zealous family who followed WTBS mandates.
As for the apathetic majority, of course that's true.
many jws don't know the basic doctrines we all use to debate the clergy with.. .
jws don't know the bible, the know a few proof-texts but can't handle the bible like the witnesses of 1950s-1990s, what happened?.
the caliber of the new elders is horrible when compared with the elders of 1950s-1990s, they don't know how to use their bible, they are turning towards orgnazational minor details while ignoring the bible and gospel message.. .
JWs never learnt critical thinking skills from their org. I mean even the most cursory glance over Rutherford, Russel and Franz's writings is embarrassing, to say the least.
They do seem to be dumbing down even more, which I imagine is the result of their whole paradigm no longer having any relevance in modern realities. I mean you could still make the argument that literature and knocking on people's doors had some effect or face validity in the 1940s; now it's truly bizarre. But it's always been a massive pile of ignorance.
