How the Good work of Russell became the curse of the Watchtower today

by Terry 30 Replies latest watchtower bible

  • Terry
    Terry

    The greatest benefit to come from Jehovah's Witnesses was the introduction of honest investigation into the

    claims of christianity based on the bible.

    Exposing error was the gimmick.

    Replacing doctrine or ritual with door to door activity was the greatest FAILURE to follow truth where it leads.

    Mainstream religion in Pastor Russell's day was set in stone. Dogma was established. It was unquestionable.

    Russell dared to question it and expose the flaws, the lies and the corruption.

    Unfortunately, his own quirky ideas merely traded places with the uprooted ones in mainstream churches.

    With Pastor Russell the End of the World elements and gimmicks of Adventist nonsense were a novelty to capture attention and lure the curious inside.

    Russell used his wealth and talent for detail to cherry-pick from among the more sensational ideas of his day.

    He used his writing skills to link elements from all sorts of shady and preposterous sources.

    Tying it all together into something SCRIPTURAL was his true talent.

    The PREMISE of Russellism was the combining of Bible, Adventist charts, Pyramidology, anti-establishment interpretation and leader charisma.

    The christians who followed Russell were kept interested by his CLAIMS because he was wrapping it all around a roll of the dice and putting his predictions on the line!

    Either those very specific dates were true or it was bunkum, right? Gotta love how brave and certain it all sounded!

    But--this was a very shaky foundation for anything but a flash-in-the-pan fly-by-night religious quack.

    How could he pretend to be right IF and when things started proving false??

    Maria Russell concocted the best reason, however, because it has proved the most durable: the faithful and discreet slave doctrine.

    The Doctrine of the Faithful and Discreet Slave rests entirely on interpretation and assertion:

    Near the End of Days Jesus would inspect and select among all religions the only one he found worthy of becoming his MOUTHPIECE.

    Using that MOUTHPIECE faithful believers could TRUST the instructions being given which would SAVE THEM FROM DESTRUCTION.

    Naturally, all of this only meant going along with weird and dysfunctional interpretations!

    Next, under President J.F. Rutherford a cult of personality developed with antisocial agendas.

    Jehovah's Witnesses was concocted as an iconoclastic, anti-authoritarian (church authority, government authority, etc.) brand name.

    The motto could easily have been: IF YOU ARE FOR IT---WE ARE AGAINST IT!

    Silly as this sounds it is true.

    Most "normal" christian people viewed worship as flowing from the authority of the bible and so did Jehovah's Witnesses.

    HOWEVER....

    JW's were set firmly in the role of ANTAGONISTS using the scriptures (really: interpretations of scripture) as weapons.

    They ranted and raved and criticized and set themselves up to be radical martyrs to gain notice.

    All the while spouting DATES for the end of the world!!

    Bait and Switch.

    Lure people in with urgency to avoid DOOM and switch to a sales work of door to door propaganda spreading!

    And so on...

    Jehovah's Witnesses ARE the Higher Critics---but--not of actual historical proofs!

    They are critics of society, worldwide religion and foundational error in mainstream religious dogma.

    IT ALL RESTS MERELY ON THEIR OWN ASSERTIONS.

    Mark this one fact and it all falls into place:

    The fragility of the bible as a source authority must NEVER be allowed to be discussed!

    Why?

    It is the bundling of their own peculiar interpretions (under the guise of "mouthpiece") with BIBLE that is the engine that drives the Governing Body's authority.

    If people ever really knew facts about the errancy of the Bible and started investigating on their on the house of cards would quickly tumble.

    THE BIBLE MUST BE PROPPED UP NO MATTER WHAT!

    The Governing Body presents itself as the champion of God's Word. In reality, they are the champions of their own crazy thinking.

    The Bible is fragile as an historical document because of 3 main reasons.

    1.The scriptures (bible) are man made, man assembled, man copied, man interpreted and man translated.

    2.There is no chain-of-custody (provenance) for documents, manuscripts, epistles from Apostles to Present Day.

    3.Original manuscripts vanished without a trace. What we today call THE BIBLE is a guess assembled from (not originals or even copies of originals)

    various scraps of this and that like so much garbage found in a landfill.

    CHRISTIANITY itself is built on a MISREPRESENTATION of inerrancy.

    Authority claims cannot be verified!

    It threatens their source authority and exposes their counterfeit claims.

    The closer you get to discovering that secret the louder they scream and emote curses, threats and doom!

    The Catholic Church simply made things up as they went along inventing one doctrine after another.

    People all through history who were intellectually honest have researched for themselves and passed through the fire of discovering the LIE.

    When the Church could do so they burned them, hanged them, tortured them and labelled them Apostate and Heretic.

    With the coming of the Protestants that authority quickly turned into warfare, witch trials, Inquisitions and Reformation.

    Pastor Russell started out as an intellectually curious pious man.

    He made the discovery that many teachings of the mainstream were based on false ideas, traditions and error.

    He exposed this and gained the confidence of other like-minded christians eager to know THE TRUTH.

    However---

    (and this is very important to realize)

    Russell's honest investigations were SIDETRACKED by his crazy obsession with DATE SETTING Adventist ideas!

    He was derailed by it!

    The Great Pyramid, date setting and personal interpretations wiped out the good in his DISCLOSURE of the LIE of doctrine purity.

    Judge Rutherford used Russell's technique of taking on the ESTABLISHMENT and exposing error to build his own empire of crazy ideas.

    Jehovah's Witnesses went from a good work of revealing the errors of christianity (based on the fragility of the bible's authority) to a bad work

    of REINFORCING that authority so that they could SUBSTITUE their own errors and present them as ABSOLUTE TRUTH.

    HIGHER CRITICISM is the number one enemy of inerrantists today.

    Jehovah's Witnesses will be found fighting on the side of the Evangelicals against it.

    Once the true nature of scripture is actually known---the AUTHORITY of such absolutists vanishes into mere opinion posing as Truth.

  • moshe
    moshe

    Terry,- good stuff for us to contemplate, not so good for a JW. Thanks.

  • Terry
    Terry

    Salesmanship techniques, entreprenuerial skills, great personal wealth, titillating subject matter, superstitious fears, iconoclast stubborn streak in American personality......

    These are the ingredients that boiled among religious people still licking their wounds after a great Civil War pitted one christian against another.

    What was simply unthinkable and unassailable was the AUTHORITY OF SCRIPTURE!

    Pastor Russell, by combining exciting elements from diverse sources, tapped in to a nerve and exploited interest.

    Every Millennium from the advent of Christianity brought Apocalyptic fever.

    Russell managed to put a saddle on it going into the 1900's.

    What he did not suspect was how easily scriptures could be "plausibly" twisted for a personal agenda.

    Russell had great writing and speaking skills, apparently. His wife, Maria, was equally skilled as a writer and "thinker".

    The one-two combination punch of TELLING AN EXCITING STORY about the imminent coming of Armageddon and assuming the role

    of MOUTHPIECE worked wonders.

    The luckiest event to befall Russell was the outbreak of World War in 1914.

    It was the ONLY practical FACT he could seize upon to save his bacon.

    The Watchtower Society has repeatedly distorted the actual facts about EXACTLY what Russell had predicted.

    The Governing Body still uses 1914 and the Maria Russell "faithful and discreet slave" elements as their foundation.

    The CURSE of the WATCHTOWER is that they are forever shackled to Russell by these two elements--distort them though they may

    with constant niggling RE-interpretations (i.e. "New Light")

    MILLIONS NOW LIVING WILL NEVER DIE......has died.

    The generation promised a view of Paradise has been laid in their coffins with the LIE marking their graves.

    Date setting has returned again and again like a ghost from Hamlet to taunt and frighten the former NEW WORLD Society.

    Whatever spin comes next the actual TRUTH about this religion is that they themselves are self-manipulators of Scripture because

    scripture is malleable.

    They believe their own ideas because they can fashion them in that clay.

    "Here, here it is---I can see it and you can too!" they exclaim from Bethel as they hold up the little clay figure they have

    manufactured.

    Fred Franz constantly refashioned old clay figures and held them up for all the brothers to behold and believe.

    It worked on him and it worked on them and it worked on all of us.

    IT WAS SEEMINGLY PLAUSIBLE.

    Why?

    Scripture had been shaped to fit an idea they had planted.

    We all saw reflected the image of our own indoctrinations!!

  • pbrow
    pbrow

    terry,

    ever since i started lurking on this site, i have looked forward to your perspective and thoughts on things. I use to try and explain to people that doubted the bible or doubted jesus existance, how could a group of story writers write about a man that has litterally touched billions of peoples lives in a postive way. It just couldnt be done, It had to be all real. After several years of this I realized (as I was telling yet another unbelieving, doubtful satan worshiper about the man that touched so many lives) that indeed muslims did have a man that was "made up"(in my mind) that touched millions and in fact billions of peoples lives.

    To your point about the bible being at the very least a copy of a copy (most likely many more copies in between) I find it amazing that we as a human family can shut out fellow humans, shut out our families, pretend were right and they are wrong and lord it over one another because we feel that the comma should be here or the comma should be there.

    I know this is rambling and i apologize for messing up your well thought out posts.

    pbrow

  • thetrueone
    thetrueone

    Religion is an agree to set of lies, what Russell did and the people that followed him was to create lies out of previously established lies

    and then commercialize them into literature, as a vain attempt of forthright religious virtuosity.

    This is where Russel gets labeled as a religious charlatan who gathered outside ideologies and combined them to

    be published into this literature. Was he a great salesman or was he a great teacher ?

    Obviously he thought he had something that would capture the publics attention.

    Maybe he was just a good con man that wore a white collar around his neck and called himself Pastor.

  • thetrueone
    thetrueone

    Another good post by Terry evaluating the WTS. in a honest biographical way, something that all people who are

    considering leaving this religion should take in .

  • moshe
    moshe

    btt

  • wobble
    wobble

    Good post again Terry keep it up !

    I would love to get a JW who takes "The Bible is the Word of god" stance, to explain how the Church of 382 C.E was "inspired" to collect the books they did at the Synod called by Pope Damasus when, as Apostates, these people, the Pope and Jerome etc, should have been "shunned" by the Holy Spirit.

    Now, if the H.S was not involved in deciding the bible canon, why put any trust in it ?

    I put this to two Dubs who promptly changed the subject after mumbling something about "Jehovah seeing that it was done properly".

    I was not adept in those days at following Black Sheep's advice and making them stick to the question, because I would have followed up with:

    "So if God moved them then to choose the correct books, did he so move them 60 or so years earlier to choose the right doctrine when they chose the Trinity ?

  • Terry
    Terry

    "So if God moved them then to choose the correct books, did he so move them 60 or so years earlier to choose the right doctrine when they chose the Trinity ?

    This is a juggling act by the Watchtower Society which they have developed into a polished skillset: cherry-picking quotes and dodging

    the full implication of the person speaking the quote in context.

    The Early Church Fathers either WERE divenly guided or they were corrupt and misled as "the man of lawlessness" who crept in and diluted

    "pure" worhip.

    The Watchtower choses to have it BOTH WAYS.

    Pure worship is a crock as an institutional imprimatur.

    Judaism before christianity was beset with competing views and split streams of factional discord.

    Christianity was born in conflict as well. The first three hundred years were spent with embattled arguments (often violent) for and against

    rather creative views of who and what Jesus was/meant.

    That controversy was briefly stifled by Roman authority only to break out again and again like wildfire.

    We have weedlike denominational differences everywhere today because these controversies have NEVER BEEN SETTLED.

    They, in fact, CAN NOT BE SETTLED.

    The bible is too susceptible to INTERPRETATION and believer's are too vulnerable to misguided leadership.

    Jehovah's Witnesses are not a modern phenomenon. They are only an adaptable one.

    Like every other facet of christian legacy they skillfully twist scriptures pretzel fashion into whatever shape suits their momentary

    doctrine.

    Like phases of the moon the bible throws light and shadow on imaginative crackpot scenarios dreamed up again and again to

    exploit naive and trusting believers.

  • rocketman
    rocketman

    Interesting post Terry, as usual. The religion was painted into a date-setting corner ever since its inception and has not been able to get out of that corner since. 1914 doctrine has become a noose by means of which the religion has hung itself.

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