My best friend is still a JW and our conversations now and then turn to his view of what the society really is. I find it most interesting.
Apparently, being an intelligent chap he is aware of the errors of the past. He no longer makes excuses for them. However, he doesn't believe there is anything being offered elsewhere that is BETTER!
I tried to point out to him the fundamental error of his reasoning. He is simply "assuming" that he must go somewhere else! It is like being a kind of drug addict who knows his supplier is cheating him--but, he cannot do without the drug and is afraid of starting all over with a new source of the "high". It does not ever penetrate his head that all he needs do is KICK THE HABIT altogether!
He says "only Jehovah's Witnesses" preach door to door.
I point out that it is WHAT they preach that is so important: i.e. utter nonsense!
Just taking magazines and books full of fanciful fluff is not doing anybody any favors. But, it is his ritual and he needs the ritual.
I asked him if he ever stopped and thought about the following:
What if you were able to enter a kind of Twilight Zone time warp and have a conversation with a Jehovah's Witness of fifty years ago? Do you think you would be members of the same religion? How about a 100 years ago? Do you think JW's believe the same things, preach the same things, have the same views they once did? NO, NO, NO! You would each disagree on all the fundamentals and would each regard the other as wrong, wrong, wrong. It is a huge myth of a chosen people walking in righteousness that is so addictive. But, the righteousness is just a kind of shadow puppetry; a "make-work" project to keep you busy and empty of genuine content.
What JW's actually have loyalty to is THE SOCIETY and not god or the bible.
Catholics have the Pope or the Church and JW's have the WT bible and tract society.
Those men have been wrong (or inconsistent) over and over again while proclaiming they have the Truth directly throught the spirit of God. If it were truth it would not change; but, change it has. Why did it change? Because it crashed head on into a meatgrinder of real world tests.
You can live in a fantasy or you can live in the real world; but, the two aren't compatible.
The real world trumps the fantasy each and every time. The society has had to back down over and over on real world dissonances and change their doctrine while simply labeling it as "new and improved" or NEW LIGHT.
Believe me, it is not the doctrine JW's crave or even THE TRUTH, it is the mythos; the subconscious patterns of activity that seemingly connect them to a constant and unchanging babysitter who'll keep them safe from the monsters. They fear becoming adults---non-dependant adults. Becoming an adult means facing your fears and actually doing something about them in the real world. Adults earn their way. JW's want to sneak through the future on patronage.
My friend, I believe, "knows" he is convincing himself that he is in the right place. He is like an ancient mariner gazing at a map of a "flat" world. He may secretly think the world just ...might..be round...but, why sail into the void alone? Why risk going over the edge? After all, there they be dragons!
Terry
