Have we traded one "end times" for another?

by undercover 7 Replies latest jw friends

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  undercover

  Having been a member on this board for a while now, I've noticed that from time to time news leaks about some new damning information that could/maybe/hopfully/luckily will bring down the Watchtower Society.

  Is is possible since we were conditioned by the WTS to expect the "end" that our mind set is that we must expect something big to happen in our lifetime? Instead of the end of the wicked world are we now expecting to see the end of the wicked Society?

  I know that not everyone expects the same thing as far as the future of the WTS, but I see quite a few that seem to think that its end is imminent. Even I, when I see a thread about some big news that's going to hit, get a bit excited that maybe this is it...then I have to make myself calm down and realize that we've been through it before and that probably nothing is going to be scandalous enough to destroy an entire religion.

  Do we expect our life to be like a movie? Interesting characters, interesting plot, maybe a twist or two that puts our hero in peril, but by the end he is vindicated, gets the girl and vanquishes his enemies...roll credits. Have we not accepted that maybe life doesn't work that way? Maybe we're an extra on the set of life and our character meets his demise before the enemy does and we're not even mentioned in the credits...
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  nvrgnbk

  I get what you're saying undercover and enjoyed your well-thought-out post.

  But I just chalk it up to good old hopefulness and enthusiasm.

  I think Thoreau said it best:

  Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.
  Henry David Thoreau

  We're just looking for some good news about a painful part of our mutually-shared past.

  IMHO.
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  jaguarbass

  To me it's pretty obvious that life and the world is nothing like the witnoids led us to believe.

  Since I left in 83, I have always considerd the witnoids to be doomsday prophets. Repent for the end is near. They always see the dark and bad in life never the good.
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  Mum

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realized_eschatology

  With apologies for not reading your entire post before I looked up the link above, there is a trade-off. Therefore:

  As a realized eschatologist, yes.

  The end.

  SandraC
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  RunningMan

  I think a lot of people have so much dislike for the organization that they hold out hope for its disintegration.

  In reality, that's not going to happen. I mean, look at some of the dumb-ass religions out there that just keep plugging along - Mormons, Scientologists, Christian Scientists, Seventh Day Adventists, and the one-man evangelical shows. Being wrong or corrupt just doesn't matter.

  I too, would like to see the tower crumble, but the best we can honestly hope for is malaise - an aging, apathetic group with recruitment problems. We can pick at them and make their problems worse, but we won't bring them down.

  The true end game for all of us is to reach a point where JWs are irrelevant, just like they are to the rest of the world. Unfortunately, the scars run so deep that it may take a generation.
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  neverendingjourney

  I don’t believe I’ll live to see the “death” of the Jehovah’s Witness religion, and I’m still in my 20s. I believe that the Watchtower will spend the next 10 years or so increasing at its current rate of 1 or 2 percent per year. They will continue to make inroads in the developing world and immigrant populations in the developed nations of the West. In the meantime, they will continue to lose longtime members at an astonishing rate. The free flow of information will continue to expose the Watchtower and lead a lot of JWs that are on the fence to get out of it completely. They will eventually tap out in the developing world and have nowhere new to go for growth. This is when their decline will begin. They won’t have new members coming in to replace the members that they will continue to loose annually. They will then have to decide if they wish to continue on as always or make the decision to become mainstream. If they decide against going mainstream, they will continue to loose members until they become a shadow of what they once were.
  
  There is a lot there preventing the JW religion from imploding. Most members have invested too much of their lives in the religion to even consider that they may be wrong. The JWs have been so good at mind control that most members would not care about any potential scandal that emerges. Someone might record a governing body meeting where every last one of them say that they don’t believe the JWs have the truth and JWs would attribute that tape to Jehovah and thank him for cleansing his organization. People that expect and Enron-like implosion are likely fooling themselves. I am happy for every piece of damning information that is revealed about them, however. The more damaging information that is made available about them, the easier it becomes for fence-sitting JWs to make their exit from the religion. That will only help to accelerate the religion’s ultimate demise.
  
  But another reason why I don’t constantly look forward to the “death of the Watchtower” is because I don’t think that will be very significant in the global scheme of things. The JWs represent one tenth of a percent of the human population. That’s nothing. There are many other mind-control religions out there that would take the place of the JWs once they have disappeared from the face of the Earth. The real problem is human credulity and ignorance. The JW religion is only a symptom of these underlying problems. As long as there is a significant amount of the human population that is credulous and ignorant, there will be mind-control religions there to suck them in.
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  Mum

  "Why, the end is just the beginning again," said Mary Sue's teacher in the film Pleasantville, which I consider an allegory for leaving the JW's.

  No doubt many thought Joe Stalin's days were numbered. They were, but he died peacefully in his sleep if I recall correctly, not in the manner he meted out.

  Regards,

  SandraC
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  WTWizard

  I don't really think so. The Watchtower Society tells people that they have to belong to that organization when the end comes (ever so close), or they are going to die. We are claiming that if the Tower does come down, anyone left in is going to be set free and those outside will stop being harassed by the Witlesses. No action is needed to prepare for the destruction of the Puketower Society, though many will sure feel the relief that many Iraqis felt when Saddam Hussein went down.

  Additionally, I have no way of knowing when (if) the Tower is coming down. That depends on how aggressive the apostates are in exposing it, what they do to fight back, and what side the people take. The day could well come when the Tower simply doesn't have the resources to carry on or get shut down by the governments. Lawsuits, criminal counts, and embarrassment will weaken them and make their demise more imminent. However, if they kiss a** and win those cases, they could well hang on longer to continue initiating force, threats of force, and fraud on people a while longer.

  As for destruction of people, I think the demise of the Watchtower Society will only mean a few lives lost. The ones who run the show might develop health problems due to stress of losing their livelihoods. Most of those are so old that they are already going to die shortly anyway. A few others will die from suicide or due to having no other place to go; in all reality, those people's lives are so stagnant that they might as well already be dead. In fact, more people's lives will be saved, both from ending and from stagnating, if the Tower comes down. And many children will be prevented from being molested or otherwise abused when the Tower comes down, whether the members are prepared or not. I don't really think the demise of the Watchtower Society is going to really create significant disruption of people's lives beyond what its existence already does.