Former Mormon has a question about the JW cult

by FormerMormon 8 Replies latest jw friends

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  FormerMormon

  I have been reading a bit on other cults. Jim Jones, David Koresh, Warren Jeffs, Sun Myung Moon etc. I see a lot of similarity between these cult leaders and my LDS cult leaders (Joseph's Myth, Bring' em Young, etc) All the aforementioned cult leaders had sexual issues. They were known to take young impressionable parishoners, fleece wives from the flock, etc. Can you tell me if something like this happened in the JW cult history? If so, with which leaders? Stories? I don't think all cults have to evolve similarly. My cult had authoritative, centralized "prophets". This made them prone sexual abuse. Your leadership may have been too distributed for excesses/abuses(????)

  PS. I have something in my board inbox... cant seem to pull it up. Nuttin' happens. Ideas?

  TIA,

  FormerMormon
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  DanTheMan

  Charles Taze Russell and Joe Rutherford were the first two leaders of the Watchtower Society (though there's controversy surrounding the way Rutherford got control of the Society and there are non-JW splinter groups in existence today that claim to be the true followers of Russell). Both men are pretty typical of the highly charismatic yet deeply dysfunctional personalities that you speak of. For instance, I believe that Russell never consummated his marriage with his wife. And Rutherford was a severe alchoholic by all accounts. If you search Leolaia's topic history, she started a thread recently that was actually an old thread that got corrupted and she put it all back together, but the thread was one of the most viewed threads in the history of this forum, and it concerned some extramarital happenings with Rutherford.
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  FormerMormon
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  freetosee

  http://www.jehovahs-witness.com/11/154191/1.ashx
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  jgnat

  Here's an extensive and rather starry-eyed biography on Russell, and an excerpt.

  http://www.biblestudents.net/history/soc.htm

  Russell having spent the years 1877 and 1878 largely in preaching afield, zealously going from city to city, and also by this time having closed out most of his previously successful business interests, which had netted him more than a quarter of a million dollars, it became necessary, in 1879, for him permanently to locate in Pittsburgh. (A Great Battle in the Ecclesiastical Heavens, J.F. Rutherford, pp. 16-18). Furthermore, in that year he was married to Maria Frances Ackley, who had become a co-laborer and a contributor of articles to the Watch Tower magazine. They came to have no children.
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  Nosferatu

  - "They came to have no children."
  
  If Russell could have made love to his pet religion, he would have.
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  Layla33

  I have always been curious about the Mormon religion. Not curious as in wanting to participate, but curious in all the different ideologies surrounding it. I have read some things, but in a lot of ways they (religions like Mormons/JWs/etc) to focus around the same cultish ideas.

  I really believe they are interconnected somehow.
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  TD

  One aspect where Russell & Rutherford were very similar to Smith & Young is this:

  A charismatic young man with a spiritual bent, but no formal religious training (e.g. He can't even read the Greek NT) starts a religious movement. The movement flourishes spiritually during his lifetime but after his death, control is seized by a ruthless CEO type.

  Now begins an era of expansion. Land, property and raw numbers of new converts take a front seat, while actually worshipping God and doing good to your fellow man get shifted to the back.
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  FormerMormon

  While the worst of cultic aspects have decreased, many are still there. Mormonism isn't as bad as Scientology or Jim Jones.

  Their roots all meet in hell together