Very well written and a nice little summary of the Society's date-based predictions. I always enjoy reading your considered posts Passwordprotected.
Excellent food-for-thought but cannot agree entirely with the conclusion. The organisation has had periods where there was no date in view. You allude to that in your article. After 1925 there was a big gap until 1975 was touted. So what kept the organisation growing between 1926 to the late 1960s?? It was the world events, the depression, famines, another even bigger world war, increasing immorality, etc. Its the same today. We have a global economic recession that could get much worse, there are always wars and rumours of wars going on and increasing fear of nuke weapons, increasing terrorism and sophistication of terrorists, lawlessness and worsening morals, horrible diseases, famine, etc. What keeps the growth continuing is their creed that all these things form a general 'composite sign' since 1914 that will culminate in the Great Tribulation. In fact, most non-JW Christians would also say that we are in the 'season' Jesus spoke about before his return.
All Christians hold to the hope of Christ's return and they are taught in scripture to keep in expectation of this. This scriptural Christian worldview is, however, abused by the likes of the Watchtower organisation to keep control and money flowing in. They have warped the legitimate Christian hope of Christ's return into speculative wishful thinking and cultic mind control.
Of course, they have always used fear, to varying degrees, to keep people afraid of leaving. I agree we are seeing a slight escalation in the directness of the fear language used in the new internal study editions of the Watchtower. Whether this turns into something more extreme remains to be seen but if it does, that won't happen for quite some time I think.
Otherwise, I agree entirely with Lost-in-Translations very insightful comments. We are undoubtedly seeing a more liberal influence at the top level in terms of the JW's works programme (meetings, FS, etc). The agenda indeed appears to be make it easier to be a JW but keep beating the 'end is near' and 'you must stay with us for salvation' drums as loud as ever.
However, I do believe that if the growth begins to severely drop off after 2014, which I expect it will, the Society will begin to hint at 2034 more (120 from 1914; parallel with the "last days" of Noah's system), possibly culiminating in another fairly firm prediction in the late 2020's. But any increasing emphasis on a possible future date like 2034 won't be noticed until a clear trend emerges of a long-term drop in publisher numbers, which trend I expect to start between 2015-2020.
