WT Dept of Mind Control???? (page 2)

When I was a kid dragged into the JW religion I got my hands on William J. Whalen's book "Armageddon Around the Corner" (published in 1962). I was only nine. Many of the things Mr. Whalen stated in that book were dead-on accurate, and even at that young age I knew something was wrong with the cult/religion. One comment he did make in the book really intrigued me (and I'm paraphrasing a bit here...), he said something to the effect that "The Watchtower Bible and Tract Society cannot go on forever making predictions about the 'end of the world' and continue to have converts when nothing happens. Perhaps the leaders of the organization will eventually have a doctrinal change ("New Light" to us) and postulate that Armageddon has already come, albeit invisibly... At that time the Jehovah's Witnesses will become yet another Christian denomination....."

I watched for that to happen for decades. Never has. Someone here (I think it was here?) mentioned that the Shakers (who didn't believe in sexual intercourse - rather like the 'abstinence' preaching that supposedly got ascetic Christians martyred in 2nd or 3rd century Rome) are still around despite their completely unworkable belief system. I predict...~~~~~~ .... that the WTBTS will eventually suffer gradual attrition of membership (yeahh, love the double meaning) and will fade into a cranky small group, stuck in upstate New York (pretty area, not a bad place to be stuck...) chewing their gums and grumbling still about Jehovah's judgement.

BTW, if any of you are interested, I've recently checked out two books which you might find of interest: "Jehovah's Witnesses - Portrait of a contemporary religious movement" by Andrew Holden, published in 2002 by Routledge. An excellent book; a sociologist's study of contemporary Jehovah's Witnesses in England...

Here's a quote from page 140, chapter titled "Honour thy father and thy mother", under subheading "The ones who say 'no'"... "Continued membership of a totalitarian organization is never unconditional...Communities like this are dependent on those born into them for long-term survival. The movement owes much of its success to horizontal and vertical recruitment. Mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces, cousins, in-laws, grandparents and grandchildren are all prime candidates for baptism - a rite of passage that boosts the Society's membership. Were it not for the significance of kinship, the Witnesses would not have had nearly the amount of success they have either in recruitment or in sustaining high levels of commitment... In a world in which people are allegedly free to choose from a whole range of options, children's acquiescence matters to the Society as never before. Most of the available research suggests that the Witnesses are successful in retaining their children. For example, Beckford (1975a; "The Trumpet of Prophecy: A Sociological Study of Jehovah's Witnesses") discovered that around two-thirds of second-generation Witnesses over sixteen remained active members. This was also borne out in the General Social Survey of 1994 that showed a retention rate of around 70 per cent....At the macro level, the Governing Body has a responsibility to ensure that parents in every congregation are supported to the nth degree, not only because it shares the same spiritual objectives but also because it must consider long-term survival. So long as children toe the line, all will be well, but those who break away from the movement do damage to its membership statistics. Children are the movement's bread and butter...."

Brrrr! A chill went down my spine... I thought that was very telling....

The second book is "Pagan Christianity?" by Frank Viola and George Barna. First published in 2002; I'm reading the 2008 republishing. It doesn't directly address the Jehovah's Witnesses' belief system, but it is a deliciously accurate dissection of the "Pagan" practices that were adopted by the early Christians and are still being practiced today - yes, even by the Jehovah's Witnesses!! (Unfortunately it doesn't address the 'pagan' origins of Christian beliefs, but that's another book - or five...)

Here's a quote from that book, Chapter 3, "The order of worship; Sunday mornings set in concrete"... (Under the subheading "Methodist and Frontier-Revival Contributions"):

(starting on page 64) "...The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought a new challenge to American Protestantism. It was the pressure to conform to the ever-popular American Frontier-Revivalist services....Even today, the changes they injected into the bloodstream of American Protestantism are evident."

"First, the Frontier-Revivalists changed the goal of preaching. They preached exclusively with one aim: to convert lost souls. To the mind of a Frontier-Revivalist, nothing beyond salvation was involved in God's plan. Salvation was God's supreme purpose for church and all of life... ( starting on page 67) Perhaps the most lasting element that Finney unwittingly contributed to contemporary Christianity was pragmatism... He taught that the sole purpose of preaching was to win converts. Any devices that helped accomplish that goal were acceptable. Under Finney, eighteenth-century revivalism was turned into a science and brought into mainstream churches... The philosophy of pragmatism opens the door for human manipulation and a complete reliance upon oneself rather than upon God. Note that there is a monumental difference between well-motivated humans working for God in their own...versus God working through humans...Finney believed that the revivalist methods that worked in his camp meetings could be imported into the Protestant churches... This notion was popularized and put into the Protestant mind-set via his 1835 book "Lectures on Revival". To the contemporary Protestant mind, doctrine must be vigorously checked with Scripture before it is accepted..."

Ah, yes, that sounds familiar....

Anyway, I highly recommed these two books! Ziddina

WT Dept of Mind Control????

Lady Lee

ziddina

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