Keep this one fact in mind about Jehovah's Witnesses. They exist in three dumb categories throughout their history.
1. Honest bible students attracted to the gimmicks of Russell (charts, graphs, chronologies, pyramid inches, etc.) expected the End of the World to come and they wanted to know more.
2.Contrarian hard heads under Rutherford wanted to prove everybody was wrong about everything except themselves. If Christendom said "white" they would insist it was "black." Holier than thou was the name of the game. Proving you were right and righteous consisted of provoking demonstrations by refusing blood, going to prison, Supreme court battles and thumbing their noses at holidays.
3.Professional ministers under Knorr performed an education work consisting of explaining the deepest details of scripture by persuasion and indoctrination door to door. They were clean cut, honest, hard working and able to win every religious argument by flipping the onion skin pages of their green bibles.
THEN the1975 debacle turned their squeeky clean image into a nightmare of cult dupes. Everybody was stunned quietly into silence.
The Jehovah's Witnesses had tried to master the art of explaining their theology by going door to door predicting Armageddon using math, chronology and the bible. It had backfired like an antique shotgun in their faces. The whole world made fun of them. They were humiliated and embarrassed and wrong publicly!
Being consumed by details was seen to be worse than snake-handling.
Trumpeting doom by quoting dates, prophetic rules (a day for a year) flipping bible passages and linking causes to effects had produced nitroglycerin. At the center of the explosion was the Governing Body and their claim to Authority over True theology.
The governing body regrouped. Splits, cracks and rebellions were fomenting underground....even at Bethel!
Why?
Everybody had seen black and white evidence in vivid color that the Society was WRONG! Surely there must be a good reason.
Here is where it gets really interesting.
The brothers and sisters who really dug in to investigate the details of theology that led to the debacle over 1975 eventually found themselves confronting the facts. The facts proved they were in a crackpot end of the world cult run by people with no authority whatsoever from Jehovah.
Fred Franz and his nephew were at opposite ends of that spectrum. Fred Franz could/would never admit to being wrong. If he did, that ended the illusion of a faithful and discreet slave serving up spiritual food (truth) at the proper time. Fred Franz stonewalled it. The rest of the "slave" had to stonewall it too. Or else? The END of the crackpot FDS!
Ray Franz, at the other end of the intellectual honesty spectrum, dug in and investigated everything from scratch. He smelled the dead rat. He uncovered the lie. Many others started using their own brains to dig deep for the very first time. The man behind the curtain wasn't the Great and Powerful Oz. It was simply delusional men pulling dates out of their asses.
There was a schism. The winners were the hardliners who performed a slow-motion INQUISITION to shut apostates up and kick them out as fast as they could. (Apostates are people who saw the failure of the FDS and investigated.)
The crackdown rivalled what happened when Stalin got rid of Lenin and the purge got deadlier and deadlier.Ray Franz left Bethel and others soon followed. The only people who remained kept their doubts to themselves and their mouths shut.
Brothers and sisters started living double lives. They got their best acting faces on at the Kingdom Hall and cut loose privately.
Three generations (from 1975 onward) of JW kids were reared by despot parents (eager to prove to snoopy elders how loyal they were) who drove them nuts and pushed them (unwittingly) out of the "Truth" by squeezing the fun out of life.
Other parents, who were in silent despair, faded or acted out along with their kids. Thus, in a latter day Seppuku--tens of thousands of once faithful JW's committed ritual suicide by getting themselves disfellowshipped.
Today, at your local Kingdom Hall you don't have curious human beings with rational functioning brains. You have trained monkeys who put on a show of acting as though they are learning. It is just a performance, I assure you.
The consequence of all the above?
Few Jehovah's Witnesses grasp the details of their own theology. So, how can they EXPLAIN IT? They can't.
If you ask a dumb JW a question they will promise to return with the answer. They don't.
It is a hollow pretense.
Door to door "ministry" is reaching for low-hanging fruit. (Idiot householders.)
NOT ONE CIVILIAN IN 100 CAN TELL YOU WHAT JEHOVAH'S WITNESSES BELIEVE--they can only tell you what they DON'T.
The preaching work is nothing more and nothing less than a dumb show of magazine and book selling.
That's how it began under Russell and that is how it is today.
Education work?
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