Thanks for the greetings.
Yes, I saw one of the videos mentioned by donuthole.
Besides almost making me want to rejoin the Watchtower just to climb back up the ranks to become an elder and conduct a witch hunt to find each and every one of those JWs to disfellowship them all (just joking, but that is what would have happened in my day--and did!), it made me think of one thing only.
A "generation" is not merely a set number of years or the lives of people that criss-cross over a specific length of time. No, a generation is also the world and unique culture made by the people who lived during an era. The generation of the "teenybopper sock hop," for example (the period my parents enjoyed during their high school years) has come and gone. It was far briefer than the lifespan of any human. It came and left during the 1950s, some historians writing it in for just a couple of years before and after 1957, no longer.
And the generation of the Live Forever book is gone too, the generation of JWs I belonged to.
Among our number were old timers who were around from the days of Russell and Rutherford. Some of them graces the cover of a Watchtower that publicized how these made up the face of the 1914 generation that would never fade away. They died, as did all that generation who had contact with the original Witnesses.
Gone are the elders I once served under. I've recently checked and all but one (who is actually now serving as a lawyer for the Watchtower) have died. That entire generation of Jehovah's Witnesses has either passed away or has left or, as I have recently just heard from another, is hanging on only because of family ties but not believing a thing.
That video made me realize that I experienced something unique that is dead now.
Witnesses dancing to worldly music in a Kingdom Hall? This is a new generation that knows noting of the one before it. This would never have been allowed before in my day, nor would we have even let it cross our minds. While I don't buy into that religion one bit anymore, at least we had respect for the Kingdom Hall. Considering doing something like this inside of it would be a sacriledge, lacking all respect for God and holy things.
This is proof that the Witnesses never really understood the "generation" teaching to begin with. Several generations have come and gone. The religion I belonged to was not the one C.T. Russell preached. It was not practiced by Judge Rutherford. And it certainly is not the one of these people jumping up and down to what we would have called "music of Satan's world" in a "holy place." the Kingdom Hall--you folks are something completely different. I was part of a generation that has come and gone, one that had a lot more respect and didn't need "simplified" Watchtowers. We may have been members of a false religion, but we were digging into big, thick books, some numbering 500, 700, even over 1000 pages long. I don't know any of this new JW generation at all, and frankly I don't care to.
Funny, after viewing that video I am not laughing anymore. I'm just shaking my head.
Even if I wanted to go back to it, the religion I left in 1995 passed away a generation ago.