Almost twenty years ago Jim Penton mentioned that the WTS was losing its brightest and best members in far greater percentages than its not-so-brightest and not-so-best . This malaise was jump-started with Rutherford's attack on "higher education" and in recent years has backfired on the society. The WTS has promoted low-tech education and employment in a high-tech world and is reaping the very whirlwind it has created.
Most recently we've seen another whirlwind the society has created: it is hunting down and executing its best examples of caring, concerned Christians: people like Joe and Barbara Anderson, Bill Bowen and a whole host of unnamed others who are trying to be exemplary Christians, even if it means standing up to the unchristian policies and doctrines of the Watchtower.
Successful Watchtower recruits are unlikely to be educated people simply because in the pre-indoctrination process, educated people are likely to spot the doctrinal inconsistencies, the fallacious reasoning and the double-standards that are a part of Watchtower life. And those in that category who do get recruited are not likely to last long for the very same reasons I've just stated.
When the creme-de-la-creme Watchtower members are forced out and they are leaders in the religion, replacements must be found for the hierarchical Watchtower structure to be maintained. Therefore, their replacements are less-qualified, less-spiritual and less aware. The leaders of the Watchtower have proven themselves to be mean-spirited, self-glorifying uneducated and uncaring humans. As such, they bring into their circles of influence people like themselves and punish or at the very least, don't reward people not like themselves. The qualities of goodness, charity, kindness and a thirst for genuine truth and a life of real meaning are not only not-rewarded by Watchtower leaders, but those possessing those qualities are discouraged and even punished.
Thus, the Watchtower has created it's own self-destruct cycle:
Bitter, mean, and bullying men of lesser intelligence and education are replacing men of higher character. Dumbed-down men are replacing thinking, educated men. The people who are not leaving are the very ones who are causing the Watchtower the most trouble. Many of them are the dregs of human society: dysfunctional, one-dimensional, power hungry, self-consumed and vindictive.
But that makes them exactly like their Watchtower leaders, doesn't it?
This cycle doesn't need to go through many more iterations before Jehovah's Witnesses will become exclusively a Cult of brain dead moronic robots filled with rage and self-loathing.
Perhaps it has already reached that point. After nearly 70 years of entrenched Rutherfordism, the Watchtower Society has fully reaped what it has sown. That end result is a collection of sub-par, sub-standard-, sub-thinking, sub-caring humans who despise everyone but themselves and who have deluded themselves into thinking that THEY are the real creme-de-la-creme out of all humans on the planet whose destiny is to seed a cleansed planet with clones of themselves.
Can anyone think of a situation sadder than that?
Farkel
Edited by - Farkel on 5 August 2002 19:56:14