The
imperative for the individual and collective GB member is to honour their appointment
as custodians of the sacred Watchtower cash-cow.
Everything
else is subordinated to this end. The pride they hold in this role has only
been revealed by their antics on the JW TV; a bunch of ignorant pedagogues, a
living example of the proverbial blind guides. (I used to think they must be
decent people before they became visible, yet I knew Knorr was a grumpy old bugger)
When
it comes to money matters (and money matters most of all), the JW doctrine is
ever flexible to meet the needs of the moment. When doctrine become
implausible... which it routinely does, it can always be rationalised by
tweaking Bible texts to give the famous Watchtower spin by presenting something
as “God’s will”...and the sheep, with brains on hold, can only follow. Just
think... if the sheep are told something by the GB that it is God’s will; that
cements it for the follower, he or she is not permitted to say or think “Oh no
it’s not!” Or question “How do you know that?”
As
a business venture the imperative is to be rich enough to do what you want and the
management need money to keep their message prominent to bring in new punters.
Using a publicly accessible TV station is surely the commercial rationale of
the moment for an ex publishing company with a cult agenda.
For
thirty or more years they have been getting a fairly consistent number of new
publishers, averaging something around 175,000 per year. As the membership
steadily increases notwithstanding the disfellowshipped, the faders and the
deaths, the effort vs results indicates a significant drop in efficiency. It now
takes something like 13,000 hours of witnessing to make one new JW. In other
words the message is no longer all that popular and in future it will continue
to decline in appeal as the internet arbitrates religious questions with its democratic
freedom of information.
Money
and membership numbers are the only true Watchtower values which denote operational
success. Through years of selling pointless literature printed by virtual slave
labour; the WTBTS amassed great wealth and great wealth earns great interest.
At the same time there exists is a lot of momentum of loyalty through family
membership built up over the century and whilst there are fewer converts in the
educated and richer West, there are enough old JW families to perpetuate the religion
through their offspring alone. So this is the trend: the org is growing through breeding and not by preaching. This
makes me think that the same could eventually happen in the third world where
expansion does exist for now, that a saturation point will come and the JW org
will nevertheless be in control of even greater wealth and large numbers of dim-witted
believers loyally breeding new child members... just like they did in the
Catholic Church.
There
is however a dramatic difference; the Roman Catholic Church has a magisterial
hold over its vast but diminishing membership based on the myth of an apostolic
inheritance from Jesus’ appointment of Peter. The Watchtower religion makes its
claim by contrast as a doomsday cult, not of this world, which can never claim
the ‘earthly’ authority as does its envied and supremely successful rival.
The
authority of a doomsday cult arises from the confidence in the accuracy of its
predictions...
