by wwjdnwt 58 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
maksutov - "I think they both believe it (consciously) and also know it is not true (suppressed) - just like I did when I was a member. I suspect they can bear a lot more cognitive dissonance than average because they have more to lose from admitting to being wrong."
Ditto.
I'd even take the second bit a step further, and suggest that (like many politicians) they can compartmentalize so well that they don't actually experience cognitive dissonance at all.
While I strongly agree with others that it is definitely possible that some members of the Governing Body might be purposefully fooling others and even themselves, I think the truth may be a little more frightening.
The Jehovah’s Witness movement is more than a cult. It’s what is known as an ideological movement. Imperial Japan was a state-religion ideology that fueled that country into the devastation that was World War II. ISIS (ISIL) is such an ideological movement too. Nazism is probably the prime and darkest example.
In ideologies while it is often possible that leaders know they are entrapping others, horrifyingly enough the leaders are the biggest drinkers of the Kool-Aid, so to speak.
This means that it is very, very possible that each and every one of the Governing Body truly believes what they teach and that they are the very mouthpiece of Jehovah, directed by Jesus and the holy spirit in all the do.
This is a far more dangerous situation than someone who is fooling others. The People’s Temple under the direction of the infamous Jim Jones is one of the most familiar examples of a leader who took a cult and drowned into his own ideology. To demonstrate the extent that leaders can very much believe the garbage they teach, Jim Jones not only had his followers drink the cyanide-laced fruit drink, he killed himself as well.
When ideologies began to spin out of control—and they all do, because they are not only destructive to the world around them, they are self-destructive—more than a few members begin to act like they did in Jonestown before that mass murder/suicide at the Guyana commune in 1978. People in the commune could see a bad ending on the horizon coming quickly, and they wanted out. This happened before the fall of Nazism, and it even occurred before the two atom bombs were dropped on Imperial Japan.
This is more than a shared coincidence. It’s an earmark of an ideological movement that is spinning out of control because the leadership believes its own twisted tale. This pre-self-destruct warning that is causing people to wake up and want out rarely hits when con-artists are at the helm. If the leadership is just out to take some type of advantage of the followers, the leadership will exit at the first sign of trouble. It is clear that they are not doing that, and that is a sign they are lost in their own web.
The sad thing about such ideologies is that because members believe in them so much, there is no exit strategy for anyone. The organization doesn’t supply one because that would be admitting that it wasn’t “the truth.” And members don’t consider one at any time because that would be a sign that one is doubting—a forbidden train of thought in an ideology.
So members begin to just stay, give up and go through the motions. Ideologies rob people of the ability to know what to do at this point. They are prepared for Armageddon, yes, but they are not prepared for the religion to self-destruct and/or be proven false.
It will not be a pretty sight when the end does come. People associated with ideologies often kill their families and themselves because they cannot cope with the fact that they sheltered themselves from reality and real truths. Others attempt to kill others and cause destruction. Some refuse to accept any truth but the ideology and continue to “drink the Kool-Aid” long after the original group dissolves, even going so far as to attempt to distribute it to others believing they have now been chosen to carry on “the work.”
I’ve been trying to figure that out myself and am no closer to the answer. On one hand, when I see how scholars are quoted out of context, it is outright deception. When I see some of the GB in videos, they seem to really believe it, even when they are spouting nonsense. Are the GB really the ones in charge or are they just figureheads? How deep does the rabbit hole go?
CalebInFlorida's post is chilling and very likely true.
What happens if the Australian Royal Commission's findings & conclusions spiral out of the control of WT spin-meisters?
Welcome to the forum wwjdnwt
You have freeness of speech here, without recriminations - unlike the K.H.'s.
The G.B. cannot be blind to the fact that their recent programs and "new lights" were created to give them total control over J.W.'s thinking, K.H.'s, and finances.
As such, they know exactly what the Org's "master plan" is, and it's not to practice Christ's teachings.
I would say it boils down to doing evil in the name of God. But its actually doing evil because of organizational pride. Organizational pride is at the root of the child abuse mess they're now mired in.
100% Agreed. Exactly the same type of thing that Jesus spoke out against again and again.
Like Londo111 looking at the DELIBERATE misquoting that goes on (the main thing that warned me about them was the misquotes in the SYBITT booklet ) I tend to see the deception as deliberate .
However because I have never been part of the org maybe I see all this too much in black and white .
Jan
@ calebinFloroda:...your comparisons to imperial Japan, isis and nazism would ring truer if it were not for the governing body/fds conjuring ' new light ' which nullifies their previous ideologically held belief systems. Your comparitive examples strictly held or hold to their ideologies to the death.
Best wishes.
