Hi Gumby,
:: During college I inadvertantly discovered that the Watchtower was scholastically dishonest,
: How did this happen?
In my sophomore year at MIT, I took an anthropology course and had to do a term paper on something related to anthropology. I decided to write about how the spread of language from a central source in the Middle East was strong evidence for Noah's Flood. I used WTS publications to get as many source references as I could, since this had long been a mainstay of Society arguments for the veracity of the Bible's Flood account. MIT has an extensive library and so I thought this would be easy. When I started looking up the references, however, I quickly found that hardly any of them supported, much less proved, what the Society claimed. In other words, the Society was quoting out of context and otherwise often misrepresenting the source references. I realize that I had to abandon my topic. So I figured that I'd delve into a much more solid topic and try to find some anthropological evidence to disprove evolution, again using the Society's many source references such as in the 1967 Evolution book. But I found the same pattern of misrepresentation of sources. This just blew me away.
For example, the Society had often touted the famous frozen Siberian mammoth, the Berezovka mammoth found in 1901 and described in a 1903 Smithsonian Institution annual, as proof of the Flood. According to the Society, this mammoth was "quick-frozen" and all of its internal organs and meat were so perfectly preserved that not only dogs, but humans could eat the meat. So I found the old Smithsonian report and read all of it. It was quite long, and it described quite the opposite of what the Society claimed. Mr. Herz, who went on the 8-month expedition that excavated the mammoth and brought it back to scientists in western Russia, described the stench of rotting meat as absolutely pervasive, even to the extent that it permeated the frozen dirt in which the mammoth was buried. The internal organs were quite rotten, as was much of the inner meat. The only meat that was well preserved was that on the very outside of the beast. This evidence completely disproved the Society's claims, but was fully consistent with the prevailing opinion of scientists that the mammoth died a quite natural death after falling into a cold tundra bog. After that I looked at anything the Society printed about evolution, or any other science-related topic, with an extremely critical eye. I found that I was unable to use 99% of the Society's references in my term paper. I did find an anti-evolution book in the MIT library and used its references, which were fairly quoted, as the basis for my paper.
Needless to say, these discoveries made me thoroughly distrust what the Society said about virtually everything from then on. Many of the misrepresentations could be attributed to ignorance, but this -- coming from a group of supposedly divinely guided men claiming to represent God -- was simply unacceptable. How can anyone trust such ignoramuses? But a number of the misrepresentations were obviously deliberate, such as the claims about frozen mammoths. They were obviously deliberate because the Society selectively quoted material that supported its claims, such as articles in popular magazines, but suppressed information that did not support them, such as the Smithsonian report. This is flat out dishonest, and is why I don't hesitate to state that Watchtower writers are, on the whole, gross liars.
AlanF
