Magnum,
First of, excellent avatar my man. Greatest movie of the past year, and completely underrated. Moving on.
JWdom used to at least appear to be intellectual and scholarly. Your post indicates that you became a JW in the 90's, so you might not be familiar with the seemingly scholarly period of JWdom.
When I first joined I quickly moved through all the 'current' literature at the time. I ordered every odd book you could still order, including bound volumes diaglot, king james bible (they printed that!), concordance, ect. The hall was still stacked with older books from 70s/80s in the lit counter. I read the James commentary, not knowing the origin of course, and wondered why they didn't have more books like that. Regardless, the older style of JWdom is what I gravitated to and in retrospect my main disappointment which led to me leaving was seeing how that part of the faith was on the way out.
It has become wimpy. The strong confidence of former times is gone. JWs of times past used to relish deep doctrinal discussions and even arguments, but no more; they now run from such.Correct. Each successive generation of JW has become more tame. Gone are the sandwich board signs and picketing. This was to be expected. I believe that the strong focus on John 17:3 i.e. "taking in knowledge" combined with a reduction in the complexity and depth of that knowledge created a situation where repetitive and dull recycled material became a monotonous norm driving apathy especially among youth.
think that now they're not really wanting people like us to join. They no longer want intelligent thinkers. They want only people they can control - people who will unquestioningly follow.My guess is that they want to sell off NYC property, build a compound that will last for decades, and transition away from expansion. The JWs put themselves in a pickle when they proclaimed for so long that the org would expand to the end. The built in anticipation for growth means they have to keep up appearances of growth, which in some respects might be costing them lots of money. What the return they see on every dollar of missionary work anyway?
I really think they want to weed out people like us because they know we see through them and would only cause problems.The downside is that we were their biggest advocates. They may not want the risk of intellectuals within their faith, but the leadership vacuum going on has to be terrible.
At this point, I essentially think the JWs are morphing into one of these non mainstream infomercial groups but without the flair. A lot of white bread that is appetizing to nobody but vein smart asses. The JWs don't have the guts to proclaim the radical end times junk as much as they used to. Total wimps. Just compare to these other radical dips, who probably have more of a connection to the Witnesses of old than the JWs themselves:
http://www.endtime.com/
https://www.thetrumpet.com/key_of_david
http://www.jvim.com/
