Anyone notice how when some of us older ones were in the cult.......

mickbobcat

When I was a kid in the late sixties the type of books we would study was very intense compared to the bull shit pablum that they put out today? I mean the finished mystery and others now its these stupid books that don't dive deep into the beliefs.

FFGhost

You can now read an entire year's worth of Awake magazines in like 20 minutes.

Literally.

Although, which really is worse: Silly bullet points copied from the back page of "Psychology Today", or 40 pages of Fred Franz's blather about the type / antitype relationships between Antiochus !, Ptolemy, etc. vs. 18th and 19th century popes.

Which is worse: Brief, vacuous nonsense, or long-winded pseudo-intellectual claptrap that aspires to be profound but is just essentially word salad?

road to nowhere

A lot of us are here because everything freddy wrote came true....AND...nothing happened.

Wife yells at me about studying. It takes all of 10 minutes if you watch the whole video. As for reading the awake it has already been memorized because it is all reprints

RULES & REGULATIONS

mickbobcat
When I was a kid in the late sixties the type of books we would study was very intense compared to the bull shit pablum that they put out today?

Actually, the opposite is true! The pablum are the old books and congregation book studies that were written by Russell, Rutherford and Fred Frantz. Today, the Society has no choice but to dumb down their reading material.

Here is one congregation book study material that would never be studied today:

Impressive book study ( my first congregation book study ) in the 1970's about cherubs, flying swords, rotted bones and flesh, the fall of the United Nations, the fall of Christendom and the attack on the true religion, ''Jehovah's Witnesses.''

The book left no doubt that Armageddon was imminent and that only Jehovah's Witnesses would survive. It was scary to read that after surviving Armageddon, all surviving Jehovah's witnesses would have years of work, burying dead flesh and bones.

Today, you would see this book as just fantasy, unrealistic, far-fetched, make believe and completely foolish, with hyperbole claims.

pale.emperor

I remember being only 7yo and us all studying the Revelation book (first edition). I sat through every book study just looking at the pictures. That was a deep book... bullshit of course, but deep shit.

Now? It's all pretty pictures and rhetorical questions in big letters.

I dont see what a newly interested person could get out of it if they were looking for "deep bible knowledge". Even the study edition of the Watchtower is, literally, the same stuff we'd studied over and over but dumbed down.

dozy

I hadn't seen a Watchtower for a few years and couldn't believe just how simple the study articles are now when I looked online. Just 3 sentences or so per paragraph - incredibly simple questions. So dumbed down it is like kindergarten level.

nowwhat?

No matter how hard I tried I found it frustrating that I couldn't comprehend parts of the interpretations of the revelation book. Here it was because it was a bunch of gobbledygook!😂

Vidiot

Another significant cause of the dialed-down nature of the publications is that original WT Oracle Fred Franz kicked the bucket without leaving any kind of successor... in no small part because - as a True Believer (like the rest of the WT leadership) - he fully bought into everything he was writing*.

As admittedly skilled at word-smithing as he was, it never even would have occurred to him to take on any kind of protege, because the End was always the day after tomorrow.

Couple that with Ted Jaracz using 9-11 fear to purge virtually all the moderates and liberals from WTHQ, and there are virtually no creative-types and outside-the-box thinkers left... the very people with the vital innovative and narrative chops needed to perform any kind effective theological overhaul for the 21st Century.

As a result, the Org is stuck with a decades-old Cold-War-centric eschatology, a bare-bones-educated and -staffed writing pool, and fuck-all imagination.

Not a recipe for literary robustness.

...

*Like I've said before, a really easy habit to fall into when you're convinced God whispers in your ear and you're surrounded solely with people who are never allowed to disagree with you.

Rafly

The Watchtower Corporation proved that sensationalized fear can sell through literature publishing.

Brainwashing the readers to their detriment mind you

slimboyfat

Ahhhh.

I’ve spent hours this afternoon searching for a quote and I can’t find it anywhere. It might be Rogerson, or “Timothy White”, or else I don’t know.

But anyway, the author says something to the effect that, “Watchtower books have become much simpler in recent years and no longer discuss complicated doctrinal issues.”

I just thought it was funny that someone was already “complaining” about this over half a century ago.

But I can’t find the quote!

Anyone notice how when some of us older ones were in the cult.......

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