Thanks for your kind words, Farkel.
Philo:
:: Do you feel they employ these dishonest means across the board, or only carefully and in respect of a small range of difficult issues?
The latter is really the case. How do they get by with it? Few in the Society’s audience are equipped with the facts, or the ability to grasp basic fallacies in reason, much less challenge them. Please note that the Society quotes but does not cite or give the reference, and not many would take the time to check the facts.
You must also understand there is a certain culture in the Writing Department that allows this kind of dishonesty. And AlanF is right on target. A certain infallibility complex is there among some, a kind of license under the aegis of the "spirit-anointed governing body."
Thinking of Marvin’s post above, let me say that they will tell you that they are the ones who can understand and interpret what Tertullian meant, never mind what he actually said, because they start with a premise rather than reaching a conclusion after looking at all the facts. They make quotations to make a point, period. They’ve got the backing of the faithful slave, you know, even if individually they do not profess to be of the anointed.
Too, there is a certain circular reasoning that obtains: ‘since the Watchtower is food at the proper time, and since these statements appear in the magazine, they must be true—because they are a product of the holy spirit.’ That is the mindset even with governing body members, who get their magazines, i.e. get fed, at the same time as do other Bethel family members.
Thoughtful persons who know better just keep their mouths shut or pay a price for honesty by being labeled a doubter or troublemaker or worse. Reminds me, Nathan Knorr was actually boastful when he stated to intimates that he had no time to read the publications.
Let me give you some insight: it was painfully obvious to many that the Society’s vacillations on numerous items of policy were glaring to the point of embarrassment. So the late Karl Klein, a senior writer and one of the GB himself, wrote the very strained Watchtower article on "tacking," in an effort to explain away and justify how they could veer left, then right.
Karl himself never embraced the 1975 date; neither did others—Lyman Swingle never embraced the 1914 stuff period. But Karl was an apologist for the Society’s position and loyally tried to explain away the difficulties.
In 1966 I asked Karl how Fred Franz could be trotting out that hoary reasoning on dates again; weren’t we going to be in for a disaster in 1976? Karl told me that it was much like the Judge, who after admitting he had "made an ass of himself" over the 1925 prophetic failure went right back to date-setting. Karl said: "The Judge just really wanted to see the end so bad in his lifetime that he got to believing his own writings." He observed the same thing had happened with Fred Franz, and that FWF felt the stimulus would be good for the organization even if it were not true.
What you have is followers following followers following followers, in a system that has momentum of his own and not easily changed.
Let me offer another example of the use of selective quotations. For many, many years the Society has quoted famed British astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle out of context. They have portrayed him as against evolution and as a creationist. I’ll be charitable and say that writer after writer trotted out the same stuff for years, without checking. You can find the citations for yourself, so I’ll just supply Hoyle’s.
Take a look at the dust jacket of his book "The Intelligent Universe" which speaks for itself: "The **Darwinian** theory of evolution is shown to be plainly wrong. Life has evolved [!!!] because biological components of cosmic origin have been progressively assembled here on Earth. These components have arrived from outside, borne in from the cosmos on comets" ... "The key to understanding evolution is the virus. The viruses responsible for evolution and the viruses responsible for diseases are very similar." (Published first in 1983 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York.)
Note that it is Darwinism and not evolution that Sir Fred takes issue with. He believes that our planet is an "assembly station" that was "seeded" from outer space and that life did indeed evolve, just not from inanimate matter. Please also note that his thesis is not buried somewhere in his books; they are the heart and soul of his clearly written argument.
It is difficult to believe that the Society’s writers have never read an entire publication by Sir Fred or more than a line or two. If they have not, their misrepresentations are indefensible. If they have read his books, they are obviously suppressing or misrepresenting what the distinguished astronomer really espouses, because it is quite impossible to read his books without understanding what he clearly articulates.
In using this and similar books in the past, perhaps the Society’s writer looked only at the FRONT of the book’s dust jacket, whose subtitle is "A New View of Creation and Evolution," and did not look at the BACK, on which there are a picture of the astronomer and in large print the words, "We have DESCENDED FROM LIFE SEEDED FROM THE DEPTHS OF SPACE." (Caps mine.)
On page 41 of the Creator book under the heading "A Deliberate Intellectual Act" in another, longer quotation we read (finally after all these years) the all-but-buried clause referring to Hoyle, "even espousing that life on earth arrived from outer space," while the paragraph ends by quoting him that "it seemed better to suppose that the origin of life was a deliberate intellectual act." (You are encouraged to read the entire page for yourself.)
Sounds great, he believes in God and creation, right? Once again the sentences are taken out of context, so that the reader will infer what the author does not imply. The reader readily concludes that a toweringly important scientist believes what JWs believe.
Read for yourself Hoyle’s discussions about cosmic intelligences superior to ours. And what does he actually believe about creation?
In his own words: "It makes little difference whether the Universe was created in 4004 BC as Archbishop Ussher asserted, or 10,000,000 years ago, if indeed there ever was a creation, which as we have seen there are plenty of reasons to doubt." [!]
Hoyle winds up his argument by noting: "Because the correct logical procedure is to build upwards from precisely formed subroutines, we on the Earth had to evolve [!] from a seemingly elementary starting point. Yet so powerful was the onward surge, so urgent the climb up the great mountain, that on Earth a creature at last arose with an inkling in its mind of what it really was, a whisper of its identity: We are the intelligence that preceded us in its new material representation—or rather, we are the re-emergence of that intelligence, the latest embodiment of its struggle for survival." (Pp. 238, 239.)
You be the judge: Does Sir Fred Hoyle believe what the Society would have you think? Is the basic belief of Sir Fred Hoyle supportive of the Society’s position? Absolutely not. That hasn’t stopped them from misquoting him for years.
A final thought: When teaching at Gilead School, Bert Schroeder (now an aged and frail member of the GB) used to cite the rule "falsus in uno, falsus in toto" as a standard to determine trustworthiness—"untrue in one, untrue in all."
Time to apply this yardstick.
Maximus
