The Carpenter's Arms

Surrendering to the Watchtower fade

noreply@blogger.com (Rory Sullivan) — Sat, 30 Aug 2014 08:28:00 +0000

The "watchtower fade" is the result of that little voice that tells us that whatever project we are involved with, whatever life-course we might be on, it is devoid of any spiritual value whatsoever. Worse, it has become hazardous to your health and well-being, both inwardly and outwardly. It's all those things - misgivings and niggles - that we keep tucking out of sight in order to be able to carry on with what we're doing. Eventually all those things pile up until they become impossible to ignore. The little voice inside us swells to a mighty roar, and it screams, "What.The.Fuck.Am.I.Doing?"

That WTFAID moment gives us the courage to stop what we are doing - change jobs, get out of an unhealthy life course, completely overhaul spiritual convictions. Anything that refuses any longer to ignore the calm low voice talking from within.

My own story is that for 25 years I was one of Jehovah's Witnesses. For ten of those years I served as an elder in the congregation. In 2003 I was removed as an elder. The circumstances are relevant. I had attempted to use methods of psychology to improve someone's spiritual health. It seemed to me that the person I was in conversation with had issues that stretched right back into their past, and I was suggesting that it might be best to deal with these things. This came to the attention of the body of elders, and after a short meeting in which I stood alone in trying to defend my actions, I was summarily dismissed.

I had a feeling that the outer person, what was being done on the outside, on display for other people to see, was more important than the inner person in the eyes of the congregation. "Elders are not therapists," was the constant mantra. It was my belief that they had to be - that shepherding must at least attempt to heal the inner person. I tucked it away to the back of my mind. I tried to ignore it. I tried to amend it so that I could continue to serve but with a revised ideology. Success came when I was re-appointed as an elder just four years later. It lasted for eighteen months. In that time further questions about the organisation had begun to surface which I dutifully sidelined, but I was already fading. I was no longer committed.

The "fade" comes about because those misgivings erode something from your convictions. We hold back. We are not entirely committed to the cause. We are no longer convinced. The more evidence we receive that what we are doing is potentially bogus, the less we want to invest.

I resigned as an elder, and I continued to fade as a Witness. Literature began to look like indoctrination. Sitting down to have a bible study with an interested person seemed to raise questions the Watchtower Society* wanted to answer. It all looked like mental manipulation of the worst sort. Changing doctrines began to appear farcical, few more so than the infamous "generation" question. This revolves around the interpretation of Jesus' words at Matthew 24:34. At one point in a chapter devoted to "signs" marking the "conclusion of a system of things," Jesus says, "Truly I say to you that this generation will by no means pass away until all these things occur." Jehovah's Witnesses have long held that the "generation" referred to here was the generation that witnessed the events of 1914. They would not pass away before the end came. When this became impossible to sustain (because of the natural passing of time) it was revealed that the "generation" actually meant the people that knew the 1914 generation. It was the "overlap" theory. It didn't take much imagination to realise that some years down the line it would be "the people that knew the people that knew..." From there it was turtles all the way down. The small voice was getting louder.

My WTFAID moment came over the matter of "family worship". Family worship was a new concept. Jehovah's Witnesses used to meet three times a week for congregation meetings. A few years ago one of these meetings was cancelled and congregation members were encouraged to use this spare evening for what was to become known as "family worship." Families were encouraged to devote the time to family bible study. I had a feeling that what had started out as "family worship" with a small f.w. would eventually become "Family Worship" with a capital F.W. I had a feeling that it would become a further means for judging a person's spirituality. I knew Family Worship was going to be an issue in our household. I knew that it would be mentioned publicly more and more. I knew our family would be at the meetings where Family Worship would be promoted and I imagined my own children thinking, "But it's not like that in our house," and I thought, "What the fuck am I doing? I can't carry on like this any more. I have to stop and give a clear indication that I no longer hold this religion to be true."

1 Kings 19, verses 9 to 14 tells the story of the prophet Elijah and his moment of doubt as a worshipper of the true God. He is in a cave on Mount Horeb:

And the word of the Lord came to him: "What are you doing here, Elijah?"

He replied, "I have been very zealous for the Lord God Almighty. The Israelites have rejected your covenant, torn down your altars, and put your prophets to death with the sword. I am the only one left, and now they are trying to kill me too."

The Lord said, "Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by."

Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper. When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave.

Then a voice said to him, "What are you doing here, Elijah?"

The answer is not in the wind, the quaking, and the fire. It is not in the voice that says we are going to be wiped out at Armageddon, or questions our loyalty to God and family, or fears for our safety. That is the voice of the opposer ( we oppose ourselves), the slanderer (we lie to and about ourselves) - our own ego, the inauthentic self fearing the change that is about to come upon it. That voice tells us we will be on our own. It calls us names, tells us we're selfish, or presumptuous. The wind, the quaking, and the fire was telling me I was being selfish, that I would hurt people, that I might be wrong...who was I to think I knew better? But "God" was not in those things. Not in the rantings, the accusations, or the bluster. "God" was in the gentle whisper. The calm low voice of reason and reassurance. It's okay to go out on your own, and even then, there will be others who feel the same way.

Your own story might involve a political affiliation, working in the financial sector, the medical profession, teaching, police, the military, any number of lifestyle choices which you have begun to feel are a dead end, as if you are merely going through the motions of life, and not really living it. The gentle whisper is telling you that this is not the way things are meant to be, but the fear-inspiring voices are saying, "What about the money? How will you earn a living?" and any other tempestuous, fearsome, and fiery things. Remember, "God" is not in those things. Meaningful change is in the calm, low voice.

When your own personal WTFAID moment comes it might just be the time to sit up, listen, and take action.

* Legal shorthand for Jehovah's Witnesses

101 ways Jehovah's Witnesses are the embodiment of George Orwell's 1984

noreply@blogger.com (Rory Sullivan) — Tue, 08 Jul 2014 07:02:00 +0000

Victory Mansions/cigarettes/gin/Square
Anything Jehovah's Witnesses get to name is either "Watchtower," "Kingdom," or "New World," be it road, house, farm, forest, hall, or Bible.

Victory Gin

He took down from the shelf a bottle of colourless liquid with a plain white label marked VICTORY GIN. It gave off a sickly, oily smell, as of Chinese rice-spirit. Winston poured out nearly a teacupful, nerved himself for a shock, and gulped it down like a dose of medicine.

Instantly his face turned scarlet and the water ran out of his eyes. The stuff was like nitric acid, and moreover, in swallowing it one had the sensation of being hit on the back of the head with a rubber club. The next moment, however, the burning in his belly died down and the world began to look more cheerful.

The experience of drinking in the "pure water" of spiritual "truth" is more akin to having a shot of Victory gin.

We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness

More often he wondered where he was, and what time of day it was. At one moment he felt certain that it was broad daylight outside, and at the next equally certain that it was pitch darkness. In this place, he knew instinctively, the lights would never be turned out. It was the place with no darkness.

'Do you know what time of day it is?' he said.

Ampleforth looked startled again. 'I had hardly thought about it. They arrested me - it could be two days ago - perhaps three.' His eyes flitted round the walls, as though he half expected to find a window somewhere.

'There is no difference between night and day in this place. I do not see how one can calculate the time.'

It is not true to say that all Kingdom Halls have no windows, but windowless halls can prove to be alarmingly disorienting, and the Society is not averse to approving them.

Hate Week
There was a time when Watchtower conventions lasted for a whole week - eight days, in fact - full of talks lambasting false religion, governments, and the United Nations. These days, although they are only over a weekend, the Society still finds opportunity to hate on religion or "apostates".

Big Brother

On each landing, opposite the lift shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.

Jehovah's Witnesses like to be reminded of Psalm 11:4. "Jehovah is in his holy temple. Jehovah’s throne is in the heavens. His own eyes see, his watchful eyes examine the sons of men." 2 Chronicles 16:9 and Proverbs 15:3 are often deployed in the same way. It is dressed in words of love, but the warning is ever present - your sins will find you out.

There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment...You had to live - did live, from habit that became instinct - in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

Big Brother is not Jehovah, per se, but he is personified in Jehovah's "representative," the Governing Body, aka the "faithful and discreet slave."

Blue overalls

The women studied him in hostile silence as he went past. But it was not hostility, exactly; merely a kind of wariness, a momentary stiffening, as at the passing of some unfamiliar animal. The blue overalls of the Party could not be a common sight in a street like this.

Are Jehovah's Witnesses not equally recognisable with their suits, coats, boots, and book bags?

INGSOC
JW.ORG

Telescreens

Facts and figures

Day and night the telescreens bruised your ears with statistics proving that people today had more food, more clothes, better houses, better recreations - that they lived longer, worked shorter hours, were bigger, healthier, stronger, happier, more intelligent, better educated, than the people of fifty years ago. Not a word of it could ever be proved or disproved.

Numbers of Kingdom Halls being built, growth in the congregation, numbers baptised, delegates at conventions - anything that can be counted and collated, data and statistics declaring the progress of the Society - is claimed as "evidence of Jehovah's blessing." Even one Watchtower becoming two is not off limits:

Minitrue

The Ministry of Truth...was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, 300 metres into the air.

Although the Organisation does not concern itself with pyramids these days, they held a great fascination for the Society's founder, Charles Taze Russell.

There is a more obvious pyramid, however - the top-down hierarchy found in the Watchtower Society.

At the apex of the pyramid comes Big Brother. Big Brother is infallible and all-powerful. Every success, every achievement, every victory, every scientific discovery, all knowledge, all wisdom, all happiness, all virtue, are held to issue directly from his leadership and inspiration. Nobody has ever seen Big Brother. He is a face on the hoardings, a voice on the telescreen. We may be reasonably sure that he will never die, and there is already considerable uncertainty as to when he was born. Big Brother is the guise in which the Party chooses to exhibit itself to the world. His function is to act as a focusing point for love, fear, and reverence, emotions which are more easily felt towards an individual than towards an organization. Below Big Brother comes the Inner Party. its numbers limited to six millions, or something less than 2 per cent of the population of Oceania. Below the Inner Party comes the Outer Party, which, if the Inner Party is described as the brain of the State, may be justly likened to the hands.

The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary.
The modern-day equivalent would be to write a blog. The official position maintained by the Organisation remains unchanged since 2002:

We have an official Internet Web site: www.watchtower.org. (now jw.org) This site is adequate to make information available to the public. There is no need for any individual, committee, or congregation to prepare a Web page about Jehovah’s Witnesses...While some may view this as a service to the brothers, it is not approved and should be discontinued. (Our Kingdom Ministry, September 2002 - you'll have to take my word for it, Our Kingdom Ministry is not available on the online version of the Watchtower Library.)

This was not illegal...

...(nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least by twenty-five years in a forced-labour camp.

There is no law against having a beard, or getting a tattoo, or a body piercing, or going to see an 18-certificate film, or for women wearing trousers to the meetings, or on the field ministry. But try doing these things without being viewed as anything other than spiritually immature.

Two-Minutes Hate
During the weekly Watchtower study Jehovah's Witnesses get many opportunities to vent against the world, false religion, and apostasy.

Junior Anti-Sex League

A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League, was wound several times round the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to bring out the shapeliness of her hips.

With the Organisation's strict attitude towards fornication and pre-marital sex, every young Witness born in to the Organisation has a figurative scarlet sash tied about their waste until the day they are married.

It was always the women...

...and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.

Not an unfair description of the situation within the Organisation - "The women proclaiming the good news are a large army," after all. (Psalm 68:11)

O'Brien

'I am with you,' O'Brien seemed to be saying to him. 'I know precisely what you are feeling. I know all about your contempt, your hatred, your disgust. But don't worry, I am on your side!'

The Inner Party member who befriends Winston Smith into revealing his hatred for Big Brother. There are plenty of experiences of congregation elders who are not afraid to disarm those who have doubts, and then turn on them later - judge, jury, and executioner.

He was the tormentor, he was the protector, he was the inquisitor, he was the friend.

Emmanuel Goldstein

Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago (how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activities, had been condemned to death, and had mysteriously escaped and disappeared.

The Society has their very own "Emmanuel Goldstein" in the shape of Raymond Franz, once a member of the Governing Body who was eventually disfellowshipped.

The Book

There were also whispered stories of a terrible book, a compendium of all the heresies, of which Goldstein was the author and which circulated clandestinely here and there. It was a book without a title. People referred to it, if at all, simply as THE BOOK. But one knew of such things only through vague rumours. THE BOOK was a subject that any ordinary Party member would mention if there was a way of avoiding it.

There are two such books by Raymond Franz - Crisis of Conscience and In Search of Christian Freedom.

Eurasian Army

Behind his head on the telescreen there marched the endless columns of the Eurasian army - row after row of solid-looking men with expressionless Asiatic faces, who swam up to the surface of the screen and vanished, to be replaced by others exactly similar.

With Jehovah's Witnesses it is always the generic-looking apostate.

Nobody heard what Big Brother was saying

But in the same moment, drawing a deep sigh of relief from everybody, the hostile figure melted into the face of Big Brother, black-haired, black-moustachio'd, full of power and mysterious calm, and so vast that it almost filled up the screen. Nobody heard what Big Brother was saying. It was merely a few words of encouragement, the sort of words that are uttered in the din of battle, not distinguishable individually but restoring confidence by the fact of being spoken.

And so it is with Watchtower articles that invariably conclude with the soothing words of the Governing Body. Or Assembly items thick with emotional manipulation, nobody can hear what is being said, but it feels so good.

WAR IS PEACE
This peaceful people are waging a constant war against the world, the fallen flesh, and Satan and his demons. And ultimately, peace is going to be ushered in through the "war of the great day of God the almighty."

The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact.

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
The Society claims that its "truth" will set you free - but such freedom simply replaces one form of slavery with another.

You know the Party slogan: "Freedom is Slavery". Has it ever occurred to you that it is reversible? Slavery is freedom. Alone - free - the human being is always defeated. It must be so, because every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures. But if he can make complete, utter submission, if he can escape from his identity, if he can merge himself in the Party so that he is the Party, then he is all-powerful and immortal.

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
Leaving scriptural interpretation to the "faithful and discreet slave" is viewed as a virtue.

"My Saviour!"

The little sandy haired woman had flung herself forward over the back of the chair in front of her. With a tremulous murmur that sounded like, "My Saviour!" she extended her arms towards the screen. Then she buried her face in her hands. It was apparent that she was uttering a prayer.

Jehovah's Witnesses are often reminded that without the "faithful and discreet slave" they would not know the truth, thereby implying that the Society is paramount to a person's salvation.

"B-B!...B-B!...B-B!"

For perhaps as much as thirty seconds they kept it up. It was a refrain that was often heard in moments of overwhelming emotion. Partly it was a sort of hymn to the wisdom and majesty of Big Brother, but still more it was an act of self-hypnosis, a deliberate drowning of consciousness by means of rhythmic noise. Winston's entrails seemed to grow cold.

"G-B!...G-B!...G-B!" Praise handed out to the Governing Body often goes on for more than thirty seconds - but it does make your entrails grow cold when it dawns on you that all these words of praise have actually been written by the Governing Body themselves.

The Brotherhood
The belief held by those on the outside, or fading Jehovah's Witnesses, that there are those in the upper echelons who are secretly harbouring anti-Witness feelings.

It was always at night - the arrests invariably happened at night.
Juducial committees are invariably conducted at night.

The Times
The Watchtower magazine.

The canteen

Winston and Syme pushed their trays beneath the grille. On to each was dumped swiftly the regulation lunch - a metal pannikin of pinkish-grey stew.

They threaded their way across the crowded room and unpacked their trays on to the metal-topped table, on one corner of which someone had left a pool of stew, a filthy liquid mess that had the appearance of vomit. Winston took up his mug of gin, paused for an instant to collect his nerve, and gulped the oily-tasting stuff down. When he had winked the tears out of his eyes he suddenly discovered that he was hungry. He began swallowing spoonfuls of the stew, which, in among its general sloppiness, had cubes of spongy pinkish stuff which was probably a preparation of meat.

The spiritual "food" served at congregation meetings. Increasingly it has become thin and insipid, old articles and tropes regurgitated. "Same meat, different gravy," is often the tired refrain.

You were supposed to call everyone 'comrade'.
You are supposed to refer to everyone as 'brother' or 'sister'.

Duckspeak

At the table on his left the man with the strident voice was still talking remorselessly away. Winston knew the man by sight, though he knew no more about him than that he held some important post in the Fiction Department. What was slightly horrible, was that from the stream of sound that poured out of his mouth it was almost impossible to distinguish a single word. It was just a noise, a quack-quack-quacking. And yet, though you could not actually hear what the man was saying, you could not be in any doubt about its general nature. He might be denouncing Goldstein and demanding sterner measures against thought-criminals and saboteurs, he might be fulminating against the atrocities of the Eurasian army, he might be praising Big Brother or the heroes on the Malabar front - it made no difference. Whatever it was, you could be certain that every word of it was pure orthodoxy, pure Ingsoc. As he watched the eyeless face with the jaw moving rapidly up and down, Winston had a curious feeling that this was not a real human being but some kind of dummy. It was not the man's brain that was speaking, it was his larynx. The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words, but it was not speech in the true sense: it was a noise uttered in unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck.

Convention speakers, one after the other, speaking in a style unique to the Organisation, tied rigidly to their outlines, spouting theocratic rhetoric - simply mouthpieces for the Society.

Parsons...

was...one of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges...on whom the stability of the party depended.

The hanging
Men, women, and children, family members and friends - all attend the public announcement that "So-and-so is no longer one of Jehovah's Witnesses." From that moment on they are to be viewed as dead.

Children

[Those children] adored the Party and everything connected with it. The songs, the processions, the banners, the hiking, the drilling with dummy rifles, the yelling of slogans, the worship of Big Brother - it was all a sort of glorious game to them.

"Listen. obey, and be blessed," is the catch-phrase. Children have always been a target for the Society.

I am authorized to say that the action we are now reporting may well bring the war within measurable distance of its end.
The end of this system has always been 'just around the corner.'

Deflection/Distraction

Bad news coming, thought Winston. And sure enough, following on a gory description of the annihilation of a Eurasian army, with stupendous figures of killed and prisoners, came the announcement that, as from next week, the chocolate ration would be reduced from thirty grammes to twenty.

The act of hiding one bit of news behind another. Stealth changes. By concentrating on the new understanding - or, idea - that the great crowd could now be counted among the "domestics," the majority could be distracted from the fact that the teaching about the "faithful and discreet slave" had been overhauled. In 1935, Rutherford expelled the great crowd from the kingdom of the heavens by highlighting the idea that they need not consider themselves as a disapproved class any longer.

Two fingers of his right hand were ink-stained. It was exactly the kind of detail that might betray you.
Just as a study Watchtower that is not dutifully underlined might betray you.

Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.
The history of the Organisation comes through the filter of the Governing Body. Personal research becomes increasingly difficult as the Society gradually phases out its back-catalogue of literature. The Watchtower Library on CD-ROM only takes the Watchtower magazine back to 1950, and the Awake! to 1970. The online version contains almost nothing prior to the year 2000.

The past, he reflected, had not merely been altered it had been actually destroyed. For how could you establish even the most obvious fact when there existed no evidence outside your own memory?

Each new release documenting the Society's history seems to water it down even further. It is now history being repeated by those who learnt it from the Proclaimers book rather than having lived it. Governing body members are either blissfully unaware of the truth - ignorance is strength, after all - or are deliberately misleading the flock.

It will not be too long before it will be impossible to prove that the Society ever used the term "present truth," or referred to congregation members as "rank-and-file," or that Joseph Rutherford ever declared, "I made an ass of myself."

Memory Holes

In the side wall, within easy reach of Winston's arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating. This last was for the disposal of waste paper. Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor. For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.

This is where "old light" gets consigned to when "new light" takes its place. The same thing applies to letters addressed to the body of elders when official policy gets reviewed. See page 2 of this recent example. "The [insert date] letter to all congregations should be removed from the congregation permanent file of policy letters and be destroyed." In other words, throw it in the memory hole.

Doublethink

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed.

Doublethink allows the Society to write articles exposing propaganda, and yet employ the very same tactics when railing against apostates; it allows them to hate the Catholic Church and yet be just like them; it allows them to declare that they are fulfilling the scripture at Matthew 24:14, but not the one at Luke 21:8. There are too many examples.

Doublethink lies at the very heart of INGSOC

Doublethink lies at the very heart of JW.ORG.

'Rectifying' articles

The messages he had received referred to articles or news items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, as the official phrase had it, to rectify.

The Society has a history of rectifying articles. From very early on, reprinted editions of Russell's books "rectified" some of his overenthusiastic prophetic claims. In 1981 reprinted versions of The Truth That Leads To Eternal Life - originally published in 1968 - edited a reference which could imply the end coming in 1975. The January 1, 1989, edition of The Watchtower claiming that the Apostle Paul was laying a foundation for "a work that would be completed in our 20th century," had been "rectified" to read "in our day," by the time it appeared in the bound volume.

As soon as all the corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number of 'The Times' had been assembled and collated, that number would be reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on the files in its stead. This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs - to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance...The written instructions which Winston received, and which he invariably got rid of as soon as he had dealt with them, never stated or implied that an act of forgery was to be committed: always the reference was to slips, errors, misprints, or misquotations which it was necessary to put right in the interests of accuracy.

There were the huge printing-shops with their sub-editors, their typography experts, and their elaborately equipped studios for the faking of photographs.

And the Ministry had not only to supply the multifarious needs of the party, but also to repeat the whole operation at a lower level for the benefit of the proletariat.
The same is true of the Society who produce two versions of the Watchtower Study Edition, one regular and one "simplified."

The great purges

The great purges involving thousands of people, with public trials of traitors and thought-criminals who made abject confession of their crimes and were afterwards executed, were special show-pieces not occurring oftener than once in a couple of years.

Each year tens of thousands of Jehovah's Witnesses are disfellowshipped. Very often regular members of the congregation have no idea why.

More commonly, people who had incurred the displeasure of the Party simply disappeared and were never heard of again. One never had the smallest clue as to what had happened to them.

Life stories

There were occasions when Big Brother devoted his Order for the Day to commemorating some humble, rank-and-file Party member whose life and death he held up as an example worthy to be followed.

Speakwrite

Winston thought for a moment, then pulled the speakwrite towards him and began dictating...

Questions

...in Big Brother's familiar style: a style at once military and pedantic, and, because of a trick of asking questions and then promptly answering them ('What lessons do we learn from this fact, comrades? The lesson - which is also one of the fundamental principles of Ingsoc - that,' etc., etc.), easy to imitate.

Pick any Watchtower study article at random and you can see exactly the same method employed.

Unperson

Withers, however, was already an UNPERSON. He did not exist: he had never existed.

The man in the cover on the left is now an unperson. He does not exist; he has never existed. His wife and child are collateral damage.

(No) Friends

Perhaps 'friend' was not exactly the right word. You did not have friends nowadays, you had comrades: but there were some comrades whose society was pleasanter than that of others.

"Friends" in the Organisation is often used as an alternative to "the brothers". And friendship is always conditional - it will end if you walk away from the religion.

Proles/Outer Party/Inner Party
However one wants to view the class divide - proles being the "world," Party members those in "the truth," or proles as the rank-and-file, and Party members as those in Bethel - there is no denying that a hierarchical system exists on multiple levels.

Newspeak Dictionary, 11th Edition

"When we've finished with it, people like you will have to learn it all over again."

The 2013 edition of the New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures has meant that verses from the Bible can no longer be taken for granted. Treasured scriptures can not be guaranteed to be worded in the same way. 2009 saw the release of a new songbook containing many new songs and a handful of subtle changes to a few of the old songs that made it to the new edition. Just a couple of ways the publishers are forced to "learn it all over again."

Newspeak

'Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking - not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.'

The language of Jehovah's Witnesses. It does make thinking extremely difficult, hearing the same few words and the same few scriptures repeated over and over. It takes a long time for someone who has left the Organisation to stop referring to it as "the truth," or to erase the phrase, "end of the system of things." Reading any other Bible but the New World Translation seems unnatural, and one is convinced for quite some time that any other version simply won't be as honest.

Voluntary subscriptions

About a quarter of one's salary had to be earmarked for voluntary subscriptions, which were so numerous that it was difficult to keep track of them.

Although the Society is determined to convince people that there are no collection plates, and all donations are voluntary, they are not afraid to employ 1 Corinthians 16:1, 2 to get the brothers to "set aside funds" for contributions. The new donation arrangement is now being seen by many as a pledge or a form of tithing.

Our new, happy life

"All over Oceania this morning there were irrepressible spontaneous demonstrations when workers marched out of factories and offices and paraded through the streets with banners voicing their gratitude to Big Brother for the new, happy life which his wise leadership has bestowed upon us. Here are some of the completed figures..."

The phrase 'our new, happy life' recurred several times. It had been a favourite of late with the Ministry of Plenty.

Our "spiritual paradise," anyone?

Fluctuating numbers

It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be REDUCED to twenty grammes a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it. The eyeless creature at the other table swallowed it fanatically, passionately, with a furious desire to track down, denounce, and vaporize anyone who should suggest that last week the ration had been thirty grammes.

For many years the number of those who partook of the emblems at the Memorial was gradually dropping. Recently, however, those numbers have begun to rise again. In view of this the Organisation adjusted its attitude to the anointed, quietly shelving its long-held belief that the door to entry into the anointed fold had closed in 1935. For more than a century it was taught that from the first century onwards there has always existed a "faithful and discreet slave." In 2013 it was declared that actually this faithful slave had only come into existence in 1919 - oh, and it was only made up of seven men, the Governing Body. Would the publishers swallow it? Yes, they swallowed it. Just two examples of the ease with which the Society can alter its views and still maintain a hold on its followers.

The ideal

How easy it was, thought Winston, if you did not look about you, to believe that the physical type set up by the Party as an ideal - tall muscular youths and deep-bosomed maidens, blond-haired, vital, sunburnt, carefree - existed and even predominated.

The Society lives in a fantasy world portrayed in their photographs and dramas - beautiful people participating in a field ministry where everyone contacted is an interested person. Brothers and sisters smilingly doing their chores and going about their work. Young ones dutifully reading the Bible in the school canteen.

Facecrime

It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself - anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offence. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: FACECRIME, it was called.

You can be called out by an elder for imperceptibly shaking your head at an announcement. Speakers on the platform are in a prime position to notice any adverse reactions to what is being taught. It will be stored away and discussed later.

Winston's Wife

Winston was married - had been married, at any rate: probably he still was married, so far as he knew his wife was not dead.

Jehovah's Witnesses can find themselves in the same position as Winston - separated, even divorced, but still scripturally "married".

She had not a thought in her head that was not a slogan, and there was no imbecility, absolutely none that she was not capable of swallowing if the Party handed it out to her.

The women of the Party were all alike...

...Chastity was as deep ingrained in them as Party loyalty.

Until they become conscious they will never rebel...

...and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.

The children's history textbook
My Book of Bible Stories

The Photograph
Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford - the significance of these three names comes in the fleeting possession of a piece of evidence, a photograph:

Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth. Just once in his life he had possessed - AFTER the event: that was what counted - concrete, unmistakable evidence of an act of falsification. He had held it between his fingers for as long as thirty seconds.

The equivalent of this Times article is the legendary letter of September 1, 1980, addressed to all Circuit and District Overseers - positive proof that at a moment's notice, whenever it feels like it, the Society can crack down on thoughtcrime.

(If you want to read the letter in full it can be found on pages 341, 342 of Crisis of Conscience.)

But did such a letter ever really exist...?

An oblong slip of newspaper had appeared between O'Brien's fingers. For perhaps five seconds it was within the angle of Winston's vision. It was a photograph, and there was no question of its identity. It was THE photograph.

'It exists!' he cried.

'No,' said O'Brien.

He stepped across the room. There was a memory hole in the opposite wall. O'Brien lifted the grating. Unseen, the frail slip of paper was whirling away on the current of warm air; it was vanishing in a flash of flame. O'Brien turned away from the wall.

'Ashes,' he said. 'Not even identifiable ashes. Dust. It does not exist. It never existed.'

'But it did exist! It does exist! It exists in memory. I remember it. You remember it.'

'I do not remember it,' said O'Brien.

The Community Centre

This was the second time in three weeks that he had missed an evening at the Community Centre: a rash act, since you could be certain that the number of your attendances at the Centre was carefully checked.

Try missing more than a few meetings at the Kingdom Hall without it being brought to your attention.

Ownlife

It was assumed that when he was not working, eating, or sleeping he would be taking part in some kind of communal recreation: to do anything that suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a walk by yourself, was always slightly dangerous. There was a word for it in Newspeak: OWNLIFE, it was called, meaning individualism and eccentricity.

Proverbs 18:1 is a regularly referenced in the Watchtower publications: "Whoever isolates himself pursues his own selfish desires; He rejects all practical wisdom."

Informant culture

For perhaps five seconds exaltation made him careless, and he stepped out on to the pavement without so much as a preliminary glance through the window.

Suddenly his heart seemed to turn to ice and his bowels to water. A figure in blue overalls was coming down the pavement, not ten metres away. It was the girl from the Fiction Department, the girl with dark hair. The light was failing, but there was no difficulty in recognizing her. She looked him straight in the face, then walked quickly on as though she had not seen him.

For a few seconds Winston was too paralysed to move.

This is feeling you have when you bump in to someone while coming out of an 18-certificate movie.

Confession

It would not matter if they killed you at once. To be killed was what you expected. But before death (nobody spoke of such things, yet everybody knew of them) there was the routine of confession that had to be gone through: the grovelling on the floor and screaming for mercy, the crack of broken bones, the smashed teeth and bloody clots of hair.

The Society knows it goes on, and they have even dramatised it: Part 1, Part 2

Swearing

A thing that astonished him about her was the coarseness of her language. Party members were supposed not to swear, and Winston himself very seldom did swear, aloud, at any rate.

Hours

'I'm due back at nineteen-thirty. I've got to put in two hours for the Junior Anti-Sex League, handing out leaflets, or something.'

'Putting in' hours is a practice Jehovah's Witnesses are all too familiar with.

Breaking the rules

Life as she saw it was quite simple. You wanted a good time; 'they', meaning the Party, wanted to stop you having it; you broke the rules as best you could...The clever thing was to break the rules and stay alive all the same.

To the exasperation of many elders and circuit overseers, this does seem to be the mindset of many young ones in the Organisation.

Goodthinkful
Meaning naturally orthodox, incapable of thinking a bad thought.

Denunciation

Katharine would unquestionably have denounced him to the Thought Police if she had not happened to be too stupid to detect the unorthodoxy of his opinions.

Party members live under the constant fear that wives will denounce husbands, husbands denounce wives, and children denounce parents. You don't have to spend very long searching jehovahs-witness.net to find examples of similar denunciations in the Organisation.

Music

The tune had been haunting London for weeks past. It was one of countless similar songs published for the benefit of the proles by a sub-section of the Music Department. The words of these songs were composed without any human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a versificator.

The Society are very proud of their Music Department.

Nothing exists except an endless present...

...in which the Party is always right.

Advance copies

'Have you seen the tenth edition of the Newspeak Dictionary?'

'No,' said Winston. 'I didn't think it had been issued yet. We are still using the ninth in the Records Department.'

'The tenth edition is not due to appear for some months, I believe. But a few advance copies have been circulated. I have one myself.'

There was often a clandestine glee detected in the voices of Circuit Overseer's who quoted from publications that had not yet been received by the local congregation.

We are the dead

When finally you are caught, you will get no help. We never help our members...You will have to get used to living without results and without hope. You will work for a while, you will be caught, you will confess, and then you will die. Those are the only results that you will ever see. There is no possibility that any perceptible change will happen within our own lifetime. We are the dead.

This whole section in which O'Brien describes the fate of 'the Brotherhood' rings true to those labelled as "apostates".

Changes

There was, of course, no admission that any change had taken place. Merely it became known, with extreme suddenness and everywhere at once.

Rarely does the Organisation state that a change in understanding has occurred, it is up to discerning members of the congregation to pick up on any alterations. And, of course, there are never "changes," merely adjustments.

Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia
Jehovah's Witnesses have always taught the Kingdom was established in 1914.

Winston stopped reading...

...chiefly in order to appreciate the fact that he was reading, in comfort and safety. He was alone: no telescreen, no ear at the keyhole, no nervous impulse to glance over his shoulder or cover the page with his hand.

Furtively glancing over the shoulder, or covering the page with the hand is the default position for any Witness reading questionable literature.

Property Ownership

Collectively, the Party owns everything in Oceania, because it controls everything, and disposes of the products as it thinks fit.

So it is with Bethel homes, Assembly Halls, and Kingdom Halls.

Inner Party members

By the standards of the early twentieth century, even a member of the Inner Party lives an austere, laborious kind of life. Nevertheless, the few luxuries that he does enjoy his large, well-appointed flat, the better texture of his clothes, the better quality of his food and drink and tobacco, his two or three servants, his private motor-car or helicopter - set him in a different world from a member of the Outer Party

This well describes life in the Bethel homes, in particular for those higher up in the Watchtower hierarchy.

Oceania/Eurasia/Eastasia

Under this lies a fact never mentioned aloud, but tacitly understood and acted upon: namely, that the conditions of life in all three super-states are very much the same. In Oceania the prevailing philosophy is called Ingsoc, in Eurasia it is called Neo-Bolshevism, and in Eastasia it is called by a Chinese name usually translated as Death-Worship, but perhaps better rendered as Obliteration of the Self. The citizen of Oceania is not allowed to know anything of the tenets of the other two philosophies, but he is taught to execrate them as barbarous outrages upon morality and common sense. Actually the three philosophies are barely distinguishable, and the social systems which they support are not distinguishable at all. Everywhere there is the same pyramidal structure, the same worship of semi-divine leader, the same economy existing by and for continuous warfare.

The Society vilifies three pillars of this system - (false) religion, government, and big business. The Organisation is, of course, part of false religion, whether it wants to believe so or not, therefore it is constantly at war with itself. It is variously at war with 'the kings of the world,' or materialism. In reality, though, it is indistinguishable from that which it villifies. It conducts itself as a rulership, and it is steeped in materialistic practices. The Society is the world in microcosm.

Ambition

Ambitious members of the Outer Party are made harmless by allowing them to rise.

Men are appointed as congregation elders.

A Party member is required to have not only the right opinions, but the right instincts.
Jehovah's Witnesses are encouraged to train their powers of discernment.

Crimestop

The first and simplest stage in the discipline, which can be taught even to young children, is called, in Newspeak, CRIMESTOP. CRIMESTOP means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. CRIMESTOP, in short, means protective stupidity. But stupidity is not enough. On the contrary, orthodoxy in the full sense demands a control over one's own mental processes as complete as that of a contortionist over his body.

It was not easy. It needed great powers of reasoning and improvisation. The arithmetical problems raised, for instance, by such a statement as 'two and two make five' were beyond his intellectual grasp. It needed also a sort of athleticism of mind, an ability at one moment to make the most delicate use of logic and at the next to be unconscious of the crudest logical errors.

The secret of rulership...

...is to combine a belief in one's own infallibility with the power to learn from past mistakes.

Family

It systematically undermines the solidarity of the family, and it calls its leader by a name which is a direct appeal to the sentiment of family loyalty.

"Let us always stay close to Jehovah and his motherlike organization, not separating ourselves from their direction and loving counsel." - Brother Gerrit Lösch, a member of the Governing Body of Jehovah’s Witnesses.

It was starting, it was starting at last!
The judicial process - it is just as Raymond Franz describes in Crisis of Conscience: "It was as if some massive legal machine had been put in motion and was grinding along in an unfeeling, unrelenting way toward its ultimate objective."

Violence

There was a gasp and a thump behind him, and he received a violent kick on the ankle which nearly flung him off his balance. One of the men had smashed his fist into Julia's solar plexus, doubling her up like a pocket ruler. She was thrashing about on the floor, fighting for breath.

It could be argued that Jehovah's Witnesses are at least free from the violence present in Orwell's 1984, but this is to ignore the ever present threat of violence. Jehovah's Witnesses live with images of destruction at Armageddon thrust in front of them. These violent images are for no-one's benefit except Jehovah's Witnesses. they serve no purpose for those who don't believe that events are going to go down that way. They are only there to remind Jehovah's Witnesses what will befall them if they deviate from the path.

Jehovah's Witnesses are also constantly reminded of the violent deeds enacted in the Bible: Korah, Dathan and Abiram destroyed for questioning Moses' leadership; Achan and his family being stoned to death for stealing; 42 young boys torn apart by a bear for dissing Elisha; Ananias and Saphira falling down dead for deception. And so on.

The waiting

The dull pain in his belly never went away, but sometimes it grew better and sometimes worse, and his thoughts expanded or contracted accordingly. When it grew worse he thought only of the pain itself, and of his desire for food. When it grew better, panic took hold of him. There were moments when he foresaw the things that would happen to him with such actuality that his heart galloped and his breath stopped. He felt the smash of truncheons on his elbows and iron-shod boots on his shins; he saw himself grovelling on the floor, screaming for mercy through broken teeth.

Anybody who has been through the judicial process knows this feeling of waiting while the elders pass judgement on you in another room.

"Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth...

...It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party. That is the fact that you have got to relearn, Winston. It needs an act of self-destruction, an effort of the will. You must humble yourself before you can become sane."

"How many fingers am I holding up?"

O'Brien held up his left hand, its back towards Winston, with the thumb hidden and the four fingers extended.

'How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?'

'Four.'

'And if the party says that it is not four but five - then how many?'

'Four.'

The word ended in a gasp of pain.

To name just two examples of this torture. It does not matter how clear it is that the Christian Greek Scriptures refer to God as the "Father," for the majority of Jehovah's Witnesses they must be satisfied with being taught that He is merely their "friend". 1 Timothy 2:5 might state that, "There is one God, and one mediator between God and men, a man, Christ Jesus," but the majority of Jehovah's Witnesses must be satisfied with knowing that he is not actually their mediator, but only mediator to the anointed class.

The Ministry of Love

'And why do you imagine that we bring people to this place?'

'To make them confess.'

'No, that is not the reason. Try again.'

'To punish them.'

'No!' exclaimed O'Brien. His voice had changed extraordinarily, and his face had suddenly become both stern and animated. 'No! Not merely to extract your confession, not to punish you. Shall I tell you why we have brought you here? To cure you! To make you sane!

Disfellowshipping is an act of love. It is the cure. It may help the unrepentant one come to their senses.

If you want a picture of the future...

...imagine a boot stamping on a human face - for ever.

The Society's dictatorship over individuals will continue for ever - on in to the new system and beyond. Someone has to interpret those new 'scrolls.' How it is now, so it will always be.

The Party is immortal

"Can you not understand that the death of the individual is not death? The party is immortal."

The Society always speaks in terms of "classes". Jehovah's Witnesses are going to survive en masse, as a people. Individuals don't matter. The faithful and discreet slave is a class. The anointed are a class. They are a whole. Whoever individually makes up that whole is unimportant. It is the whole that matters.

Consequences

'You did it!' sobbed Winston. 'You reduced me to this state.'

'No, Winston, you reduced yourself to it. This is what you accepted when you set yourself up against the Party. It was all contained in that first act.

The Society never accept responsibility for the actions of others. Disfellowshipped ones have brought it upon themselves - they knew what to expect. Those who were disappointed over the failure of the end to come on all the occasions the Society have been outspoken - 1914, 1925, 1975 - are roundly blamed for their own misplaced expectations.

The Party was in the right...

...It must be so; how could the immortal, collective brain be mistaken?

Room 101

'You asked me once,' said O'Brien, 'what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.

'The worst thing in the world,' said O'Brien, 'varies from individual to individual. It may be burial alive, or death by fire, or by drowning, or by impalement, or fifty other deaths. There are cases where it is some quite trivial thing, not even fatal.'

Though they would hardly admit it, there is a fear that almost every one of Jehovah's Witnesses harbours: "What will happen to me during the great tribulation?" That brief period of time just before Jehovah steps in at Armageddon. That time when all of Gog's hordes have surrounded God's people.

Sexcrime/goodsex

The party member knew what constituted right conduct, and in exceedingly vague, generalized terms he knew what kinds of departure from it were possible. His sexual life, for example, was entirely regulated by the two Newspeak words SEXCRIME (sexual immorality) and GOODSEX (chastity). SEXCRIME covered all sexual misdeeds whatever. It covered fornication, adultery, homosexuality, and other perversions, and, in addition, normal intercourse practised for its own sake. There was no need to enumerate them separately, since they were all equally culpable, and, in principle, all punishable by death. He knew what was meant by GOODSEX--that is to say, normal intercourse between man and wife, for the sole purpose of begetting children, and
without physical pleasure on the part of the woman: all else was SEXCRIME.

It has been a number of years since the Society stopped interfering in what takes place within the marital bedroom, but the footnote in this article shows that they still hold to their position. the bottom line in The Watchtower of March 15, 1983, pages 30-1 is, "As already stated, it is not for elders to 'police' the private marital matters of couples in the congregation. However, if it becomes known that a member of the congregation is practicing or openly advocating perverted sex relations within the marriage bond, that one certainly would not be irreprehensible, and so would not be acceptable for special privileges, such as serving as an elder, a ministerial servant or a pioneer. Such practice and advocacy could even lead to expulsion from the congregation."

Jehovah

What was required in a Party member was an outlook similar to that of the ancient Hebrew who knew, without knowing much else, that all nations other than his own worshipped 'false gods'. He did not need to know that these gods were called Baal, Osiris, Moloch, Ashtaroth, and the like: probably the less he knew about them the better for his orthodoxy. He knew Jehovah and the commandments of Jehovah: he knew, therefore, that all gods with other names or other attributes were false gods.

The Catholic Church or Jehovah's Witnesses? Too close to call

noreply@blogger.com (Rory Sullivan) — Fri, 27 Jun 2014 06:08:00 +0000

There was a court case a couple of years ago concerning Menlo Park Congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses in California, the details of which I couldn't quite fathom. It seemed that a member of the congregation who had been removed as an elder was contesting the decision in court. (This link will serve as a jumping off point if you want to find out more about the case itself.) While representing one of the defendants during a trial held in San Mateo County Court in Redwood City, California, on February 22, 2012, Calvin Rouse, who described himself as "general counsel for the National Organization of Jehovah's Witnesses out of Brooklyn, New York," made this astonishing admission:

"Ordinarily, I wouldn't be here, but this is one our 13,000 congregations in the United States. We are a hierarchical religion structured just like the Catholic Church. And when the order from the Pope comes down defrocking a priest and kicking him out, he no longer has any say in any matter in the local parish."

He added,

"We brought our organizational bylaws book, our rule book here, and we are prepared to present witnesses that this is a hierarchical organization. It is governed from the top down."

There was a time when I used to think that the religion of Jehovah's Witnesses was the Catholic Church done right. Now I think Jehovah's Witnesses are just the Catholic Church done the same...and sometimes worse.

Charles Davis was a prominent theologian in the Catholic Church. In 1967 he wrote A Question of Conscience. It documents his decision to leave the Church. It remains a remarkable piece of work, and anyone with a knowledge of the Watch Tower Societ would not be able to ignore the obvious parallels between the Catholic Church and Jehovah's Witnesses.

Aside from the fact that both consider themselves to be the only true Church, here are some further similarities.

CHURCH HIERARCHY
On July 18, 1870, the First Vatican Council included this statement about the Church's authority:

Therefore, if anyone says that blessed Peter the apostle was not appointed by Christ the lord as prince of all the apostles and visible head of the whole church militant; or that it was a primacy of honour only and not one of true and proper jurisdiction that he directly and immediately received from our lord Jesus Christ himself: let him be anathema.

Therefore, if anyone says that it is not by the institution of Christ the lord himself (that is to say, by divine law) that blessed Peter should have perpetual successors in the primacy over the whole church; or that the Roman pontiff is not the successor of blessed Peter in this primacy: let him be anathema.

So, then, if anyone says that the Roman pontiff has merely an office of supervision and guidance, and not the full and supreme power of jurisdiction over the whole church, and this not only in matters of
faith and morals, but also in those which concern the discipline and government of the church dispersed throughout the whole world; or that he has only the principal part, but not the absolute fullness, of this supreme power; or that this power of his is not ordinary and immediate both over all and each of the churches and over all and each of the pastors and faithful: let him be anathema.

Such is the official stance against anyone that might contradict the hierarchy of the Catholic Church: Let him be anathema. Similarly, if any one of Jehovah's Witnesses rejects the authority structure of the Watch Tower Society, they could soon find themselves on the wrong end of a judicial committee, and have themselves thrown out of the congregation - excommunicated. In other words: Let him be anathema.

Jehovah's Witnesses believe only a limited number - 144,000 - are anointed with the holy spirit. This select number began with the 120 in the upper room, spoken about in Acts chapter 2. All Christians in the first century would have been of this number. The Witnesses believe a period of spiritual darkness was allowed to engulf the earth from the time of the apostle John's death. This darkness existed until Charles Taze Russell, founder of the Watch Tower Society, once again rekindled the spark of true Bible understanding. There are only a few thousand of the anointed left. These are known as "the faithful and discrete slave" after the designation alluded to at Matthew 24:45. However, oversight of the organisation is really in the hands of only a few men, known collectively as the Governing Body. At present they number seven. These seven men have authority to interpret the scriptures. The Governing Body, with perhaps a handful of other men, constitutes the organisation's very own Magesterium.

Although the Catholic Church maintains there is a direct line of authority between the apostle Peter and the papacy, in fact it faces a real challenge in trying to fill in the gap of two centuries until the first Pope was appointed in 232AD. Jehovah's Witnesses also claim a direct line to the faithful and discreet slave mentioned by Jesus in Matthew 24:45. However, they too come unstuck when asked to present evidence of such an unbroken line. On the one hand, on page 344 of God's Kingdom Of A Thousand Years Has Approached (published by the Watch Tower Society), they claim, "As to just how the 'faithful and discreet slave' class existed and served down through the centuries after the death of the apostles of the Master Jesus Christ, we do not have a distinct historical picture. Apparently one generation of the 'slave' class fed the next succeeding generation thereof." And yet, earlier, the very same book states on page 185, "Thirty years later found a small group of men, not associated with the Adventists or affiliated with any of the religious sects of Christendom, studying the Holy Scriptures at Pittsburgh (Allegheny), Pennsylvania, U.S.A. They studied independently so as to avoid looking at the Bible through sectarian spectacles. Among these men was one Charles Taze Russell, just entered into his twenties."

As with the Catholic Church, Jehovah's Witnesses can only look back and claim divine authority in retrospect by pointing at all the wonderful works the organisation has been able to accomplish. Often it is claimed, "the organisation would not have been able to accomplish thus-and-so if it did not have God's backing."

The hierarchy of the organisation continues down through the ranks. Bishops and Archbishops find their equivalency in the offices of Circuit and (soon-to-be-defunct) District Overseers. The former have jurisdiction over twenty or more congregations, making sure that preaching targets continue to be met. The latter have jurisdiction over a handful of circuits, making sure that Circuit Overseer's are correctly carrying out their responsibilities. Further down the hierarchical chain, each congregation has its own appointed men making up "the body of elders". There is an unmistakable clergy/laity divide, whether the every-day Witness would like to admit it or not.

INFALLIBILITY
Although Jehovah's Witnesses would cry foul on anyone who suggests that they think they are infallible, their own writings, and the attitude they expect from their adherents would seem to belie this claim. Whatever Jehovah's Witnesses offer as their doctrine must be considered to be what has been referred to as "present truth". Even when this changes, the new doctrine will be exchanged for the old, and continue to be referred to as "the truth". This is very much the same as the position adopted by the Catholic Church, as documented by Charles Davis in A Question of Conscience:

Monsignor Vallainc, the head of the Vatican Press Office, when asked how the Pope could say there was no doubt about the official teaching on birth control despite the fact that the Commision had been appointed to study the question said, as widely reported in the Press, that the Church was in a state of certainty, but when the Pope made his decision the Church would pass from one state of certainty to another.

There could be no better way of expressing the position of Jehovah's Witnesses. They consider themselves to be in a permanent state of certainty, and when the Governing Body changes its position on something, the organisation simply passes from one state of certainty to another. As Davis himself states, "Occasionally the manipulation of language to hide truth and protect the prestige of authority reaches the point of absurdity."

ADVICE FOR THOSE THAT WISH TO LEAVE
It was fascinating to see that when Charles Davis moved to leave the Catholic Church he face very much the same advice that doubting Witnesses do today. Catholics are reminded that the Church is only human. Jehovah's Witnesses, too, are reminded that the organisation is made up of imperfect men who are bound to make mistakes. "Remain where you are," Davis was encouraged, and this is usually accompanied by the suggestion that things could change. A section from A Question of Conscience perfectly mirrors the attitude encouraged among Jehovah's Witnesses:

Revelation keeps its transcendence over all attempts to express it. A better understanding of this transcendence may bring a greater stress upon the relative value of all dogmatic statements. In brief, while many problems remain intractable at present, it is best to hold them in suspense. We should not allow ourselves to be overcome by difficulties and apparent contradictions, but continue to work patiently with the confident hope that time will eventually lead to the solution of what now troubles us.

In the same vein, Jehovah's Witnesses are fond of quoting Proverbs 4:18, "The path of the righteous ones is like the bright light that is getting lighter and lighter until the day is firmly established."

In the end, Davis found that his loyalty was called into question.

Many of the comments I received, both publicly and privately, even from theologians, invoked the question of loyalty to the Church. The image most frequently used was that of the bark of Peter buffeted by storms. The crew should remain on board, not abandon the ship. I was failing in my duty, ijn the trust reposed in me, at a time when every hand was needed to battle with the tempest. My departure was a betrayal of the Church I should love despite its defects.

Jehovah's Witnesses also find their loyalty called into question. They are reminded about who it was that led them to "the truth", that freed them from unscriptural teachings. A constant cry is, "Where else is there to go to?" in reference to Peter's words to Jesus at John 6:68, "Lord, whom shall we go away to? You have sayings of everlasting life."

CONFESSION AND PENANCE
Just as the Catholic Church encourages the confession of sins, so do Jehovah's Witnesses. Along with this confession comes the need to do penance for any wrongdoing. Whereas a Catholic might need to say several Our Fathers and a Hail Mary, or go through the rosary, one of Jehovah's Witnesses who confesses to wrongdoing might be removed from an appointed position, or put under certain restrictions, not being allowed to comment at meetings, or have the privilege of being used on the platform. This will continue for as long as the body of elders deem necessary. It is up to them to decide when a period of penance has been fulfilled.

EXCOMMUNICATION
Expulsion from the congregation is practised by the Catholic Church, but this is a rare occurrence. Jehovah's Witnesses are far more liberal with the execution of this discipline, which they call "disfellowshipping". Over the past few centuries relatively few Catholics have been excommunicated. Among Jehovah's Witnesses the number runs into the thousands each year. And, although there will be tears shed in their families for both Catholics and Jehovah's Witnesses who are forcibly removed from the Church, only one of these two will follow it up with a determination to drastically curtail any association with the expelled one.

CATECHISM
The Catholic catechism is a collection of questions on the Christian faith. Jehovah's Witnesses also have a book containing over a hundred questions which a baptism candidate must go through and answer to the satisfaction of several elders.

We could go on:

The monastic tradition of referring to each other as "brother" and "sister".
The organisation takes delight in declaring, "The women telling the good news are a large army." It could be argued that these women are the brides of Christ, married to the organisation. In this way they constitute a sisterhood of nuns, often putting religion first before family. The lines can become blurred as to whether they carry out their commitments out of love, or because the organisation tells them to.
The Watchtower facilities being built in New York state are taking on the form of the Society's very own Vatican City.

These are just a few of the many similarities, and we haven't even begun to talk about the doctrinal affinity. Chief among these is a belief in the Trinity. Paradoxically, Jehovah's Witnesses argue strenuously that their belief that "Jesus Christ is not part of a Trinitarian godhead but is the only-begotten Son of God", sets them apart from other Christian faiths. However, they find it impossible to separate the holy spirit from Jehovah, and they agree that faith in God can only be maintained by accepting Jesus Christ as the Saviour. They cannot disagree that the fullness of God can only be experienced by including the Father, the Son, and the holy spirit. What else is this but the Trinity doctrine under a different guise? Furthermore, their eschatology is essentially the same - a vague future hope that a new heavens and a new earth will replace the old.

So it is that while Jehovah's Witnesses try very hard to promote their differences between their organisation and that of the Catholic Church, in reality it becomes increasingly difficult to tell the two religions apart. It appears that a relatively high percentage of converts to Jehovah's Witnesses come from the Catholic Church. This is because all they have really done is pass through a door from one room to another, but stayed within the same house.

Occupy Jehovah's Witnesses: When the 0.1% are the 99.9%

noreply@blogger.com (Rory Sullivan) — Fri, 11 Apr 2014 13:47:00 +0000

On the evening of Monday, April 14th, after sundown, some 19 million people will meet in Kingdom Halls around the world to celebrate the Lord's Evening Meal. Of those 19 million less than half will be fully-fledged Jehovah's Witnesses comprising men, women, and children, who have dedicated their lives to the cause, amounting to some 7-and-a-half million - a mere 0.1% of the world's 7 billion population.

That 0.1% are in a privileged position. They are the sole bearers of "the truth". They alone know what God's purpose is regarding this earth - that at any given moment God is going to exact Armageddon upon this earth. The ungodly are going to be exterminated in a war against God that they cannot win. The only likely survivors of this war will be the 0.1% of the world's population who have dedicated their lives to the service of Jehovah, the true God. They will be preserved through the end of this wicked system, to live on a cleansed earth which they will go on to restore to the paradise it was always meant to be. If anyone else survives, it will be by the skin of their teeth. This cleansed new earth will be ruled over by Jesus Christ and his 144,000 co-rulers - a number chosen from among the earth. They will rule for a thousand years, and then Jesus will hand over the final result to his heavenly Father...and then...who knows what, and frankly, who cares.

The 0.1% have no intention of keeping this information to themselves. Jehovah's Witnesses are known throughout the world for their selfless house-to-house preaching work. In 236 lands around the globe they are pictured speaking to people of all colour and creed about "this good news of the kingdom," and leaving countless pieces of literature in numerous languages. They claim to be the only organisation truly engaged in this vital ministry. When the sword comes down, you can be sure that they are not going to be blamed for negligence. Your blood is not going to be on their hands.

However, on the night of April 14th, a curious tradition is going to take place in these Kingdom Halls of Jehovah's Witnesses. This is the Memorial of Christ's death. Apparently, it will be the only true representation of what Paul describes in verses 23-26 of chapter 11 of his first letter to the Corinthians:

For I received from the Lord that which I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus in the night in which he was going to be handed over took a loaf and, after giving thanks, he broke it and said: “This means my body which is in your behalf. Keep doing this in remembrance of me.” He did likewise respecting the cup also, after he had the evening meal, saying: “This cup means the new covenant by virtue of my blood. Keep doing this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” For as often as you eat this loaf and drink this cup, you keep proclaiming the death of the Lord, until he arrives.

Throughout thousands of Kingdom Halls, bread and wine will be wordlessly passed from person to person, and 99.9% of the dedicated attendees will neither eat the bread nor drink the wine.

Jehovah's Witnesses remain firmly convinced that Jesus' words to "eat this loaf and drink this cup" does not apply to most dedicated Christians - it only applies to members of the 144,000 elect. Today, among the 7 million dedicated, baptised Witnesses, some 13,000 or so will claim to be surviving members of the 144,000 ruling class. This 13, 000 represents a somewhat embarrassing number. Ever since 1935, when it was insinuated that the door to entry into the 144,000 had as good as closed, the number of those who claimed to be of the 144,000 "anointed" had gradually been tapering off, just as was to be expected. For a decade or two the number settled at the mid-8000s. However, since 2007 the number has been rising at a somewhat alarming rate - over 500 a year! It has lead to some panicked explanations by the organisation's ruling class, the latest being the suggestion that, "A number of factors — including past religious beliefs or even mental or emotional imbalance — might cause some to assume mistakenly that they have the heavenly calling." (The Watchtower, 2011 8/5 page 22) They would rather cry foul on everybody else than find fault with the mentality that created the problem in the first place.

If we take a generous and open-hearted interpretation of the evidence, we can say that, strictly speaking, the numbers really ought to continue to decline, and everyone who has since begun to partake of the bread and wine is either mad or still attached to their old religious convictions, then the actual number of anointed should probably be hovering more around the mid-7000s. Ah, now we're talking. A neat 0.1% of the 7 million Witnesses worldwide.

This 0.1% are the "elect". Up until last year this small group were also referred to as "the faithful and discreet slave", a term derived from the words found at Matthew 24:45-47,

“Who really is the faithful and discreet slave whom his master appointed over his domestics, to give them their food at the proper time? Happy is that slave if his master on arriving finds him doing so. Truly I say to you, He will appoint him over all his belongings."

Based on this verse, Jehovah's Witnesses understood that this "faithful and discreet slave" - this 0.1% - had the God-given responsibility to look after the spiritual needs of the the 99.9%. To be obedient to "the faithful and discreet slave" is to be obedient to the Christ himself. The 99.9% labour under the misguided assumption that all the members of "the faithful and discreet slave" are in some way involved in the oversight of the majority. The reality is very different.

In a series of ever decreasing circles, this 0.1% are themselves just another 99.9%. All decisions and policies are in actuality decided upon by a group of men known collectively as the "Governing Body". At present the number of members on the Governing Body stands at 7 - a mere 0.1% of those remaining of the 144, 000. Since July 15, 2013 the Governing Body have seen fit to identify themselves exclusively with "the faithful and discreet slave" class. While for many years the Governing Body were happy for the majority to entertain the fantasy that their spirituality was being handled by "the faithful and discreet slave" en masse, they have recently made it quite clear that they are not interested in having any input from the other 99.9%. How can they, after all, when they have branded any one of them with "mental or emotional imbalance." It would be nuts to let them have any part in the decision-making process. In The Watchtower of June 15, 2009 page 24, they plainly state:

Are all these anointed ones throughout the earth part of a global network that is somehow involved in revealing new spiritual truths? No. The Governing Body does not consult with each individual member of the slave class before making decisions.

This 0.01% are the next generation of the elite. They are the offspring of the offspring. They are the Rehoboam to the previous generation's Solomon - and just as Rehoboam boasted, “My father, for his part, made your yoke heavy, but I, for my part, shall add to your yoke. My father, for his part, chastised you with whips, but I, for my part, shall chastise you with scourges,” so they will make the yoke upon the necks of the majority even tougher. They will continue to bear no responsibility for any of the life-threatening decisions they make. They have inherited doctrines and traditions they can do nothing about. They have a centuries worth of study material they can hash and re-hash, with only minor adjustments. The recent history of the organisation presented on a series of DVDs proved to be a cut-and-paste selection of legendary quotes which they lifted from the 1993 book, Jehovah’s Witnesses — Proclaimers of God’s Kingdom. At the same time, they will distance themselves from their forefathers, quietly erasing the foundations and lower storeys of their theocratic edifice until eventually they are floating effortlessly in the heavens. They seek to make the Governing Body an entity all of its own - a mouthpiece for "the faithful and discreet slave" - that can be served on by anyone they see fit to appoint. They are working to establish their own right to rule. They have to. After all, most (if not all) of those seven men were not even alive in 1935. All of them come under their own condemnation that, "A number of factors — including past religious beliefs or even mental or emotional imbalance — might cause some to assume mistakenly that they have the heavenly calling." However, they have the advantage of being able to sit in their tower surrounded by the moat of circular reasoning: "We are here, so we are meant to be here. We can't be suffering from mental or emotional imbalance because if we were Jehovah would not have appointed us to this position."

As with Jannes and Jambres, the madness of this position is very plain for all to see. Everyone can see it except those cursed with the madness. Like a depressed person, full of self-loathing, the Governing Body despises its own physique. It refuses to look at itself in a mirror. It hates what it sees. It believes some of its own adherents - their own fellow believers - are afflicted with mental or emotional imbalance, or that some of them are still resolutely clinging to past religious beliefs. If this is the opinion they let slip in public, what must they think of their fellow believers in private? They see them as a stiff-necked people who would do nothing but go astray, were it not for the determined resolve of those at the top. Contrary to Jesus claim that each individual is "worth more than many sparrows", members of the organisation are treated more like skin cells that are shed and replaced by the thousands each day without being noticed. The 99.99% accept this treatment with quiet resignation. But not all of them.

The men and women who speak out boldly about the injustices of the organisation through forums or by other means comprise the Watch Tower Society's very own Occupy movement. They are speaking up on behalf of the 99.99%. They do not necessarily seek the dissolution of the organisation, they are simply determined to highlight the unjust balance of power. The 0.01% are able to hold sway over the majority because the 99.99% are held captive to fear, guilt, and shame. They fear for their lives and the 0.01% are content to do nothing about that except gently stoke the fires of discontent by subtly labelling people, and calling into question people's loyalty to God. At worst, the 0.01% have placed themselves in positions of authority and have given themselves permission to adopt and enforce policies that have proved time and time again to have a damaging effect on people's well-being. They have destroyed lives, and without an ounce of shame. OJW will go to any lengths to make these facts known. Wave after wave will not let the oppression and authoritarianism continue unchallenged

Within the rank and file of Jehovah's Witnesses, however, there also appears to be a quiet revolution taking place. One of the reasons for the gradually increasing number of memorial emblem partakers is the growing belief that all Christians have been commanded to "keep doing this in memory of me," and not just a select few. At first this defiant group will be viewed with suspicion and scepticism. If some are foolhardy enough to speak out publicly, they will be tried and evicted - disfellowshiped for apostasy, in JW parlance. And then in a farcical display of irony, the Governing Body will declare that "evidently" the bread and wine ought to be partaken by all Christians. This could prove to be a logistical frightfest - just think of the health and safety outcry when everyone is asked to sip from the same cup! Perhaps they will be asked to file up to the front in an orderly manner where an appointed man will wipe the lip of the wineglass. And thus Jehovah's Witnesses will continue to morph in to any number of other Christian denominations.

Ghostworld of the Excommunicated

noreply@blogger.com (Rory Sullivan) — Fri, 04 Apr 2014 08:15:00 +0000

I died on Wednesday, April 4th, 2012.

Time was called at a little after 8 o'clock in the evening.

"Rory Sullivan is no longer one of Jehovah's Witnesses."

I had been sick for at least a decade prior to my passing, but it had not always been that way. For many years I was fit, healthy, and strong. I had grown to be a man qualified to teach and lead. Ten years ago, however, I was infected with a debilitating illness. It was diagnosed as a sympathy toward worldly psychology, but in reality it was a gradually dawning realisation that any lasting spiritual healing could only come from the inside out. Such thinking began to bleed in to my congregation ministry enough that eventually the local body of elders took issue and decided to let me go as an appointed man.

I worked hard to self-manage my condition. At one point I showed all the signs of a remarkable recovery, right up to the point that I was asked to serve again as an elder, but it was all a wicked deception. The disease had taken root at too deep a level. After eighteen months the sickness resurfaced, and I went in to rapid decline.

I had lost all confidence in the body of men self-appointed to oversee the organisation. It seemed contradictory to me that an organisation could lay claim to a monopoly on the truth while at the same time being less than honest themselves. I was only just learning that the Watchtower Society has not always presented its history accurately. Anything questionable written in earlier literature is carelessly brushed aside with a gesture, "The light is getting brighter." Past "mistakes" become those that the Lord has permitted. I couldn't understand why he would do that. Why would he condone years of his spokesman declaring something as truth which could potentially endanger the lives of his flock, or damage their faith, only to have it later revoked? When is it the operation of God's holy spirit, and when is it merely the whims of men? How can you claim not to be infallible and yet insist on calling your teachings "the truth"?

There was no point in going to the spiritual doctors about matters like these. There was no cure. There would just be encouragement to keep taking the medication - Bible-reading, preaching, meetings, prayer - anything to push those pernicious doubts back in to the darkness. By then I knew that it was too late. The walls were crumbling. Nothing was standing up under close scrutiny. It was all superficial nonsense anyway. The fact is, I was finally waking up. I was beginning to see myself clearly for the first time, and these men who had insinuated themselves into my life were just getting in the way. They were not a help, they were a hindrance, and I wanted nothing more to do with them.

***

Eventually Kate steeled herself for the inevitable question. The moment came. It was night, and the children had been put to bed. I heard her footfall on the bedroom floor. She creaked down the stairs and I braced myself for what I knew was coming. She entered the room, dark save only for the chilly blue glow of the computer screen. I felt her beside me.

"Are you going to die?"

"I think so."

She broke down in tears and I offered empty words of reassurance. Shortly after that I stopped all congregation activities. I was already refusing to report my field ministry, but now I ceased to go out preaching altogether. I stopped attending the meetings at the Kingdom Hall.

The qualified men sought advice and were told that even though I would not accept orthodox treatment I was imposing a sort of self-quarantine, and so they could leave me be and allow the sickness to follow its own course. Time would tell if it was benign or malignant.

In this inactive state all things become unsettled. Associating with others becomes stilted and unnatural. There is a phone-call or two. Promises of visits that never materialise. The community is kept very busy, and quite frankly, if you're not well enough to pitch in and help out, you have only yourself to blame.

Social gatherings are particularly awkward. There is a distinct atmosphere: They wonder why you are there. If you haven't done the work, why should you be entitled to the rewards? The well don't quite know how to handle the sick. The expectation of death hangs in the air. They are preparing themselves for the inevitable. They make comments like, "What are we to do with you?" and "It breaks my heart." There are furtive glances, a curled lip of displeasure, voices dropped to a whisper, enforced cheeriness when accosted, all the time the concern that what the sick one has might be catching.

Some are optimistic, but conversation is pregnant, all a prelude to the expected question, "When are you going to be back with us?" I can't tell them I don't think I ever will be. I don't need the final curtain to come down before its time. So I lie, and say, "I don't know," or "Never say 'never'..." or some other specially prepared phrase - sometimes it's just a shrug and a half smile - and they are a little deflated and touch me on the back or arm and shrink away and the conversation is over. One thing is a given: At all costs, don't talk about the illness. Only those who have the required qualifications are best placed to talk about such things. For anyone else, leave well alone.

Kate begins to go through a sort of grieving process. It starts when the disease is diagnosed as being terminal. Now she is angry, feeling guilty, blaming herself - perhaps there was something more she could have done, things she should not have done; now she is bargaining with God, pleading for him to show her a sign; now she is blaming me: "You knew what you were getting in to, why have you changed your mind now?" It is impossible to reason with her and be heard. Newcomers are only ever made familiar with a sanitised version of the Society's history. Furthermore, the set of beliefs you joined up with may not be the same a few years later. The organisation is allowed to change around you, and you are expected to change with it, but one is not permitted to change independent of the Society - not without serious repercussions. It is likened to Eve's rebellious eating of the fruit, the frightening punishment for which is expulsion from the "spiritual paradise".

She blames me for not doing more to keep healthy, for not declaring my illness earlier. Perhaps they could have done something before it was too late. But what was the point of arguing with the elders over things like failed prophecies and changing doctrines? I knew what the answer would be: "They are imperfect men...mistakes were made in their eagerness for the end to come...the light is getting brighter..." How could I explain that a dam had burst deep inside of me, and the rushing waters had washed away all the sand upon which my house of faith was built, and that this was a good thing? It was futile. I was a lost cause, a dead man walking. It was only a matter of time.

***

The sudden discovery of an alarming new symptom sent the qualified men into a flurry of activity. Some of them had found out I had a website and had been writing about my spiritual views and publishing them for all the world to see. To begin with they had tried to ignore it, but for some unexplained reason it eventually came to the attention of the other elders. Now that it had become impossible to ignore the qualified men met to discuss my condition. It didn't matter that nobody had read or been affected by my writings, it was all about the "what-if".

We talked briefly about my misgivings, but they were only really concerned with knowing if I was willing to accept their particular course of treatment. I wasn't, and after consulting with head office they agreed that there was nothing more they could do for me. The final diagnosis was "apostasy" - in other words, I had become mentally diseased. Because they feared the disease was contagious, and lethal, they saw no option but to exterminate the carrier. 2 Timothy 2:16-18 was used to prove that the spread of gangrene must be stopped:

But shun empty speeches that violate what is holy; for they will advance to more and more ungodliness, and their word will spread like gangrene. Hymenaeus and Philetus are of that number. These very [men] have deviated from the truth, saying that the resurrection has already occurred; and they are subverting the faith of some.

The rich irony of this scriptural judgement was completely lost on them. The Watchtower Society have been declaring that the resurrection has been occurring since 1918. "On this one basic point," declares The Watchtower of April 1, 1986, "What [Hymenaeus and Philetus] were teaching as to the time of the resurrection, Paul rightly branded them as apostates, with whom faithful Christians would not fellowship."

They tell me I only have a week to live.

At the end of seven days, they pull the switch.

***

I choose not to be present for the announcement - not everyone appreciates an open casket. There is an audible gasp. At the end of the meeting members of the congregation descend upon Kate and offer their condolences and words of consolation. One or two even weep. Afterwards she goes with some of them for a meal, like a sort of wake. She gets sympathy cards. She is a Watchtower widow.

Even though my death is expected, the announcement of my passing still hits Kate hard. However, she will pass through it, it will hurry her through to the last stage of grief - acceptance - and she can then settle back in to some sort of normalcy. There will always be a hole, but she will manage. I try to embrace her, but it is as if we are not in the same room. We do not occupy the same space. For now I am an apparition, barely visible.

Life is punctuated by other-worldly experiences as I drift by people that I know from the congregation. I drive by someone's house as she is loading her car. Everything slips in to silent slow motion as she looks up as if brushed by something uncanny. I pass someone I know sitting on a public bench and she looks at where I would have been, a small sad smile playing about her lips.

I don't see many in town. It could be that I am seen first and avoided. When I do happen upon someone, the reaction is all too common: Embarrassment, not knowing where to look, a hesitant step betraying an overwhelming desire to walk in the opposite direction. If I am somehow spotted, a spectre taken shape, I must be avoided at all costs, head down, or turned. If there is enough time, a road can be crossed. I know that if I was to try to make contact there would be a look of terror, or great pity. One or two forget - a big smile and vigorous wave from a car, or headlights flashed as I drive by - and I know that these will go on to reassure themselves that their merciful and loving God will overlook their momentary forgetfulness.

Would you believe it but the first people we bump in to after my expulsion is the family of my friend who was my best man at our wedding. We are shopping in a neighbouring town, and suddenly there they are. In these situations there is an unspoken protocol to be observed: Before approaching a Watchtower widow one must assess the situation from a safe distance. Is the widow carrying the burden of her dead husband? When it is determined that a reasonable moment has arisen, approach with caution. The conversation is low, the group huddled. The concern will be that reserved for the lost and lonely, the bereaved. "So sorry for your loss, we were shocked to hear...How are you coping? Is everything all right?" I drift around just beyond the periphery. No looks are needed. They know where I am and will sense whether I am straying too close. I turn my back for an instant, and they are gone. A little later we surprise the wife. My presence gives her a cold chill down her back. She grimaces at Kate and hurries off. They will have to leave the shop. They might even abandon the town.

Soon after my demise I bid a heartfelt farewell to my close working companion of twelve years. Even though he has no real qualms about continuing to work with me he cannot risk the disapproval of his fellow elders, and the possibility of upsetting members of his congregation. Now that I am a corpse, I must not be touched. If any of the living lay their hands on me too often they run the risk of losing their own lives. Although the organisation teaches that Israelite Law was nailed to the cross along with the Christ, in reality it is still very much alive and kicking. Apostasy is the worst sort of disease, most contagious. Even the qualified men are warned against any close contact. Each year the elders are encouraged to visit disfellowshipped people in the territory, and apostates are not included on this list.

Lapsed Witnesses are also considered to be at risk from contamination. Elders feel duty bound to act as inter-congregational informants, and local bodies of elders have been known to be particularly (un)scrupulous in dealing with deliberate absentees. On one occasion I return to the Kingdom Hall to attend a funeral. A companion of mine is there. He has not been active in the religion for a while, but still we must avoid acknowledging one another.

That funeral is a strange and sad affair. Right there on their home territory, passing among these people - men, women, and children I have known for twenty years - who must now act as if I do not exist. Eye contact is conspicuously avoided. Eye contact could betray true feelings - compassion, friendship, a yearning to smile, greet, or embrace. I can't even get the attention of the one sitting behind me in order to borrow a songbook, so I just remove it like a poltergeist.

I sing like an angel. They might not be able to see me, or talk to me, but they will be able to hear me - a voice from the afterlife. For one or two, it is simply too much. They can not bear to ignore me. A light touch on the arm, a whispered, "Lovely to see you..." Perhaps there is hope for some.

What is very sad is knowing that natural affection is being suppressed. Occasionally around town I catch a member of the congregation suddenly seeing me. At first there is an instinctive look of recognition and a smile, but almost immediately this is followed by a set expression and a bowed, defiant head, as they remember the way I should be treated now that I have entered a disfellowshipped state.

Even sadder is the subtle instructing of children in the ways of hatred. To see young boys and girls casting shy glances, but knowing that they have been primed - "We don't talk to so-and-so any more" - and they meekly go along with it. This despite the fact that children are not strictly bound by congregation law and are free to interact with the expelled should they choose to. But the grown-ups aren't so keen on them exercising this freedom. They get uneasy and hurry them along. Being so young, children can't really understand why someone should be ignored and avoided, but this is simply one of those facts of life they will have to come to terms with, until the spirit fades from their vision too.

Sometimes I happen upon Kate quietly weeping, the bathroom door locked, stifled sobs coming from within. Her grief is understandable. By default, the widowed wife is subjected to the same isolation as the deceased husband. Her house has become a mausoleum. It is too risky to visit. The path leading to our house rounds a blind corner, the front door part of a glass conservatory, and there is every possibility I might be sitting right there. Visitors could easily be caught off guard - a faltering step, a self-conscious laugh, stiff formalism, a visit cut short. Few enter beyond the thresh-hold. Most conversations are made hurriedly at the door accompanied by cautious glances over shoulders. Telephone conversations are quickly reduced to formal passing on of information. All social niceties are dispensed with.

The decision to expel me has stripped our marriage of a potentially valuable avenue of conversation. The extensive Talmudic notes on the subject of excommunication - those oral laws pencilled in to the margin that are not specifically stated in the scriptures, but become just as binding - state that no spiritual matters may be discussed with a disfellowshipped partner. By extension this would include philosophy, psychology, politics, and any other subject which might have a tendency to slip in to the spiritual. The laws of the Society hang like a shadow over our relationship rendering it monochromatic. Of course the marriage suffers as a result. It can no longer be a full and healthy relationship. We now move in two completely separate circles.

Once Kate said, "Talk to me about it. Maybe we'll come with you..." But we both know these are just words of desperation. Conversations like this are rarely successful. Ultimately, an overwhelming realisation must well up irresistibly from within, and it would take nothing short of a miracle for this to happen to Kate. Born and raised as one of Jehovah's Witnesses, an extravert who needs the love and approval of others, the only people she knows are Jehovah's Witnesses. As well as the huge embarrassment it would be to admit the religion could be wrong, there is too big a risk of losing ones friends and family. These can appear to be insurmountable barriers to overcome in one's own strength alone. It can only be accomplished with a complete over-turning of one's self-image, and that is not a road that many are prepared to go down.

For those who are ready to venture down that road, it is true that there are sacrifices to be made, and wandering this ghostworld of the excommunicated can certainly be a sad and surreal experience at times. However, if one is to live with any sort of love, integrity, and freedom from contradiction, it is a sacrifice well worth making.

Brief exchange with a circuit overseer

noreply@blogger.com (Rory Sullivan) — Fri, 28 Mar 2014 07:09:00 +0000

It was certainly my experience that when I was becoming increasingly disillusioned with the doctrines of Jehovah's Witnesses, personal spiritual conversation with those closest to me - primarily my wife - shut down, and everything was placed in to the laps of those in an official capacity. The elders can handle it. As long as the elders were handling it, what more could be done. Part of the efforts to readjust my thinking included a meeting with a circuit overseer. He was not our own circuit overseer, but a friend of the family. In our brief conversation it soon became apparent that he had nothing groundbreaking to offer. It was all familiar territory: "What are the governing body getting out of it?" "Who really is the faithful and discreet slave?" "Where else is there to go to? If Jesus were to come down, this is the religion he would belong to." I came away no less convinced.

When I sent my letter to the body of elders, I also forwarded a copy to Anton. This was our brief exchange:

Dear Rory,

It is with intense sadness that I received your email, and with equal sadness that I noted the contentment and tenor of your message.

I apologise for not replying to your email of last year; I always intended to and actually framed a number of replies in my mind and intended to put them in writing. I obviously didn’t think it would come to this.

I would have to say, in connection with that original email, that nothing you said was new to me, I had come across it all before, and dealt with it. It does seem to me that you have fallen and succumbed to the bait of “spiritual me-ism” where we become the centre of our spiritual world, that how we feel as an individual, our personal relationship with God is the most important thing, which, tempting as it may seem is not the case. You seem to now feel there is no messianic implication in Gen 3:15 and no link to Rev 12 or Jesus prayer at Matt 6. That the first thing Jesus taught us to pray for is not the most important thing, the sanctification of Jehovah’s name, and the doing of Jehovah’s things Jehovah’s way according to His eternal purpose. The old illustration of the 3 piece suite comes to mind – going to the showroom and sitting in this one and then that one until you find one that suits you and is comfortable for you. That’s not the way. It’s finding how God says he wants to be worshipped and finding our place there. So where are you worshipping now? I presume you haven’t gone back to the middle ages and started worshipping with those who celebrate the trinity and hellfire etc, I can’t imagine you doing that, although once we become spiritually bedarkened, strange things can happen. So are you now a bit of a “lone ranger” spiritually, picking out the bits that Rory decides are right and rejecting the bits that Rory decides are wrong? That seems a flawed and dangerous course, as if our own wisdom is sufficient to guide us at any given time. Prov 3:5-7 and Prov 18:1 would come to mind.

Satan is the God of pride and rebellion, Jehovah the God of humility and obedience and it’s good for us. When things go wrong, the path is to ask, “What can I learn from this, will I allow it to make me bitter or better?” Everything about Jehovah is teaching us qualities that bring us closer to him, (Jas 1:2-4; Rom 5: 3-5) humility being one of the main ones, everything about Satan teaches the opposite and spiritual me-ism falls firmly in the latter camp.

Rory, my dear friend, whom I love so much, nothing in your recent email suggested you view yourself any longer as a brother. You addressed the elders as “men”, and were critical of the arrangements they were enforcing. However, you were the one that agreed to abide by the house rules when you got baptised, you knew what they were and agreed to them. You are the one that has put yourself at odds with them. When you start advocating and publishing things contrary to those precepts and potentially undermining others, you leave those charged with care of the flock no option. “If you can’t restore the man, you must protect the congregation.” This is a wonderful and holy place we have found. We have unity of purpose and belief. It is a family that abides by the house rules; it stands up for the highest principles, for God’s moral standards in an increasingly debased and degraded world. It gives a safe environment for our young people to grow up in. It’s focus is outward not inward. We are an organisation of preachers, dedicated to helping others. We fulfil the apostolic mandate of Matt 24 and Matt 28 in accordance with Acts 20:20 and Acts 4:42 which is not in the adverbial but distributive sense and we are the only ones doing it. It is Jehovah’s Name and purpose that is of paramount to us, not our own, but by virtue of that we get salvation and the best life as part of His purpose.

Matt 16:24,25 says to disown our self. Rory I beg of you to do that. Forget yourself and any perceived hurts and injustices you have suffered. Just forget yourself, and give yourself to Jehovah, be used by Him and Jesus in the context of the Organization he is using, which regardless of what you may think at the moment stands out as so manifestly different from the corrupt, fusion religions of Christendom; stay with your lovely family in a spiritual sense, be a true spiritual head for them.

I look back with such fondness on those days in Norfolk – you and Kath and Neil Young! I’ve still got the tape you both did for me.

Rory, I have such affection for you and Kath, if the announcement does go through, I hope that in time you can find your way back – there is nowhere else.

Warm love

Your brother (at present)
Anton

***

Dear Anton,

I appreciate you taking the time to put your feelings down in writing.

It really is too late to have decent conversation. The announcement will go ahead on Wednesday, and I shall never return to the organisation. It took me a little over twelve months to join, and it has taken me almost eight years to leave.

I won't attempt to answer the accusations of "spiritual me-ism". It falls into the trap of not directly discussing the misgivings, but instead denigrating one's character. Happily, I have a better sense of my own motives, and my certainty is in no danger of being damaged.

The reference to the middle ages is strange. The organisation's opinion about who wrote what parts of the Bible and when have languished back in the middle ages while all around them men who make it their life's work to understand the history of the Scriptures have been publishing a more enlightened understanding. No, I don't adhere to the Trinity - however, I can see that the Trinity is simply man's clumsy way of trying to explain that in order to experience Christianity in it's fullest sense, men need to have the Father, the Son, and the holy spirit. Try explaining the holy spirit without mentioning God. It is impossible. There is no holy spirit without God. And today - the argument goes - one cannot enjoy a pure relationship with God if one does not accept the Christ. The three are essential. Page 426 of the Reasoning book poses the question:"When someone says, "Do you believe in the Trinity? You might reply, "I find that not everyone has the same thing in mind when he refers to the Trinity. Perhaps I could answer your question better if I knew what you mean." Given the above definition you would be forced to agree that you, too, adhere to the Trinity - or you would have to force them to alter their definition to one more suited to your opposition, rendering the initial reply moot.

All your references to Satan are rendered null and void. The Pharisees, too, charged Jesus with having a demon. I can imagine they used much the same arguments.

Your paragraph about the house rules I can agree with in part. That is all they are: House Rules. I do not entirely agree that those who join know what they are getting in to. It is more like a dawning realisation as opposed to an up front presentation of everything it might mean if at some future time you choose to leave the organisation. Newcomers are fragile and naive, like a newborn deer finding its legs. I encountered "apostasy" very early on, and it was very quickly stamped on and presented as a fearful Satanic boogie-man designed specifically to entrap spiritually weak individuals. It must not be read, it must be consigned to the bin. Little did I know that some of these were once believers who had since come to learn some uncomfortable truths, and were now having their names dragged through the mud.

I implore you not to question the tone of this e-mail. Read back through your letter to me, and do so through my eyes. I forgive anyone who leaves the organisation for being bitter, and angry. It is shocking - truly shocking - for a few men to hold sway over so many. Their arbitrary and fluctuating decisions have caused heartache and loss of life - yes death. And it is done without a shred of shame. Not a shred. And you have the gall to talk about "spiritual me-ism".

I did forget myself. I let it all go...and this is where it brought me.

I, too, have fond memories of the times in Norfolk. You were a lovely man to be around. With any (whatever) you will be posted here to Suffolk so that Katherine can see more of you and Jules. She loves you a lot.

Much love,
Rory

Too much power, and yet no power at all

noreply@blogger.com (Rory Sullivan) — Fri, 21 Mar 2014 08:00:00 +0000

After the decision was made to remove me from the congregation, but before the announcement was made, I sent this letter to the three men who made up the committee, and several other elders.

An Open Letter to the Body of Elders,
Sudbury (Suffolk) Congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses

On Wednesday, April 4, 2012, the decision will be carried out to announce to the congregation that, “Rory Sullivan is no longer one of Jehovah's Witnesses.”

Men, I urge you not to make this announcement.

This action serves to highlight a crucial problem with the elder arrangement among Jehovah's Witnesses: You are called upon to bear the burdensome contradiction of having both too much power, and yet having no power at all.

In dealing with the matter of the accusation referred to as “apostasy”, you have too much power. You have the full backing of the Governing Body to come down hard on any congregation member who has misgivings about the religious views of the organisation, and chooses to question those views publicly, or publish their own spiritual observations.

The authority vested in congregation elders gives you the power to radically alter a person's life. According to the rule, adhered to by Jehovah's Witnesses, by deciding to expel someone from the congregation you are telling members of the congregation to have nothing more to do with that person. You bar that person from any social contact with friends and acquaintances. The person's employment is often affected. It deeply upsets family members, and, in extreme cases, jeopardises marital harmony. Furthermore, it can have a knock-on effect on anyone inhabiting the outer reaches of the congregation who may choose to associate with the expelled individual. In my own case, 27 years of family, friends, and acquaintances, will be snuffed out.

And yet, despite having the authority to seriously affect a person’s life, there is nothing you can do about the scriptural interpretation upon which this decision is based. You are entirely at the mercy of the whims and arbitrary decisions of those who occupy the seat of power. Faced with the question as to why the Governing Body should choose to interpret scripture in the way it does, you are rendered impotent. You have no power at all.

Why should it be that the phrase translated, "Stop associating with", found at 2 Thessalonians 3:14 is treated so differently from, "Quit mixing in company with", found at 1 Corinthians 5:9, when it is the same Greek phrase?

Why do the Governing Body go to such lengths to distinguish between two types of "greeting" in discussing 2 John 9, when Luke 1:28, 29 demonstrates that they can be used interchangeably?

Why would the first century Christian congregation implement a policy that their Lord warned them against? At John 16:2, Jesus said, "Men will expel you from the synagogue. In fact, the hour is coming when everyone that kills you will imagine he has rendered a sacred service to God." What does it mean that Jehovah's Witnesses are one of the only religions that carries out this extreme punishment? Jesus words were supposed to indicate what his listeners would have done to them, not what they would do to others.

There is no adequate explanation when faced with inconsistencies in scriptural interpretation. The position is all too often adopted that ones who were expelled from the congregation brought it upon themselves. They were not willing to patiently "wait on the Lord"; they displayed a lack of loyalty; they were presumptuous; they “went running ahead". Never is this a judgement the Governing Body turns on itself. To take just one example, when the Watch-Tower Society “went running ahead" and published dates for the end of the world to come in 1914, 1925, and 1975, the subsequent exodus from the organisation was put down to a lack of loyalty on the part of those who left, rather than something the Society had brought upon itself.

Why are those accused of apostasy expelled? I believe the Society has unwittingly given its reason: In the 2010 DVD, Jehovah's Witnesses - Faith In Action, Part 1: Out of Darkness, Governing Body member, Geoffrey W. Jackson comments on the clergy's fury over the preaching work done by Jehovah's Witnesses:

"Now this affected the money that was coming into many churches, because once people saw the truth, and they saw that they had been taught falsehood, it was only logical that they would withdraw and would not give their support to religious institutions that were teaching falsehood."

There is no reference to the clergy possibly caring about the spiritual health of their flock. It was all about the money. Jesus said, "Stop judging, that you may not be judged; for with what judgement you are judging, you will be judged." Therefore, it stands to reason that the Governing Body cares less about the spiritual welfare of their flock than they fear exposure of the organisation and the subsequent withdrawal of financial support.

Again, I urge you not to make this announcement. It is not loving, merciful, reasonable, or scriptural. On the contrary, it is heartless, harsh, unyielding, and baseless, and I urge you - each, individually - to refuse to have any part in it.

In the end, if you choose to go through with it, consider that this announcement to expel me from the congregation will be made in the middle of Memorial Week, the day before you celebrate the Lord’s Evening Meal. Perhaps I can leave the significance of this coincidental irony with you as a final thought. Jesus, too, was killed for apostasy.

Prelude to a disfellowshiping, revisited

noreply@blogger.com (Rory Sullivan) — Fri, 14 Mar 2014 08:09:00 +0000

It is approaching two years since the elders in the congregation took action against me. I thought I would take this opportunity to revisit the summary of events I documented at the time.

***

I was 25 years a congregation member; ten years an elder; all told, up to 18 years an appointed man; a decade or so as a full-time minister; assembly speaker, with the pinnacle giving the public discourse at a district convention.

I stopped being an active member of the congregation in November 2010, but it had been brewing for several years, with the customary gradual drifting away - all the necessary mental gymnastics as my spiritual views changed and doubts set in; quitting the Theocratic Ministry School; ceasing to answer; sitting quietly off to the side. I think the straw that broke the camel’s back was when “family worship” inevitably became “Family Worship”. I had already felt troubled by it, but I found myself swallowing back the tears when comments began to be made at the meetings about it being Jehovah’s provision. It seemed like a whole charade to change the meeting arrangement but slot in something called “family worship” - essentially a meeting at home which you were made to feel equally guilty for neglecting. Enough was enough.

I had one or two meetings with concerned elders, but pretty soon these tailed off, and for a year or more I had been left to my own devices. I was not interested in causing trouble. I was not embittered. It was simply that my spiritual outlook had changed. I was always sure not to say that I no longer was one of Jehovah’s Witnesses. I worded it carefully - I simply said I was finding it increasingly difficult to defend the Faithful and Discreet Slave.

In June or July of 2011 I experienced something of a spiritual epiphany and I decided to write about my spiritual outlook. I opened a blog - A carpenter from Nazareth - but kept it private. August/September time, after about a dozen or so articles, I decided to throw caution to the wind and go public. If by some bizarre coincidence it was discovered, so be it. Even so, I was somewhat startled when it was discovered not four weeks later. I wasn’t even told directly. A friend I work with is an active Witness. He received a phone call from a local elder. Was he aware of my website? He wasn’t - I had been sure not to tell him about it. Apparently the Coordinator had spent half-an-hour on the telephone with the Circuit Overseer discussing what to do about it.

I braced myself, but the tension was unnecessary. I heard nothing, and again it was only my friend who informed me that he doubted the elders would do anything. He had been speaking to a local elder at a recent assembly and they had decided to “maintain the status quo.”

Several months went by. It was curious the way things went. I took the extra step of sharing one or two articles on facebook, but these seemed to go by largely unnoticed. Then I wrote an article I felt particularly comfortable with. A week or so later I received a phone call from a local elder - could I meet with a couple of the elders to have a chat because, “We know about your website.”

The next evening - Monday, February 13, 2012 - I met with them and basically had the conversation I thought we were going to have several months ago. They referenced articles from back then, but when I inquired about what had changed regarding the circumstances, they declared that they had only just found out about the website. Because the website does not attack Jehovah’s Witnesses, their questions could only really address fundamental questions about Christianity, and my view of the bible. There was one reference to a comment made about Jehovah’s Witnesses being simply another religion.

Once or twice they asked if I considered myself a Witness any more. I answered that I did not want to bear witness against myself. The brothers would have to make their decision based on the information they had. I told them I did not relish the upheaval of being put outside the congregation, but it had to be their decision. I recognised it put them in something of an awkward position, but...

One of them speculated that it could be decided that they would make a simple brief announcement to the congregation that I was “no longer one of Jehovah’s Witnesses,” and the congregation would decide what to do. I thought this was somewhat disingenuous, as the congregation would know fine well what to do if such an announcement was made, as that is the only announcement that is made these days when someone is put outside the congregation. Still, they said they would report our discussion to the rest of the body of elders.

I haven’t heard anything since. One of the elders said that this was all new to them - what to do about a member of the congregation blogging their radically altered spiritual viewpoint, without categorically attacking the religion itself - so I can only imagine that they have decided to ask the branch office how to proceed

***

Honestly, I feel quite sorry for the local body of elders. Of course, we have known each other for years, and worked together, and now they're not sure what to do with me. I'm sure they don't want to put me through the upheaval that comes with disfellowshiping, but at the same time they have all this stuff that is contrary to most everything that the organisation teaches - how can it be anything but apostasy in their eyes? And there is that one article that walks the line between a defence of the Witnesses, and an unabashed attack*. Damning with faint praise, you might say. One of the elders that spoke to me I have known my whole time in the congregation, twenty years or so - he was genuinely sad. The other one was a newcomer to the congregation, probably paired with him so as to come from a more impersonal angle. The whole conversation was extremely amicable, but I felt very positive, and I confidently defended my position. It is curious, because I might not have been able to do that several months ago - but the extra time has been favourable to me. Having said that, it was a calm inner acceptance of the consequences that allowed me to go public with the website in the first place. I felt like the man who had built his house upon the sand - when that house falls, the collapse is great. For twenty five years I had built a faith upon the sand of another man's words, and I realised that there would be consequences for doing that. I have come to terms with the collapse, and I feel okay about it - even more so now that the rebuilding has begun with aplomb.

I do have family. My wife - born and raised a Witness - is still active in the congregation. She is being stoic, but inside I know she is hurting. Our two girls are still quite young: One is 7 and quite likes having the choice of being able to go to the meetings, or stay. The other is 4, and just likes to go out. I am not overly troubled by their association - they are free to make their own decisions on these matters, and there is still plenty of time. My wife's parents are Witnesses, so they might well follow the protocol of disfellowshiping, but I'm not too sure - they're just as likely to surprise me. She also has two sisters who we don't see too often, who I am quite sure will uphold the disfellowshiping. And, of course I will lose my workmate. He is (as I said) and active Witness, an elder in his local congregation, and he will cease association with much reticence.

That is, of course, if it all goes ahead. I must say, the lengthy silence is disarming. I'm almost inclined to think they are deciding on inaction - but I almost feel that would set a precedent: Now you can say what you want about the Witnesses and remain unpunished, as long as you are not speaking directly to congregation members. I don't think that is a message they want out there. There is a Circuit Overseer's visit in a couple of weeks time - perhaps they are waiting for that.

***

I have been invited to a second meeting with the same two elders that spoke to me five weeks ago. Sunday, March 18 at 6.30pm.

This is what the elder's handbook, Shepherd the Flock of God, has to say in chapter five under Determining Whether a Judicial Committee Should Be Formed - subheading, Offences Requiring Judicial Decisions.

Apostasy: Apostasy is a standing away true worship, a falling away, defection, rebellion, abandonment. It includes the following:

Deliberately spreading teachings contrary to Bible truth as taught by Jehovah's Witnesses: (Acts 21:21, ftn.; 2 John 7, 9, 10) Any with sincere doubts should be helped. Firm loving counsel should be given. (2 Tim. 2: 16-19, 23-26; Jude 22, 23) If one obstinately is speaking about or deliberately spreading false teachings, this may be or may lead to apostasy. If there is no response after a first and a second admonition, a judicial committee should be formed. - Titus 3:10, 11; w89 10/1 p. 19; w86 4/1 pp. 30-31; w86 3/15 p. 15.

Causing divisions and promoting sects: This would be deliberate action disrupting the unity of the congregation or undermining the confidence of the brothers in Jehovah's arrangement. It may involve or lead to apostasy. - Rom. 16:17, 18; Titus 3:10, 11; it-2 p. 886.

I'll let you know how it goes.

***

My wife is a born and bred Witness, it is true. She will be torn, but she is still "organisation first" - I can't deny that. However, my family life will survive this. We have two girls who we love very much, and we share ideals which lie outside the confines of the Society. Our marriage will not be jeopardised by this, though it will no doubt be put through the wringer. I also believe that the girls can survive this. Yes, they will have the JW ethic from their Mum, and when they attend meetings, but I believe it will be counter-balanced by my non-attendance, (and the waves that will be made from this minor furore).

I am in a good, strong, and peaceful place about all this. What I have now is better than what I had as a Witness. I have come to realise that trying to fight the organisation might be futile, but if I view this as a way to speak to individual men about the injustices and inconsistencies, it might just be enough to shake their (non-existent) foundations. They have to go through the process, too. I don't believe it is easy for them having to sit down with a man they have known for a fifth of a century. They are going to have to think about the collateral damage, too. This is a policy that they have agreed to be a part of, and they are damn well going to have to suck it up and see it through. Each of those men is going to have to make the decision to expel me from the congregation, because I am not going to disassociate myself. But I am also not going to spend my life gagged, or furtively looking over my shoulder.

***

Last night's meeting went much as imagined. This was the "second admonition", and the next stage will be a judicial hearing.

They used 2 John 10, 11 "If anyone comes to you and does not bring this teaching, never receive him into your homes or say a greeting to him. For he that says a greeting to him is a sharer in his wicked works," to which I was able to point out that although the Society goes to great lengths to argue that John deliberately used the simple expression (khairo) for "greeting" rather than a word which meant a much warmer greeting (aspazomai) - proving that apostates should be unequivocally shunned - Luke 1:28, 19 shows us that the two words were interchangeable. In connection with that, I also took the opportunity to ask why the Society should choose to interpret the phrase "stop associating with," at 2 Thessalonians 3:14 differently from the phrase "quit mixing in company with," at 1 Corinthians 5:11, when Paul uses exactly the same Greek phrase.

As was expected, there is no answer to these questions except, "maybe the understanding of these verses will change...how would you feel if you were on the outside looking in etc etc." I said I could not believe that the first century Christians had a policy which imitated the religion that they had left behind. It was Pharisees who threw people out of the synagogue, and shunned them - why would the Christians go on and do the same thing? Again, the only answer to that is to toe the party line and explain the need to protect the congregation.

So, there we are.

***

The judicial hearing took place on Friday, March 23, 2012.

If you would like to read the comments and replies given to this story, you can read them here.

* This article was titled "Jehovah's Witnesses and the faulty first century blueprint," and will be re-released here soon.

On the futility of writing to the Governing Body

noreply@blogger.com (Rory Sullivan) — Fri, 07 Mar 2014 07:23:00 +0000

I think we can be fairly certain that the governing body do not read any of the letters that are addressed to them. Nobody has anything to say that they could be in the least bit interested in. They don't care for fawning praise, or deep gratitude; they are not interested in insightful observations on the scriptures, and they certainly couldn't care less about the views of any disillusioned congregation members.

I am quite convinced that there must be a bank of secretaries who are charged solely with the task of opening and scanning any and all correspondence. They are, of course, primarily looking for donations, with a secondary interest in requests for literature or a bible study. The merest hint of anything which could in any way be considered contrarian, let alone outright "apostate," and the letter will be fed directly in to the shredder.

E-mail will fare no better. Any message containing blacklisted terms such as, "Russell," "Rutherford," "Watchtower," "Awake!" "1925," "1975," will be flagged and filtered through to the trash and deleted post-haste.

There was a time when I still harboured the dying embers of hope that a passionately worded missive might find its way to a compassionate member of the governing body...

Not bleedin' likely.

All the same, this is what I wrote:

***

Dear Brothers,

Genesis Chapter 3 speaks of the human condition. In his book, The Old Testament In Dialogue With Modern Man, James D. Smart describes it as, “a marvelously accurate picture of how evil finds its way into human life. The trouble begins with a questioning of God’s commands. The voice of the serpent asks whether the limitation on man’s freedom, the line that God has drawn, should be taken quite so seriously as it is.”

For keenly interested bible students, one question is, “Is it really so that God said to you, ‘It does not belong to you to get to know times or seasons which the father has placed in his own jurisdiction?’”

In the section under “False Prophets”, the book Reasoning From The Scriptures makes reference to “wrong expectations” and “mistakes” without giving any explanation as to what these have been.

When faced with the question, “Is it really so that God said to you, ‘It does not belong to you to get to know times or seasons which the father has placed in his own jurisdiction?’” it is a matter of public record how the Watchtower Society reasoned. Although the scriptural reference is different, the sentiment and intention remain the same:

One thing is absolutely certain, Bible chronology reinforced with fulfilled Bible prophecy shows that six thousand years of man’s existence will soon be up, yes, within this generation! (Matt. 24:34) This is, therefore, no time to be indifferent and complacent. This is not the time to be toying with the words of Jesus that “concerning that day and hour nobody knows, neither the angels of the heavens nor the Son, but only the Father.” (Matt. 24:36) To the contrary, it is a time when one should be keenly aware that the end of this system of things is rapidly coming to its violent end. Make no mistake, it is sufficient that the Father himself knows both the “day and hour”! (wt68 500)

When 1975 came and went, God’s voice asked, “What is this you have done?” The reply amounted to, “We didn’t do anything, they read too much into it.”

It may be that some who have been serving God have planned their lives according to a mistaken view of just what was to happen on a certain date or in a certain year. They may have, for this reason, put off or neglected things that they otherwise would have cared for. But they have missed the point of the Bible’s warnings concerning the end of this system of things, thinking that Bible chronology reveals the specific date. (wt76 440)

And, when some left, disillusioned by the record of “mistakes” and “wrong expectations” they were roundly slandered, labeled, accused among many other things of having a “lack of faith”, a “spirit of independence”, of showing “ingratitude and presumption.” (wt80 8/1 Remain Solid In The Faith) Here is Cain retorting, “Am I my brother's keeper?”

One can only guess how Joseph Rutherford reasoned on the question, “Is it really so that God said to you, ‘It does not belong to you to get to know times or seasons which the father has placed in his own jurisdiction?'” Perhaps he was only following the lead set by Charles Taze Russell. When speculating on the “translation or change from the natural to the spiritual condition, due this side or by the fall of our year 1881,” in Zion’s Watch Tower of January 1881, page 180, Russell concluded, “Aside from any direct proof that our change is near, the fact that the manner of the change can now be understood is evidence that we are near the time of the change, for truth is ‘meat in due season’, and understood only as due.” Whatever the case, in 1922, with the release of the booklet Millions Now Living Will Never Die, Rutherford saw himself free to claim,

Based upon the argument heretofore set forth, then, that the old order of things, the old world, is ending and is therefore passing away, and that the new order is coming in, and that 1925 shall mark the resurrection of the faithful worthies of old and the beginning of reconstruction, it is reasonable to conclude that millions of people now on the earth will be still on the earth in 1925. Then, based upon the promises set forth in the divine Word, we must reach the positive and indisputable conclusion that millions now living will never die. (page 97)

When 1925 came and went, and the Lord asked, “What is this you have done?” it seemed that Rutherford had caught a glimpse of shame. “I made an ass of myself,” he was heard to declare. (wt84 10/1 24 footnote) Subsequent years, however, have proved that his concern can only have been for himself. Updated versions of The Finished Mystery made slight amendments to the 1917 edition’s claim that God would “destroy the churches wholesale and the church members by millions,” in 1918, and completely expunged the claim that, “Even the republics will disappear in the fall of 1920.” By the 1930s, when he continued to be plagued with the question, “What is this you have done?” he became hot with anger and judgmental of others:

God's faithful people on the earth emphasized the importance of the dates 1914 and 1918 and 1925. They had much to say about these dates and what would come to pass, but all they predicted did not come to pass. The predictions as to the dates were correct, but what came to pass could not be fully seen in advance. The failure to come to pass of some of the things predicted has afforded Satan's agents in Christendom, particularly the clergy and the "man of sin", an opportunity to ridicule and reproach the faithful servants of the Lord and to say of and concerning them and their predictions: 'All their visions and predictions have failed; and such proves that they are all wrong, and that all their predictions for the future must fail.' This the clergy use to turn the people away from God and his truth. (Vindication Vol. 1 pages 146, 147)

It could be said that Joseph Rutherford and Frederick Franz were only following a precedent that had been set by the Watchtower society’s first president. For forty years Charles Taze Russell claimed that 1914 would see, not the start of the last days - they had already begun in 1799 - but the end of the present system. For more than forty years it was declared that Christ's presence began in 1874, the resurrection in 1878, along with the judgment that began with the House of God, and the fall of Babylon the Great. When 1914 came and went, and with it all the other predictions Russell had made, including the expectation that the “Lord’s saints might be with him in glory,” the question ringing out was, “What is this you have done?” The man who had already claimed to be God’s “mouthpiece” had no real option but to offer,

The author acknowledges that in this book he presents the thought that the Lord's saints might expect to be with Him in glory at the ending of the Gentile Times. This was a natural mistake to fall into, but the Lord overruled it for the blessing of His people. The thought that the Church would all be gathered to glory before October, 1914, certainly did have a very stimulating and sanctifying effect upon thousands, all of whom accordingly can praise the Lord - even for the mistake. Many, indeed, can express themselves as being thankful to the Lord that the culmination of the Church's hopes was not reached at the time we expected; and that we, as the Lord's people, have further opportunities of perfecting holiness and of being participators with our Master in the further presentation of His, Message to His people. (Editor's Forward, The Time Is At Hand, 1916 edition.)

It is shocking that Russell manages to offer a veiled apology and simultaneously implicate the Lord himself in the “mistake”! Adam's response cannot be avoided: “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me [fruit] from the tree and so I ate.”

All of the above “corrections of viewpoint” have been written off in the Reasoning book as “relatively minor.” Surely the intensity of the claims, or length of time they were declared, cannot be compared to the disciples imagining that “the Kingdom of God was going to display itself instantly,” or asking Jesus directly, “Are you restoring the kingdom to Israel at this time?” Furthermore, it was in response to such inquiries that Jesus made the statement, “It does not belong to you to get knowledge of the times or seasons which the Father has placed in his own jurisdiction.” Jesus was drawing a line for generations to come - a line that ought not to be crossed, rather than a convenient excuse to fall back on.

Russell’s attitude can only continue to be the pattern followed by a collective who claim to be God’s sole channel of communication – his “mouthpiece.” Russell's presumptuous claim is echoed on page 59 of the book The Nations Shall Know That I Am Jehovah – How? (a book that also stated that “the battle in the day of Jehovah” would begin “within our twentieth century.” (p216)) The changes to administration in the late-70s - governorship being undertaken by a body as opposed to being shouldered more or less by one man - have only served to compound the problem. A faithful and discreet slave “class” absolves any one individual of responsibility. If one among your number hears the whispered question, “What is this you have done?” there is always the danger that he can reply, “It was these men that you gave me to work with.” Or, even more terrible, like Russell before, to insinuate, “What do you mean, ‘What have I done?’ We only go where your spirit leads us,” thereby defiantly throwing the blame at the feet of the Lord.

A brief recap of the various amendments to the doctrine of “this generation” right up to our present time, will show how little has changed in the Watchtower Society's attitude to the question, “Is it really so...?”

1968, Awake! October 8 (pages 13, 14)
Jesus was obviously speaking about those who were old enough to witness with understanding what took place when the “last days” began. Even if we presume that youngsters 15 years of age would be perceptive enough to realise what happened in 1914, it would still make the youngest of “this generation” nearly 70 years old today.

1978, Watchtower, October 1 (page 31)
When it comes to the application in our time, the “generation” logically would not apply to babies born during World War I. It applies to Christ’s followers and others who were able to observe that war and the other things that have occurred in fulfillment of Jesus’ composite “sign.” Some of such persons “will by no means pass away until” all of what Christ prophesied occurs, including the end of the present wicked system.

1980, Watchtower, October 15 (page 31)
As indicated by an article on page 56 of U.S. News & World Report of January 14, 1980, “If you assume that 10 is the age at which an event creates a lasting impression on a person’s memory,” then there are today more than 13 million Americans who have a “recollection of World War I.”

1984, Watchtower, May 15 (page 5)
If Jesus used “generation” in that sense and we apply it to 1914, then the babies of that generation are now 70 years old or older. And others alive in 1914 are in their 80’s or 90’s, a few even having reached a hundred. There are still many millions of that generation alive. Some of them “will by no means pass away until all things occur.”

1995, Watchtower, November 1 (page 19)
Therefore, in the final fulfillment of Jesus’ prophecy today, “this generation” apparently refers to the peoples of earth who see the sign of Christ’s presence but fail to mend their ways.

2010, Watchtower, April 15 (page 10)
How, then, are we to understand Jesus’ words about “this generation”? He evidently meant that the lives of the anointed who were on hand when the sign began to become evident in 1914 would overlap with the lives of other anointed ones who would see the start of the great tribulation. (in the article Holy Spirit's Role in the Outworking of Jehovah's Purpose.)

These are not changes directed by the holy spirit – to claim so is frightening. They are simply changes rendered unavoidable by the inevitable passing of time. Does it not betray an altogether unrepentant stance?

This is an organisation built on the backs of at least three men who found themselves up against the line that God had drawn - “Is it really so...?” - and reasoned that it did not need to be taken so seriously. That is the spiritual heritage. It is a house built upon sand, for such is the situation of “everyone hearing these sayings of mine and not doing them.” The “mistakes” and “wrong expectations” are part of a history that is little known among the majority of Jehovah's Witnesses. For all intents and purposes it is a secret history, and all who are troubled by it and believe it ought to be uncovered are likely to be labelled “apostates” and expelled from the congregation.

It must be said: Contrary to the belief that this organisation is leading people to God, Jehovah's Witnesses are an organisation on the run from God, hiding behind the trees and covering up their shame. It is of grave concern that unless you face the question, “What is this you have done?” naked and openly exposed, without any minimisation, denial, blame, deflection or righteous indignation, then you will forever be among the many who will say to Jesus in that day, “Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and expel demons in your name, and perform many powerful works in your name?” And the Lord’s confession to you will be, “I never knew you! Get away from me, you workers of lawlessness.”

Yours sincerely

***

Throwing open the doors...

noreply@blogger.com (Rory Sullivan) — Sun, 02 Mar 2014 07:13:00 +0000

"A Safe Harbour," "The Storm Shelter," these were the kind of names I toyed with as I thought about opening up this little corner of my universe. Something that would convey the idea that this was somewhere someone could retreat to when adverse conditions got to much.

I have been more than a quarter of a century one of Jehovah's Witnesses, and this tenure of service came to an end when I left the organisation in 2012. Some would say I was expelled, but I had already come to the conclusion that the religion I had been affiliated with for 25-years-plus was not all that it made itself out to be.

For a while I haven't really been interested in publishing what would be considered, in Witness parlance, an "apostate" website. I do not harbour any animosity or bitterness - not that this is necessarily the driving force of any other anti-Witness website - but I simply did not feel moved at the time to add to the sterling work being done by the likes of jwfacts or jwsurvey, and many others besides.

For one reason or another, however, I now feel differently. One more choice is no bad thing. One more place where those that once were Jehovah's Witnesses, or those that still are, or those that never were, can come and just "hang out." Have a drink, have a cup of green tea - quietly read and pass the time of day. Sit in a darkened corner, in the shadows. It is perfectly understandable that you might not want to be noticed if you are still an active member of your local congregation. This is a place where you are more than welcome. My first outlet - the one that originally got me the old heave-ho - is called A Carpenter from Nazareth. It just seemed in keeping that this little watering hole should be named The Carpenter's Arms. The layout will be minimalist, unfussy, uncluttered.

The one big difference between these two ventures, however, is that the opportunity to comment will be open at The Carpenter's Arms.

The first thing I am going to do is gradually move the several Witness-centric articles from over there to over here, and you can feel free to say whatever you like about them.

Finally, let me be another name and e-mail address you can contact if you feel moved to.