Trigger warning: If you intend to live life as a Good and Faithful Slave, reading this post may be an Unforgivable Sin! or cause athlete’s foot or something.

I spent some time, due to a quirk in the YT algorithm, diving into what the latter-day apostates were saying of late about the rather battered belief system I was raised in, the one offered as The Truth by the witnesses of Jehovah.

I have no interest at all in getting down into the doctrinal weeds here or discussing how many Special Pioneers can dance on the head of a pin.

I’m just going to offer a few pointers, annotate and embellish them a bit, and leave it at that. First pointer:

Why I Left Jehovah’s Witnesses – Former Elder / Pioneer

You don’t have to watch a single second of it to begin getting a sense of what this man has to say. Just look at his face for a start! Does this look like some dimestore Antichrist with an evil faith-wrecking agenda to sell you?

Listen to a few seconds of his drawly voice and your vague intuition of his sincerity will be confirmed. (Disclaimer: Sure, he might be an angel of darkness masquerading as an angel of light … and I might be too. Proceed at the peril of your soul.)

His story kept my attention all through. His falling away journey started with a list of questions he had, regarding some inconsistencies and contradictions in the teachings–questions he felt he needed to be able to answer, when he knocked on someone’s door, or a congregant came to him for the knowing counsel of an Elder. Getting no satisfactory answers from the approved materials, he stuck a toe into the waters of doing his own research outside the limits of approval. Which is to say, he dared to use the Google to find out what non-believers had to say about the unanswered questions (this is a major sin in itself), and once he started to encounter some true alternatives to Truth, the trajectory he’s on today was pretty much inevitable.

Toward the end of the video, he starts to hint at some things having to do with the organization itself and the pretty horrifying path its leaders and ‘Governors’ are embarking on.

There’s a procedure in place, for example, for when someone comes to an Elder with a story about a child being abused. What is step one for this, according to the Elder’s Manual?

Rule one is no cops. Rule one is: you immediately call the Watchtower Legal Hotline.

When you as the elder call, you are specifically forbidden from asking who you’re talking to. You don’t get any names, but you are absolutely required to give yours. You never know if the person you’re reporting the crime to is a lawyer, a paralegal, or the elder-janitor at Bethel who happened to be near the phone. Regardless of who it is, or what they think you should do, you do what they say and you don’t ask questions.

What this does is take all the legal burden off the organization, and places it onto the shoulders of the poor dim elder out in Bumfuck who is only doing what they told him was God’s divine will.

God’s divine will almost never tells the elder to report the abuse to any secular authority.

As a form of legal insurance for the Watchtower Society, this is perfect genius.

As a good idea for the elder, not so much.

It seems that there were a pair of elders in Illinois a while back who did everything by the book, like they were supposed to. They’re in jail now.

The sentencing judge said basically, “You’re telling me you committed the crime of failing to report child abuse because a voice on the phone told you not to? How stupid are you, boys?” And the gavel came down.

It’s hard not to feel a little sorry for these well-meaning too-trusting faithful dipshits. But only a little. They were, after all, pretty much just good Germans for Jehovah instead of that Adolf guy.

We can safely save our real ire for the people and policymakers on the other end of the phone.

I also learned that there have been massive structural changes recently to the internal workings of the Society. Essentially, ‘Watchtower’ has been re-organized into seven different puppet corporations, and none of them are legally under the supervision of “The Governing Body”, who are god’s chosen leaders. Say what now?

This is a game attempt at insulating the old white men at the top of the food chain from personal liability for exactly these kinds of crimes and immoralities, at a time when they know that Satan’s lawyers are coming for them with blood and dollar signs in their eyes, over this abuse and cover-up scandal in particular.

The horribly immoral rules were nobody’s fault, you see … technically … judicially …

Tell it to the raped kids, Brother This and Brother That. Tell it to theoretical God and pray for mercy on your theoretical soul.

***

The other main piece I have to share is a lot more fun.

A Brief History of Watchtower’s Failed Armageddon Predictions

Most Witnesses know that in 1914, the founder of their faith, Charles Taze Russell, waited with a cadre of apostles in white robes on the Brooklyn Bridge, waiting for the inevitable moment that they would be lifted up in Heaven to sit at the right hand of God. The story is told with a kind of forgivingly vague amusement, like a tale told about one’s misinformed grandfather. The guy was no Elijah, you know, but his heart was in the right place.

When Russell died heartbroken in 1916, the politics for control of the organization began. But whoever was at the helm during the years that followed, one thing was certain. Over and over again, the publications continued to prophesy hard and immutable dates for the catastrophe of the End Times. 1920. 1925. When a date once more failed to bring the crisis, it was advanced a few years, but always with perfect certainty that this time would be the one. It will come as no shock to you that it never was.

Eventually, the struggle for leadership was completed and a man named “Judge” Rutherford emerged as top dog, directly beneath Jehovah in the org chart.

Rutherford was an open anti-semite, who once also proposed that after the Resurrection, uplifted peoples who used to be black would show up with new and improved white shiny faces befitting their now-godly natures.

Under his leadership, the Watchtower Society gradually began to hedge their bets on the question of specific dates. The absolute certainty and precise times were still there to the discerning eye, but never again would they fall into the embarrassing trap of declaring “For Sure For Sure”. It was all ‘to the best understanding of the elders’, qualified and conditional.

This new method of predicting using probabilities reached it’s zenith around the same time the Witnesses knocked on the door of my parents and quickly converted them into hardcore faithful slaves. The new story was Oh It’s Going Down Soon This Time Baby, almost for sure by 1975 and maybe sooner. We didn’t know if we could wait that long.

But sure enough we did, again.

The failed 1975 half-prophecy was also based on some rude maths that required the Earth to be no older than six thousand years old, or maybe forty-two thousand in later versions of the tale, which … let’s just say that’s problematic scientifically and leave it at that.

The practical effects of the belief hit much closer to home.

I was under ten years of age when that was written. A young person. In ’75 I was a teen.

They promised me as a fact that I would never grow old, in the Wicked Old System.

I have some retroactive bad news for them.

The above quote and dozens like it were used to try to shape what those ‘young people’ did with their lives. More on that atrocity in a minute, but as an aside, note the early emphasis on the 1914 generation and the importance of its passing away as a hard limit on the timetable for Armageddon, in accordance with Russell’s own dictum that “Millions Now Living Will Never Die”.

I can’t say for certain whether there are “millions” of 109-year-olds still around, but even if that were the case, it sure won’t be for much longer. But that won’t matter either. There will be some revelation of new bullshit that makes it okay to keep the faith in the clearly delusional greybeards that still run and have always run this show. Beards, as in, “no sisters need apply”, nor faggots either. Here, have a token black bro and a cartoon render of an Asian chick, and shut your impudent trap.

Atrocity, personal ‘atrocity’.

My parents believed that the end was very near indeed, and so too they believed that there was no point in making plans, or a career, and very specifically, there was absolutely no reason to do anything crazy like go to college and maybe learn to question idiotic self-appointed authority.

They were adamant on this point. God strongly disapproves of college. I heard it preached from the podium. I heard it all the time, and even from people I loved and was supposed to be able to trust, that my soul would be far better off if I became a full-time door-knocker, or went to the magical place called Bethel where the truly good slept and toiled and ate and lived and died.

College was anathema. You hear about celebrities stooping to corruption to get their kids into better colleges?

Oh, no, baby.

We forbid your sixteen-year-old ass from accepting that scholarship. That nobody but you worked toward getting.

If you can scrape up the money yourself, and you hate Jehovah that much, you can go to the community college down the road. Go down your selfish evil path alone, boy, and answer for it at the Judgment, which is … well, we don’t know exactly when anymore, but for damn sure any day now.

That all changed in the blink of an eye when my mother’s second husband turned out to be, of all heinous things … a college president!

And such a good man. Our worldly savior, in point of fact. Brave, noble, kind, a decorated Patriot.

Suddenly college was not evil. Suddenly it was the apotheosis of all that was good in the world. It was the only path, to a normal, happy, abundant life as an American citizen.

Just. Like. That.

Headspinning. The shortest verse in the whole Bible reads:

Jesus wept.