RE: That Day will come as a trap on all the world
September 8, 2014 at 12:54 pm
(This post was last modified: September 8, 2014 at 12:55 pm by Tonus.)
(September 7, 2014 at 8:49 pm)Beccs Wrote: It ended in 2012, but no one noticed.The JWs actually used that, sorta. Charles Russell had predicted the end of the world in 1914. He clearly stated it; 1914 was when god would be all finished up putting a severe ass-beating on the world and ushering in paradise for the true believers. Even before then, Russell had started to hedge on whether he was off by a year, and perhaps it would be in 1915 that the world would go buh-bye. When WW1 began, he felt as if that was what would kick off Armageddon, but no dice.
The organization decided to turn this to its favor by insisting that what Russell had predicted was the beginning of the "End Times" of Biblical prophecy. Imagine that a man had predicted --some 30 or so years prior!-- that 1914 is when Jesus would begin his heavenly rein by dumping Satan onto the world, and BOOM... the world is thrown into turmoil! He musta been moved by the spirit!
In any case, this is why the Watchtower Society isn't big on reprinting their oldest stuff-- it tells a very different story than the one they push to the membership today. But it's also a reminder that if your end-of-world prophecy fails, just revise it. Some people are so invested in their religion that they'll remain faithful even in the face of such blatant deception.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould