It's all in the marketing. The typical JW presentation to a potential convert is to get them to agree that the present day sucks pretty badly and only seems to be getting worse. If they get agreement on that, then they offer up the solution: god will wipe out this miserable scenario and replace it with a paradise that is populated by good people and governed by god himself (the really kind and loving one that you can get if you select just the right Bible verses). I think they are looking to convert people who are already Christians, since the message is less likely to seem crazy to them, and the slight modifications to the typical heaven/hell scenario are usually much more appealing as well.
And as for the number of disappointments, my guess would be that most people can tolerate one or maybe two. The JWs have had some massive exoduses in the past. After the failed predictions for 1914 and 1925, they lost something like 80% of the membership. That they managed to rebuild from there shows that they learned two lessons. One, don't be so blatant with your end-of-world predictions. Two, the world has a surplus of gullible people. The 1925 prediction would be the last time they laid out specific occurrences (J. F. Rutherford, president at the time, claimed that many of the Biblical saints of old would be resurrected in 1925 and become rulers on Earth). Although they marked 1975 as a notable year, their predictive statements were generally more ambiguous to the public and more definitive only to the membership.
Each period teaches them to be less and less specific and definitive. They made comments in the 90s about how we'd almost certainly never see the turn of the century without witnessing god's judgment, but nothing too definitive. These days it's more of the old "the end is closer than you think!!1!!" The high turnover suggests that even that approach wears out over time. My mother began studying with the JWs in the mid-60s and remembers the excitement about 1975, though she just parrots the company line today. But that means that she's been waiting for more than 45 years for an event that is "just around the corner... any day now... god's judgment won't wait..."
And as for the number of disappointments, my guess would be that most people can tolerate one or maybe two. The JWs have had some massive exoduses in the past. After the failed predictions for 1914 and 1925, they lost something like 80% of the membership. That they managed to rebuild from there shows that they learned two lessons. One, don't be so blatant with your end-of-world predictions. Two, the world has a surplus of gullible people. The 1925 prediction would be the last time they laid out specific occurrences (J. F. Rutherford, president at the time, claimed that many of the Biblical saints of old would be resurrected in 1925 and become rulers on Earth). Although they marked 1975 as a notable year, their predictive statements were generally more ambiguous to the public and more definitive only to the membership.
Each period teaches them to be less and less specific and definitive. They made comments in the 90s about how we'd almost certainly never see the turn of the century without witnessing god's judgment, but nothing too definitive. These days it's more of the old "the end is closer than you think!!1!!" The high turnover suggests that even that approach wears out over time. My mother began studying with the JWs in the mid-60s and remembers the excitement about 1975, though she just parrots the company line today. But that means that she's been waiting for more than 45 years for an event that is "just around the corner... any day now... god's judgment won't wait..."
"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
