(August 20, 2013 at 3:50 pm)Doubting Thomas Wrote: Didn't the Watchtower predict the end of the world back in the 70's?
The 1910s, the 1920s, the 1940s, the 1950s, 1975... predicting the end of the world is kind of their thing. 1975 was the last time that they were so brazen about it, because the increase in membership numbers were (unsurprisingly) followed by a gradual slowdown that threatened to turn into negative growth until they sorta-kinda "came clean"... five years later. To this day they peddle the story that they didn't REALLY predict the end of the world and that anyone who thinks they did is just wrong.
Your average JW has absolutely no clue that there were so many definitive and implied end-of-world predictions. They believe that Charles Russell (the founder of what is today the JWs) predicted only that 1914 was the start of the "end times." In fact, Russell taught that the end times began in 1874 and would END in 1914. Revisionist history, it turns out, is also kind of their thing.
One of the things that struck me after leaving was what CD pointed out, that it seems odd that a group that often repeated Jesus' admonition (that no one knew the day or time of his second coming) would seem so keen on predicting something that only god could know. But if the JW leadership learned anything over its history, it is that predicting the end of the world is very good business.
"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
