JW looking clarity followup

[Tonus]

It just doesn't make sense to me that someone could be df'd for only holding a view without discussing it.

It doesn't make sense to me either, yet the organization sent a letter with that instruction to congregations in 1980.  Like I said, it really just smacks of an attempt at targeting a single person via policy changes.  That is pretty scary behavior, IMO.

We're you a witness then? If so, as an atheist this point is moot but, if jw's serve Jehovah then they can trust in him to set matters straight.

I was raised a JW, and lived it for about 30 years before falling away from it and eventually realizing I did not believe in god.  I understand the view about trusting Jehovah to set matters straight, but it's the sort of view that can be used to excuse dangerous behavior like that I described above.

The Watchtower leadership claims that it is guided by god's holy spirit, but that the governing body is composed of fallible and imperfect human beings.   This allows them to demand that you accept their interpretations, explanations, and advice as god-given, but that you hold them blameless when they get things wrong.  To me that sounds like a lot of cult leaders that we have heard about over the years.

As for what the Bible teaches: the Bible is a poorly-assembled collection of old teachings, fables, stories, and letters selected from a much larger trove of such.  The many different interpretations and the many disagreements on various matters and subjects show just how easy it is to interpret it in an almost endless variety of ways.  Go through your Reasoning with the Scriptures book and you will note that for nearly every subject the explanation consists mostly (or entirely) of numerous out-of-context chapter/verse selections with short explanations.  But that isn't what should concern a JW.

Charles Russell originally had the belief that Jesus had begun his invisible reign in 1874 and that the war of Armageddon would be over and done by the autumn of 1914.  When this did not happen, he and Rutherford (his successor) offered up several other dates, until being constantly wrong led to massive defections in the mid-1920s.  Yet today you won't hear about that.  You will hear that from the start, Russell taught that 1914 was the beginning of the end times.  But that's completely false.  They have clung to the 1914 date because it was coincidentally when World War I started, and they could re-work the "prophecy" into something that appears to be divine.  That's a deliberate attempt to mislead: they are lying to the membership.

The issue of the date of the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians is tied to this deception, because they use the date of 607BC to get to 1914AD via "Bible chronology." If the actual date is different (and it is) then the basis for their end-times prophecy is wrong.  Their revised history of Russell's end-time predictions becomes useless and their "chronology" is thrown into disarray.  So they insist on the 607BC date, not because it is correct, but because they are using one lie to carry another lie.

Maybe those apostates you know are miserable because they haven't been able to get over how thoroughly they were deceived?  I don't know.  I've always been a happy person, and leaving the organization did not change that for me.  I certainly can't imagine that I'd feel worse after cutting the ties to an organization like that.