Ask one of Jehovah's Witnesses

[Won2blv]

I agree with this.  I think that it is in our nature to fear/despise uncertainty-- we want to KNOW.  So it's not really surprising that people have been trying to set a date for the world's end for centuries, in spite of the very clear admonition in the Bible itself that it wasn't for us to know and that therefore we needn't worry about it.  Russell was really just carrying on a time-worn Christian tradition of trying to pinpoint the date of Christ's second coming.

And it's difficult to say the extent to which it was a con or how much they believed it.  Setting a specific date has an upside (people will flock to your side, offering support and money) and a potentially ruinous downside (when the date passes and nothing happens, you are discredited).  I think that Russell (and many other such men, including some in the present day like Harold Camping) was convinced he had it right, and was disappointed when his numbers fell short, again and again.  I think that Rutherford was a more practical individual who understood that what he was doing amounted to marketing.  His claims that scripture positively identified 1925 as the year when biblical men of fame would be resurrected and become leaders to humankind led to the building of a palatial estate in San Diego, ostensibly to house these worthy men but which became Rutherford's vacation home (which he continued to enjoy the use of during the Great Depression).  This backfired when the year came and went, and instead of just moderate losses in membership as in years before, the movement almost disintegrated, losing around 75-80% of the membership over the next year or two.  Rutherford would rebuild the organization and he would continue to point to certain dates, but never with the certainty and boldness that he used when promoting 1925.

Later leadership seems to have learned to keep things more circumspect, though they almost blew it with the 1975 predictions.  They promoted the year as the end without ever explicitly stating it (though a number of statements were pretty unambiguous, such as referring to "the few months remaining before Armageddon" in a 1974 Kingdom Ministry) but they came close enough that the membership was taking drastic steps, such as taking their kids out of school and running up debt that they assumed would not have to be repaid.  This "unwise" action was joined by those who sold their worldly possessions to dedicate themselves to preaching full-time.  The organization lauded those who did so, but offered nothing when the end failed to materialize.  They didn't even address the issue until declining membership numbers forced them to do so in 1980, at which point they blamed the members for 'reading more into it' than had been said, which was not true.

Sorry if I'm wordy, but I lived through some of this and can clearly remember some of the later stuff (from the 80s and 90s).  I didn't look into the JW history until years after I'd made my break from the organization, so I read it with great interest.  I still find it fascinating.

Its funny you say this because I have a really close friend that has been researching this stuff and telling me about 1925 and so on. He said that he is sick of people in the younger generation saying that they didn't blow up 75 because he lived through it too and knows they did. He was even telling me how Rutherford or one of the older guys said that they knew what constellation Jehovah lived in because of a scripture but then never brought it up again. But in the end he came to the conclusion that its not a magic orb around the GB. They still are a group of men that rather than have an angel meet them and tell them what to do, pray and consider what to do. If JW's are by chance the true religion, it won't matter what they got wrong because in the long run their efforts have been preaching and purely worshiping Jehovah. So I am in a similar position. I don't care that they screwed up in a lot of areas. I don't even care if the 144k is not even a literal number.

It does bum me out that they can be a little bit disingenuous in fessing up to those past mistakes but at the same time, I think that humans are so fickle that you have to sometimes play everything off like its all according to plan. I heard this podcast story about a girl that was working in Alaska as a dogsledder for cruise ship tourist. And one day everything went wrong but the manager just kept telling the employees to play it off like it was according to plan and really a good thing. It sucks, but sometimes you do have to be a little disingenuous to keep humans spirits up