Tag: college education

The truth about JW “Bible Studies”

You hear a knock at your door. When you answer, you find one or more Jehovah’s Witnesses standing there. Oh yes, you remember them; they were the nice people who you spoke to a couple of weeks ago when they came by and left a free Watchtower and Awake! magazine with you. You were polite to them during that visit, so they have marked your address down for a “go-back” (revisit).

“Hello. We just wanted to stop by and drop off the latest issues of the Watchtower and Awake! magazines for you to read,” says a JW. “There are some really good articles in them announcing God’s kingdom that will soon rule the Earth.”

You reach out to accept the magazines and thank them. The JW continues, “We’d very much like to offer you the opportunity to have a free weekly Bible study in your home. This will be your opportunity to learn about all the great things that are promised to mankind within our lifetimes. You do have a Bible don’t you?”

After confirming that you do have a Bible somewhere around the house, but admit that you have hardly ever read it, you think about it and then respond that having a Bible study might be a good thing.

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Opinion: Raising kids as Witnesses

I can speak from experience: being raised in a Jehovah’s Witness family can be tough for many children and downright disastrous for others.

I was fortunate enough to grow up in a JW family in the 1950s when many of the Watchtower’s restrictive rules had not yet been fine-tuned nor enforced the way they are today. I also had the good fortune to have a father who loved sports and wanted my brother and me to participate in organized athletics such as Little League and high school teams. Dad would often want to play catch and even join us when we’d play in pickup games with our neighborhood friends.

My father was an exception to the JW rule by letting us play on Little League and other sports teams. Even back in the 1950s and 1960s, most of the other JW kids were not allowed by their parents to participate in team sports or to join in on other school activities. JW children were supposed to be spending their spare time at home studying the Watchtower or out “in the field service,” knocking on doors trying to “place” the Watchtower Society’s magazines and books.

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Are Jehovah’s Witnesses a Cult?

Several years ago a friend, who was still a Jehovah’s Witness at the time, sent me a list of “Ten Signs of a Cult.” His purpose was to prove to me that the Watchtower Society and its followers, Jehovah’s Witnesses, was not a cult, but a legitimate Christian religion.

At the time I just looked at the list he’d emailed me and laughed, because for me it proved just the opposite. I wondered what this fellow had been smoking and wondered if he was reading the same list I was.

I’m not sure where this originated or who its author was, but I think that it can be realistically used to compare The Watchtower Society to other religions that would be commonly considered as “cults.”

  1. A cult has an absolutely authoritarian leadership that refuses to be held to any meaningful accountability.
  2. A cult has no tolerance for questions or critical inquiry from within or outside of the organization.

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