Thinking about my relationship with the Watchtower

 I just spent almost two weeks on the road.  My wife and I drove to Boulder, Colorado to watch our daughter receive her Master’s degree.  Wife flew home the next day and I stayed two more days to help the daughter with a startup business.  I then spent three days alone in the car getting home.  (Trip totaled 3168 miles in about 10 days).  Driving to Boulder provided opportunity to talk. We spent much of the drive discussing family, our lives together, work, and a host of other subjects.  Naturally, this led to some interesting conversation about the present state of our religious beliefs.  The trip home alone provided an opportunity to think about it all.  I have some new ideas to work into my stories.

So today’s entry is about what I want to accomplish by writing about cult-like groups, and why I think it is important.  In brief, I have no set religious beliefs, at least none I feel compelled to convince others to believe with me.  My wife and I agree that we cannot define one belief superior to another, and that most of them look like schemes to rake in money.     

If you look in the “cult” section of a Christian bookstore you will find many volumes analyzing the doctrinal mistakes of a host of religions, among them Jehovah’s Witness, Mormons, Scientologists and many others.  For example, I have on my shelf “Encyclopedia of Cults and New Religions” by John Ankerberg and John Weldon.  This work lists fifty-seven groups the authors consider cults, or cult-like.  This book, like many similar volumes, focuses on issues of doctrine.

To put it bluntly, I don’t care what people believe.  If you want to think the Great Pumpkin will rise out of the most sincere pumpkin patch in the world, that is your choice and I see no need to argue with you.  I care a lot if you are blindly following a course that will damage you, or your loved ones.  I consider it my moral duty to provide information and sound a warning.  I think, far too many people have lived damaged lives or incomplete lives because they surrendered their critical thinking to some group.

My wife and I recalled old friends, people who no longer speak to us because we left the religion.  Forty years ago, we expected the world to end.  Today, these friends still expect the end of the world “soon.”  They have never lived up to their full potential because they lived their lives on hold. Everything good would happen in the New System. 

I do not think this problem lies solely with Jehovah’s Witnesses or even religion generally.  Political movements of all stripes display some of the negative traits of high control groups.  The same holds true for many multilevel marketing programs.  These organizations compel the individual to give up freedom of action and conscience for group-think.  I believe that this reduces the individuals need and right to enjoy life to the fullest.  When we give up self-fulfillment to group-think we lose a piece of ourselves. 

So my purpose is educational, to provoke thought not provide answers.  I do not seek to gather followers, in fact the exact opposite.  (This summer’s Watchtower conventions apparently contain a long talk on people like me trying to recruit followers, I’ll comment on that in another post.)  The idea of attracting “followers” is the exact antithesis of my beliefs.  Nor do I want to “bring down the Watchtower.” 

I want people to think for themselves.  I hope to help them do so.