Jehovah's Witnesses and the Magic Beans
OK, the boys are gone to the arboretum to walk off excess energy (thank goodness!), and I've decided to sit down and do the first of the JW posts. I've also realized that in describing the nuttiness of this religion, I'm also going to have to give the history of the religion as well. It's not going to be as interesting as Justin's Mormon history, though. We'll see, I guess.
So, first up. JW's were founded by a nut. Plain and simple. Here's a brief summary, which you can find pretty easily in some form or other by googling "history of Jehovah's Witnesses", so I'm not going to be bothered to link it:
Jehovah’s Witnesses were started by a man named Charles Taze Russell, who was born in 1852 and worked in Pittsburgh as a haberdasher. He actually spent a lot of time as an agnostic after trying to convert an atheist and getting disallusioned with religion. Imagine that!
He went to an Adventist meeting, was told that Jesus would be back at any time, and got interested in the Bible. The Adventists at the time were led by a guy who enjoyed predicting the end of the world, although obviously it's still been turning since 1844. When people finally got irritated enough with him, they splintered off to form the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. There's a lot of doctrinal similarity (and weirdness) between them and the JW's for this reason.
Russell started calling himself "Pastor" and he never finished high school. In 1879, he began the Watch Tower—what would later be known as the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, and moved it to Brooklyn in 1908. I went there when I was 16 and toured the place. Pretty impressive. All that donation money really did build something.
Before his cult really took off, Russell sold "miracle wheat" for $60/bushel. He claimed it grew five times as well as regular wheat, however it in fact underperformed regular wheat, as was established in court when Russell was sued. Later he came up with a fake cancer cure and what he termed a "millennial bean" (maybe it took a thousand years to sprout).
JW's have been selling fake medicine ever since...
--Virgil
posted by contemplator at Saturday, December 16, 2006
5 Comments:
Please keep writing more chapters. Being a Jehovahs Witness ruined my life. It has cost me dearly, in my mental health, and I now have no family. For what???
If there is a God, he did not mean for our lives to be spent like the JW's. Threats of expulsion, and being made to feel that you can never do enough to please Jehovah. They always want more.
Please!!! If you are in this religion, PLEASE do your research. Would you not read the ingredients of a product before you bought it??? Does it make sense to do the same with your religion??
I am weeping. I need counseling. wannabecamille
wannabe, you don't need counselling necessarily. You just need people who understand what it's like. I've been df'd for a little over 10 years now, and I understand what it's like mentally. What they do to people mentally should be criminal. Shame on them for making you feel so bad. And shame on them for trying to control your life.
If you want to talk about it off-blog, you can email me at contemplator77@yahoo.com
It's always good for me to talk about it. I bet it'll be good for you, too.
Heh. Haberdasher. There's a profession that needs to make a comeback. :)
Well, if that graduate degree in English literature doesn't work out...
Meh, there's a lot to be said for being buck naked in my book.
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