Jehovah’s Witnesses

Cult warning signs: Jargon and peculiar vocabulary

Posted on by TwoCultSurvivor

Not long after I became an atheist, a couple of family members attempted to talk me back into the fold of Christianity. Both were rude about it (and naturally accused me of being rude about it). But one of them was more interesting than the other. I’ll call my cousin “John” for the sake of this post.

John was deeply troubled by my deconversion. Honestly, I think he took it as a personal insult. And for some reason, he seemed to believe that my former faith was evidence of the veracity of Christianity. “Oh yeah, well you used to believe in God and Christ!” I mean, so what? That’s what happens when you change — you no longer believe the things you used to believe. What does that prove?

red flag

Warning!

But John was interesting for another reason. He and one of his faith-brothers, let’s call him Jack, bombarded me with arguments about why I’m wrong. And it wasn’t until they did that I noticed something others probably noticed about me during my days with The Way International and its offshoots. John and Jack are in a cult, and they don’t even know it.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that “cult” is a loaded word that means different things to different people. I’ve seen some fun definitions.

  • A cult is what a big church calls a little church.
  • A cult is a religious movement where there’s someone at the top who knows its a scam. A religion is the same thing, only that person is long dead.
  • A cult is a religion that thinks your religion is wrong.

There are others, usually concocted by cults to deflect the “cult” label. For this post, I’m going to use this broad definition, recognizing that others may apply: A cult is a sect of a larger religion with unusual doctrinal interpretations considered heretical by the larger group. These doctrinal differences, in the cult’s view, make them better than the larger religion and are signs that the larger religion has been corrupted.

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For Jehovah’s Witnesses, the end was just the beginning

Posted on by TwoCultSurvivor

I am the last person to call myself an expert on the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society (the legal name of the organization better known as Jehovah’s Witnesses. You know, like the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is the legal name for the Mormons).

But I do remember bits and pieces of growing up under the organization’s thumb in the 1970s. I have no memories of 1975 being a particularly significant year, although I later learned it was their last prediction for when the world would end and the New System of Things would be upon us.

millions-titleIt’s a little more complicated than that, of course, and the Society will tell you that they never really taught the world would end in 1975. Don’t buy that. They did. But 1975 was just the last in a long line of predictions about the end of the world that would prove false.

In fact, if you ever received a copy of Awake! magazine during that time, you might have noticed their proclamation in every issue. “This magazine builds confidence in the Creator’s promise of a peaceful and secure new world before the generation that saw the events of 1914 pass away.”

You’ll find that promise in your Bible if you turn to … the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society. You won’t find it in your actual Bible. Or anyone else’s. Not even theirs.

In the 1920s, Watchtower leader Joseph “Judge” Rutherford began teaching “millions now living will never die.” There are maybe dozens of people alive who may have heard him teach that. There was even a book by that title that they published in 1925. It’s, um, no longer in print. At least, not by the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society.

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