Posted by Liberty [Liberty] on November 03, 1999 at 12:50:56 {eZOTANvCI6Mwiuh6GymAdHqlgCajU.}:
I find it interesting that "apostates" are often seen as weak and wrongly motivated when they were J.W.s and this is primarily the reason they eventually quit and now bad mouth the Society. How else could it be that someone would leave the "Truth"? It is nearly impossible for a faithful J.W. to understand how good and honest persons could turn their backs on the J.W. brotherhood, therefor, such persons must be evil and selfish. The Society loves it when loyal J.W.s are unable to see any alternatives other than evil intentions in the heart of the departing member much as the rulers of the former Soviet Union could not allow a good motive for defecting to the West during the Cold War.
One of the traits usually associated with these "weak and selfish" individuals is that they were only serving for the reward and not out of a love for God. When such a "fair weather" Christian sees that Armegeddon is no longer imminent(due primarily to false hopes fostered by the Watch Tower Society and their lack of fulfillment)they get angry about not getting their reward and blame the Society and poof!, another apostate is born. Such ones were clearly "serving for a date" and therefore had a bad heart condition to begin with. Ah,if only life were that simple my faithful J.W. friends then all our doubts about apostates could be forgotten and they could be justifiably destroyed.
Life isn't that simple, however. If there is an obsession with rewards and dates isn't it really the Watch Tower Society that has consistantly throughout its history over emphasized the immediacy of Armegeddon(punishment)and the perfection of the "New System"(reward)? Who is really serving for dates and rewards? If there is a God, surely we should serve him out of love and not for the rewards, but how can any of us know why we really serve since we were promised a reward? This is one of the questions that kept me up many a night for years rolling it around in my head. What was my true motivation for serving God? I finally concluded that it wasn't my fault when I was honest with myself. If God wanted us to serve him freely and out of love there would be no rewards nor punishments, or the reward could be held for us in secret so then there would be no doubt about our motives for serving. The Watch Tower Society creates this problem of motives, not the individual and not God. Think of it this way,if we worked for someone who promised to pay us a million dollars could we honestly know what our true motivation for working was? Would it be our love for this person or the million bucks? To be truely motivated by love the reward would have to be unknown to us. Just something to think about. Liberty,who thinks free will is more complicated than the Society ever imagined,and wonders if free will is just another Watch Tower myth created from the ethers of human imagination like 1975,1925,1914,1874 and...............