Posted by Lobo [Lobo] on November 05, 1999 at 23:54:06 {6xiCHW3gJ2woj6QDdD4U60q8BzTBA6}:
Dean wrote:
as I understand it (I wasn't there at the time) they felt it was their responsibilty to alert people that 1975 marked the end of 6000 years of mankinds existence and that this date COULD be of great significance. I guess you could say that they started a fire that they couldn't get back under control, but it wasn't their intention to do so, Stafford deals with what the Society said, not with what some overzealous brothers may have said from the podium.
You must be incredible naïve or uninformed. Much of what “overzealous” brothers said from the podium came from reading the outlines provided by the Society, and most of these dogmatic statements were made in conventions, not isolated Kingdom Halls. The members of the Governing Body were very aware of the CO’s and DO’s making these statements. Furthermore, one of those “overzealous” speakers was Fred Franz himself, Jehovah’s mouthpiece at the time.
Why did Society not publish a KM insert to correct the dangerous euphoria, the same way it published a KM insert against Internet interaction with “apostates”? To the contrary, the KM May, 1974 said:
Reports are heard of brothers selling their homes and property and planning to finish out the rest of their days in this old system in the pioneer service. Certainly this is a fine way to spend the short time remaining before the wicked world's end. 1 John 2 :17.
The Society even printed a chart showing the beginning of the Christ’s millennial reign in 1975 (October 8, 1971, Awake!) The Watchtower allowed for the possibility of being off “weeks or months, not years.”(August 15, 1968, WT)
When my dad (an elder at the time) read the above statement, he became convinced that Armageddon was definitively coming circa 1975 and told everyone about it. Now he has amnesia and forgot all about 1975. That kind of dishonesty, even if subsconcious, is what Greg Stafford has been peddling here.
Lobo,
who was too young to remember much about 1975, except the expectation of playing with tamed lions and sweet whales by his sixth birthday