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I care very little about people’s peculiar beliefs, however you should know about Jehovas witnesses:
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they are absolutely a cult and dangerous.
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they believe joining their cult is the only way to achieve eternal life. Everyone else is doomed.
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they put a very high focus on „saving“ people, aka bringing them into the cult. In fact, how many people you brought in is a big factor in determining your worth. Members are absolutely convinced they are doing good and actually saving souls. At least the normal folk who don’t abuse their brothers and sisters.
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members are discouraged from forming bonds and meaningful interaction with non-members, unless it serves bringing them into the cult.
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if someone leaves the cult, other members are forbidden from interacting with them, even within families. Except for the purposes of stalking and harassment of course.
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obeying authority without question is very important. The children obey the parents. The wife obeys the husband. The husband obeys those above him in the pecking order. This creates a fertile breeding ground for domestic and sexual abuse, which are dealt with „internally“, aka swept under the rug.
That said, most of them are normal people trapped in a very bad system. They can be kind, absolutely lovely people, or huge pricks, or pure evil, everything people outside the cult can be. It’s just that every single one of them needs to pull you inside, for your own good.
A JW to non-JW relationship is not possible in the long term. Either your daughter will be absorbed by the cult (because he can’t let his wife and their children be condemned) and distance herself from you and her former friends or he will leave and be shunned by his family and friends inside the cult. Anything else will not be tolerated by his community.
The best you can do is to find out about their methods and dangers and also prepare your daughter to never give up thinking for herself. I hope she is level headed enough to understand that it is not going to go well, even if he is a genuinely good person.
FourPacketsOfPeanuts@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
Fairly recent (in the scheme of things) non standard Christian group
they don’t believe in the trinity: God is god, Jesus was crafted by god - used to be an angel, the holy spirit is more like an impersonal force
they don’t believe in everlasting hell, they believe the soul of unbelievers is annihilated
believe Armageddon is imminent and have repeatedly tried predicting it and failed
they originated from a bible study group in the 1800s and some things they are into are actually a literal reading of the new testament rather than a more pop culture or traditional view of Christianity. for example:
they believe the future of believers is on a restored earth, not heaven (based on Revelation)
they believe 144000 special believers are elevated to rule in heaven (Revelation again)
they believe a letter written by the apostle in Acts telling believers to “abstain from blood” is still in force (to be fair there isn’t anything saying it isn’t) which they take to mean refusing all blood including blood transfusions
they practice ‘shunning’ family and church members who won’t repent of sin which sees some parents totally rejecting their children, people acting like people don’t exist if they see them on the street. (Again to be fair, this is what the new testament tells Christians to do). For this they (rightly) get flak for being cultish and overly controlling
they believe it’s every believers duty to give people opportunity to repent hence going door to door (I think they’ve stopped doing this now) or standing on the street offering their standard magazine “Awake”
their central organisation is called the Watchtower, again a biblical reference to keeping watch for the end of the world
ChicoSuave@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
They still go door to door and the newsletter is called The Watchtower.
And to clarify the very specific 144000 number: that’s made of up 12k people from the original 12 tribes of Israel. When I pointed out that I wasn’t Jewish so does it mean I don’t get to go to heaven, they clarified that it was 11 tribes and one “lost tribe” that allows non-jews eligibility. “So only twelve thousand get into heaven, out of about 9 billion?” They agreed that it’s the gospel and many people weren’t good enough Christians. I asked how many Jehovah’s Witnesses there were. They left after they figured out I was going to ask questions that exposed their awkward answers.
Jehovah’s Witnesses are one of the only cults that tell people that they most likely aren’t going into heaven for believing and giving your life to a religion. And don’t even insinuate that better Christians might appear in the future and take their places in heaven. The end will happen before new Christians have a chance to prove how good they are.
JW are super petty and very mean to even their own. It’s all passive aggressive and it’s constant.
I_Fart_Glitter@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
They send me hand written Hallmark cards. They don’t know my name (yet) so mine get addressed to “our neighbor” but my neighbors get them addressed by name and are very creeped out by it. The latest one came during the LA fires and is about how “the bible” will help me “cope” with extreme weather:
TrickDacy@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
“Awake!” is also a thing. I’ve seen it many times.
FourPacketsOfPeanuts@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Looks like they have two: “Awake” and “Watchtower”: www.jw.org/en/library/magazines/
In London in recent years I’ve only seen Awake. Maybe Watchtower is American or only in Kingdom halls?
As far as I’m aware there are 10 lost tribes. Only Judah and Benjamin were not regarded as lost. They might have a different view on that of course…
They don’t see the “vast multitude” (who are believers besides the 144,000) as having a bad deal in any way. They get to live on the restored earth which is basically Eden paradise. That’s why all their magazines / tracts have pictures of an idyllic life in a park / nature type setting
MothmanDelorian@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
I did econmerce for a grocery chain during COVID. A JW retirement community was a huge source of customers. They spent ungodly amounts of money on cheese and crackers
Kitathalla@lemy.lol 12 hours ago
They now stand outside places, like a university a few miles away from me, and have incredibly idiotic stands meant to take advantage of people going through hard times.
They do far more than that to be considered cultish. The elders of an area have a large degree of input on things like marriage, for instance, which goes hand in hand with men moving their new wives to areas far away from any family. Combine that with the typical cult emphasis on only socializing with people in the cult, and you’ve got a beautiful combination to keep women oppressed and without options. I’ve had to sit and listen to a poor woman come to terms with leaving everything, adult children included, behind and hope that her family would still help her after 30 years, because she had no other means of support. It was horrifying, because even the resources I was trying to pair her with wouldn’t be enough to help.
Nollij@sopuli.xyz 11 hours ago
#3 seems like a pretty standard evangelical Christian group
FourPacketsOfPeanuts@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
Yes, it’s a general feature though I’ve rarely come across evangelical groups that go as far as to make public proclamations of their predictions like Jehovah’s witnesses did (some do, no doubt)
Amusingly it seems the JWs might have only survived because around 1886 it accidentally predicted 1914 would be the end of the world and the beginning of the favouring of the Jews (WWI and II culminated in the re-founding of Israel)