A Thing Worth Doing

Rich and Suzanne

“If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.”

G. K. Chesterton

The sentence above is the great Catholic writer’s defense of the amateur — the one who does a thing himself, out of love, rather than leaving it to someone better qualified. I have taken Chesterton at his word, and stopped putting off composing this website out of fear of not doing it well enough.

This site is for my family and friends first, and secondly for Jehovah’s Witnesses and former Witnesses everywhere. The years of research behind it were done out of love — not to win arguments, but so that the people I love can know my history, understand why Suzanne and I walked the road we walked, and be warned about how easy it is to be misled in the things that matter most. If what is written here spares one person years of spiritual detour, or simply helps someone I love understand our story, it will have been worth doing — even if done badly.

One conviction shapes everything here: we all tend to believe what we want to be true. The intellect and the will are not always on the same side — a heart that has been wounded, or that longs to belong somewhere, can lead the mind where the evidence does not point. And it's not just belief that brings comfort. Disbelief can be a comfort too: walking away from everything can feel like freedom, and “there is no one to answer to” can be as soothing a thought as “someone is watching over me.” So I am asking you — whether Witness, Christian, or skeptic — only what it asked of me: to test what we want to be true against what actually is true. Truth has nothing to fear from examination.

If you are one of Jehovah’s Witnesses — or used to be — this research was done with you especially in mind. I know what it could cost you to examine it, and nothing here is intended to criticize your personal honest conclusions. The Where to Begin page explains what this site is, makes you two promises, and lays out a path through it — wherever you happen to be presently.

For thirty-five years I was active as one of Jehovah’s Witnesses. I was an appointed Elder for over thirty years and a Pioneer for several years. I spent seven years at the organization’s world headquarters in Brooklyn, New York — known as Bethel — where I was appointed a Bethel Elder and worked in the Service Department as secretary to Harley Miller, the Service Department Overseer. While at Bethel, I contributed to the writing of articles in The Watchtower and Our Kingdom Ministry. I gave circuit- and district-convention talks to audiences as large as forty thousand people in Tiger Stadium (Detroit, Michigan) and the SilverDome (Pontiac, Michigan). I served for years as Accounts Overseer for local circuit assemblies and News Service Overseer at regional district conventions. I served on one occasion as a substitute circuit overseer.

All this is simply to say that what follows cannot be dismissed as the complaints of a disgruntled underachiever who never really understood the religion: my standing as one of Jehovah’s Witnesses was, by any reasonable measure, unimpeachable. What’s more, neither I nor my wife Suzanne were ever disfellowshipped even after ceasing association with the religion in 2000.

This website visits questions that ultimately led Suzanne and me to leave The Watchtower, questions to which I eventually found answers in the Church Jesus actually founded. That Church is the one to which He promised, “behold, I am with you always, to the close of the age” (Matt. 28:20, RSV-SB).

You may leave comments or questions below, but be sure to read our policy on commenting before doing so.

The Watchtower vs The Catholic Church

Are Jehovah’s Witnesses the restoration of first-century apostolic Christianity, as they claim — or a man-made religion, a restorationist sect of the kind they themselves say the Mormons and Seventh-day Adventists are? The answer turns on a handful of specific questions. Each is worth asking honestly, and each is examined in its own page on this site:
  • Did the apostles warn of a coming ‘great apostasy’ that would eradicate the entire Church founded by Christ, leaving authentic Christianity unidentifiable until Bible students restored it eighteen centuries later? Or did they warn of heretics and lax Christians who would trouble the Church but never destroy it?
  • Did Jesus foretell a future “faithful and discreet slave” class that would be given authority to govern His people — and is today’s Governing Body that class? Or did He simply give a teaching parable to illustrate that every Christian should be a faithful steward, prepared at all times for His return?
  • Is the Kingdom of God a political government that began ruling invisibly in heaven in 1914? Or is it a spiritual reign, extended by preaching and making disciples wherever a soul consents to the will of God — the Great Commission Jesus could give because “all authority in heaven and on earth” had been given to Him?
  • Did Jesus foretell two classes of Christians — a “little flock” of 144,000 in heaven ruling over an unlimited number of “other sheep” on earth? Or did He foretell that a “little flock” of Jews would be joined by an unlimited number of Gentile “other sheep”, the two folds becoming one flock of Christians?
  • Did the apostles foretell a distant future “last days” to begin in 1914? Or did they believe they were already living in “the last days” of a present age that was leading to an age to come at Christ’s return?
  • Before creation, was God an solitary monad with no one to love? Or is His very nature relational, a communion of love among Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?
  • Does using the divine name “Jehovah” mark the one true religion? Or is “Jehovah” the result of a medieval mistranslation of the Tetragrammaton, which was never used in the Septuagint or by the writers of the Christian Scriptures?
  • Is the New World Translation a faithful rendering of Scripture? Or is it translated to fit the Watchtower Organization’s doctrines?
These and other questions are taken up, one by one, in the pages herein. My hope is that each is weighed honestly — on the Scriptures, on the historical record, and on the plain sense of Jesus’ own words — and that an unbiased mind, asking them in good faith, will find that the questions very nearly answer themselves.

Atheism vs Christianity

Beneath the question of which church is true lies a deeper one: which worldview better explains the world we actually live in: the Christian one, or the materialist one that says matter and energy are all there is? Belief in God is often dismissed as a leap in the dark, contrary to reason. But is it? Each of the following questions is worth asking honestly, and each is examined in its own page on this site:
  • Why is there something rather than nothing? Does a universe that need not have existed at all, and that did not always exist, explain its own being? Or does its existence point beyond itself to a cause that must exist of its own nature?
  • Why is the universe finely balanced for life, in ways that grow more striking the closer we look at the constants that govern it? Is such exquisite calibration better explained by blind chance, or by a Mind that intended it?
  • Why is the cosmos intelligible to the mind, orderly and written in the language of mathematics, and why are we the kind of creatures who can read it? Is that a happy accident, or just what we should expect if reason stands behind the world?
  • Are right and wrong objectively real? Most of us know that cruelty is genuinely wrong, not merely unfashionable. But can objective good and evil, real meaning and real purpose, be grounded in a universe of mere particles? Or do they point beyond matter to their source?
  • Has God acted in history? The Christian claim is not only philosophical but historical: that God revealed Himself, supremely in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, events with real evidence behind them, recorded in documents we have good reason to trust. Is that evidence better explained by a risen Christ, or explained away?
  • And what of the honest objections, above all the problem of suffering and evil? Do they overturn belief in God? Or, weighed fairly, do they trouble the believer without dissolving the reasons for belief?
None of this is meant to belittle the honest doubter; I take the hardest questions seriously and weigh them in these pages too. I simply find that, taken together, the world we actually meet (its existence, its order, its moral weight, and the figure of Christ at the center of history) is better accounted for by a reasonable Christian faith than by materialism.

Summary

This page has made its case in outline; here it is in brief. The site exists because Suzanne and I spent thirty-five years as Jehovah’s Witnesses, left, and found in the Catholic Church the answers to the questions that drove us out — and because the people we love deserve to know why. It is built on the working conviction stated above: we all tend to believe what we want to be true, believer and skeptic alike. So nothing here asks for trust. Everything asks to be checked.

The left panel asks the Watchtower question: is the organization the restoration of apostolic Christianity, or a man-made religion of nineteenth-century America? That turns on questions history and Scripture can answer — whether the Church ever fell, who the “faithful and discreet slave” is, what happened in 1914, whether Christians come in two classes, what the divine name proves, and whether the New World Translation translates or edits. The Watchtower vs Catholic Church section takes them up one by one.

The right panel asks the deeper question beneath it: which worldview fits the world we actually meet — the Christian one, or the materialist one? Why anything exists, why its constants are balanced for life, why it is intelligible at all, why cruelty is really wrong and not merely unfashionable, and what actually happened at the empty tomb. The Atheism vs Christianity section weighs that evidence, the honest objections included.

Between the two stands a third set of pages for fellow Christians who are not Catholic: Others vs Catholic Church, on sola scriptura, faith and works, the sacraments, Mary, and the Church herself — why I did not stop at the church door nearest the Kingdom Hall, but kept walking until the road ran back to the beginning.

If you want the path, it is laid out on Where to Begin. If you want the story, it is told in About. And if Chesterton was right that a thing worth doing is worth doing badly, then the doing is now done — the weighing is yours.