A Thing Worth Doing

Rich and Suzanne

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

G. K. Chesterton

The line above is Chesterton’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 him at his word. The research behind this site took many years, and I put off building it as long as the fear of not doing it perfectly restrained me. It is here now, done as well as I could do it, for my family and friends, and for Jehovah’s Witnesses and former Witnesses everywhere.

For thirty-five years I was one of Jehovah’s Witnesses: an appointed Elder for more than thirty of them, a Pioneer for several, and for seven years a member of the headquarters staff at Brooklyn Bethel, where I was a Bethel Elder in the Service Department. My wife Suzanne and I ceased association with the organization in 2000. Neither of us was ever disfellowshipped. The rest of that story is told in the About Me pages.

This site asks one question: is the organization what it claims to be — the restoration of the Christianity of the apostles? It asks that question one checkable claim at a time. On every page the Watchtower speaks first, in its own words and from its own publications, and the reply comes afterward. Nothing here asks for trust. Everything asks to be checked.

One conviction shapes everything here: we all tend to believe what we want to be true, believer and skeptic alike. So I ask of you only what this work 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, start here: A Path for Jehovah’s Witnesses — ten pages, in what I think is a logical order.

If you are a Christian of another tradition, or a skeptic, or a relative or friend wondering how I came to be where I am, Where to Begin has a door for each of you. The questions this site raises led Suzanne and me out of the Watchtower and, years after Suzanne's death, led me into the Church Jesus founded — 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.

Watchtower vs 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 series of specific questions. Here are nine of them, in the order a Witness should meet them. 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?
  • Did Jerusalem fall to Babylon in 607 BCE, the date on which 1914 depends? Or in 587 BCE, as the tablets, the astronomical records, and the historians say — leaving 1914 with nothing under it?
  • Did Jesus mean by “this generation” the people who saw 1914, a meaning the Society has redefined five times since? Or the generation He was speaking to, which lived to see Jerusalem destroyed, exactly as He said it would?
  • Did Christ return invisibly in 1914, a “presence” the Society once dated to 1874? Or does the Greek word parousia name the arrival of a king, which “every eye will see” (Rev. 1:7)?
  • Is the New World Translation a faithful rendering of Scripture? Or is it translated to fit the Watchtower Organization’s doctrines?
  • Does the New Testament command shunning — a mother refusing her own child’s greeting? Or does it describe a narrower discipline, medicinal and temporary, that Scripture never aims at family affection?
  • Is Jesus the archangel Michael, a created spirit who became a man and then an angel again? Or the Son of whom Hebrews asks, “to what angel did God ever say, ‘You are my Son’?” — and commands, “Let all God’s angels worship him”?
  • Before creation, was God a solitary monad with no one to love? Or is His very nature relational, a communion of love among Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?

These nine questions, in this order, are the path laid out in A Path for Jehovah’s Witnesses; a tenth page there, Counting the Cost, is about what an honest answer might cost you. The rest of the Watchtower section — fourteen more pages, from the soul to the blood doctrine — is listed under Content, in the upper right. My hope is that each question 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 they 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 such as the problem of suffering and evil? Do they overturn belief in God? Or, weighed fairly, can they be faced without losing 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 decades of our lives as Jehovah’s Witnesses but stopped associating with the faith in the year 2000 — and because the people we love deserve to know why we left… and why they should too. 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, and I have done my best to provide honest and thorough research to enable you to do so.

The left panel above asks the question: is the Watchtower actually the restoration of apostolic Christianity, or is it a man-made religion of nineteenth-century America? That turns on questions history and Scripture can answer, and the panel puts nine of them in the order a Witness should meet them — whether the Church ever fell, who the “faithful and discreet slave” is, whether 607 and 1914 survive the tablets, what “this generation” and the parousia meant, whether the New World Translation translates impartially or edits to fit a doctrine, how the apostles handled sin, whether Jesus is Michael, and who God is. The page Watchtower vs Catholic takes them up, with the rest of that section, one by one.

The right panel asks the deeper question beneath: which worldview best 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: Protestant vs Catholic — why I did not stop at the church door nearest the Kingdom Hall, but kept walking until the road led back to the beginning. The same kind of questions decide it: Is Scripture alone the rule of faith — and where does Scripture say so? Does the faith that saves come alone, or working through love? Did the apostles leave successors, or only a book? And are the disputed Catholic doctrines late additions, or developments of what the Church believed from the first?

If you want a logical path through the site, it is laid out in Where to Begin. If you want the story, it is told in About. If you want the complete, documented treatments, every essay on the site is gathered in the Essay Library, each downloadable as Word or PDF. And if Chesterton was right that a thing worth doing is worth doing badly, then the doing is now done — the weighing of it is yours.