(Cont. from Page
16/10/94D).
The Society
bought One Clark Street in 1967. Proceeding under the 1969 rent regulations
which permitted landlords to evict tenants when apartments were required for the
landlord's use, the Society served eviction notices on the building's 42
middle-class families, many of whom were paying a monthly rent of only $150. The Society offered to pay relocation expenses required under law; but the tenant's
response was "Where are we going to move to?"... By 1971 only 12 of the original
tenants remained On August 10, 1974, 100 tenants of the 480-room hotel at 25 Clark Street, most of them middle-aged and elderly working people, were served eviction notices so that the owner‑operator of the residential hotel could rent five additional floors to the Watchtower Society, which already occupied five floors of the shabby but still elegant hotel. Some of the tenants uneasily speculated that the management of the hotel wanted them out so that the property could be sold to the Watchtower Society. The Society's spokesman, Jerry Molohan, denied that the Witnesses were planning to buy the Towers. On November 19, 1974, he said, "I know of no plans to do so. What the future holds I don't know. At the moment it's the hotel's problem, not ours." Early in 1975, the Watchtower Society bought the Towers Hotel. (Pg.87,88).
On October 2, 1914, Charles Taze Russell entered the Bethel dining room. "The Gentile Times have ended, their kings have had their day," he rumbled. "Anyone disappointed? I'm not. Everything is moving right on schedule." [Yearbook 1975, p.73]. Thirty-six years previously, in 1878, a small band of Russellites had had to explain why they had not then been taken to heaven, since 1874 had marked the beginning of Christ's invisible presence in the spiritual "Temple of Jerusalem" and the economic panic of 1873 had been the first death spasm of a dying world. Once again, in 1914, they found themselves having to account for failure. In 1879, Russell had predicted that an international nihilist-Communist-anarchist uprising would begin early in 1914 and that this period of turbulence would be followed, on October 2, 1914, by the establishment of God's kingdom on earth and the calling of the "living saints" to glory. When this did not happen, many of Russell's followers, according to his apologists, "grew sour" and left the organization. (Pg.107). The shocking thing about the published erroneous predictions of JWs is that they offer them in book form to the public and still teach from them! They still don't correct them even when their errors are made public!
The Witnesses'
accounts of their travails during World War 1 reflect a parochialism. They view
Rutherford's conviction on the charge of espionage and his nine-month
imprisonment in the Atlanta penitentiary as proof of a special relationship with
God; they ignore the fact that clergymen of all denominations were sent to
prison (Cont. on Page 16/10/94F).
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