Here it is in writing, ONLY BAPTIZED Witnesses will survive armageddon.

[Jack Ryan]

To all naysayers and apologists who say that Jehovah will look at hearts at armageddon and save billions, my own mother believes this.

This is the october 2019 study Watchtower page 11 paragraph 14. As you can see it makes it crystal clear that ONLY baptized witnesses will survive armageddon.

14 Read Matthew 28:19, 20. As we conduct Bible studies, we have to try our best to “make disciples . . . , teaching them to observe all the things [Jesus has] commanded.” We need to help people understand how important it is for them to take their stand for Jehovah and his Kingdom. This means trying to motivate people to make the truth their own by applying what they learn, dedicating their life to Jehovah, and getting baptized. Only then will they survive Jehovah’s day.—1 Pet. 3:21.

[Jack Ryan]

Only Jehovah's Witnesses, those of the anointed remnant and the "great crowd," as a united organization under the protection of the Supreme Organizer, have any Scriptural hope of surviving the impending end of this doomed system dominated by Satan the Devil." Watchtower 1989 Sep 1 p.19

"In fact, with God's day of judgment so near today, all the world should 'keep silent before the Sovereign Lord Jehovah' and hear what he says through the "little flock" of Jesus' anointed followers and their companions, his "other sheep." (Luke 12:32; John 10:16) Annihilation awaits all who will not listen and who thereby set themselves against rule by God's Kingdom." Watchtower 2001 Feb 15 p. 14

[JW Insider]

[James Thomas Rook Jr.]

So, if I am a HVAC contractor, and a church calls me up to fix their furnace or air conditioner, I can't do it?

That is insanity on parade, and total nonsense.

It is also DANGEROUS, because that perspective warps minds.

OURS!

WE BUY CHURCHES, chop off the steeple and cross, and rededicate it as a Kingdom Hall.

I went to an OBVIOUS converted church-to-Kingdom-Hall, when I was a young boy, dropped a bag of marbles at the back, and they rolled all the way to the front, on a tile floor, in South Richmond, Virginia.

False religion got "our" money, for the sale.

We got the building.

 

 

 

[JW Insider]

I included a large portion of the page where the paragraph in question ends. This is because there really is a bit of a change in the overall message here. The idea that a Witness MUST make sure that his or her secular employment has NOTHING to do with Babylon the Great had been a very strictly enforced rule in the past, and it has been relaxed somewhat in the last 20 years.

I have no idea what's right or wrong in this regard, because there are some statements that still allow for this to be a matter of conscience, to some extent. Even the paragraph above uses the words "a Christian who is employed by some other business would not want to do extensive work at a facility that promotes false worship."

This starts to bring up quite literally THOUSANDS of examples of work that will become questionable again. How much work is extensive work. My son graduated high school in 2011 with a person who went to Italy to learn how to restore artwork for museums. If she's working on 10 projects and has just been given a statue to restore that was partially burned at Notre Dame, would she refuse, or consider it only one of 10 projects and therefore "not extensive"? If she can finish the piece in only two weeks and not have to step foot herself in the church, then is it "extensive?" (This young woman is not a JW, by the way, so she's happy for the work.)

We went through so many of these legalistic ideas in the 1970's, where brothers lost their privileges and were put on "probation" or "public reproof" for taking on certain kinds of work, that I just hate to see it become Pharasaical again.

 

 

[James Thomas Rook Jr.]

Apostates do not really need to destroy the GB's credibility ... the GB  does a comprehensive job of destroying their own credibility, with no help from anybody.

[JW Insider]

A year or two after I was baptized, about 1968, our Circuit Overseer (called the "Circuit Servant" back then) gave a talk on a Tuesday that railed against giving our old junk to the Salvation Army. (We used to give up the Book Study night for the first meeting with the Circuit Overseer.) This didn't bother anyone too much because we didn't have a Salvation Army around the city, and most of us only BOUGHT things at the local GOODWILL STORE which was huge in our city, and it was unlikely that any of us gave anything to any of these stores, anyway. But someone was bound to ask, not during that meeting, but sometime before the Thursday night meeting, so that the Circuit Overseer mentioned the question, and that he had left out the fact that even BUYING at these stores is supporting false religion, and he added that the GOODWILL STORE was founded by a Reverend So-and-So. 

I know that my mother was like . . . "Why did that person have to ask?" It was her favorite place to shop, spoiled by someone asking the wrong question. 

Fast forward 50 years, and I'm cleaning out junk for my parents at their house in California to move them into an apartment last year. We've got 3 Witness families happy to take quite a lot of the stuff, but there was still quite a bit that no one took. So I boxed it up and told them that I'd drop it off at the local GOODWILL STORE. My mother said, "Fine." And I reminded her of what Brother Kent Karras (the Circuit Overseer) had said. She remembered, and told me that his counsel "lasted all of about 2 weeks." I told her I didn't know she was such a rebel.

[James Thomas Rook Jr.]

It's ALL about credibility.

It's a constant battle between WANTING to be obedient ... and not being an obvious moron.

Roughly the equivalent of not buying lunch at Churches Fried Chicken, for religious reasons.

[Anna]

1 hour ago, James Thomas Rook Jr. said:

So, if I am a HVAC contractor, and a church calls me up to fix their furnace or air conditioner, I can't do it?

Well you've got to be reasonable.  The question is; is our employment closely and consistently tied with false religion. One off things don't count I'm sure.  One thing is fixing a church HVAC, and another is specializing in polishing church steeples.

[ComfortMyPeople]

Instead of being guided by an extensive manual of what to do and what not, I try to follow, in this order:

•  
• (Romans 6:14). . You are not under the law [RULES] but under an undeserved kindness. . . [PRINCIPLES]
• Common sense is the least common of the senses.

But, as @James Thomas Rook Jr. has said very well, many times I cannot behave openly because  (Romans 14:21)  "It is best not to eat meat or drink wine or do anything over which your brother stumbles. . ."
 

What @Jack Ryan mentions I would summarize as follows:

1. The vast majority of JW's sincerely believe that we will be the only ones to be saved (those who were inside the ark lived, no one outside the ark survived). And stick to this and other similar models to believe that. Normally they are those who believe that we are better than others and, not infrequently, their way of being is in some measure pharisaic.
2. Others, however, think that a God of love, that the Judge of the whole Earth, cannot be so strict. A little with the doubts that Abraham presented to the angel walking towards Sodom.

I have to admit that I have belonged to the first group for a long time.

Of course, the statements in our publications are, almost exclusively, in support of the "hard" stance, the one quoted by Jack Ryan.

 

[Anna]

Yes, common sense is great!

A few weeks ago, we had the video about the brother getting a bit materialistic and buying a big TV, a fancy coffee maker and fancy car. After study and meditating he realised it was not a good idea so he went and took these things back and he replaced the TV with a really small one. On the way home, the COBE and his wife joked about it in the car (I was getting a ride with them). She said; "did he really have to replace it with the size of a computer monitor"? (lols from all of us) "I mean come on, you'd need a pair of glasses to see that!" (more lols). Me: "so on Sunday when you are at our house for FS you know what you're going to see on our wall" (now really cracking up...tears rolling down face). This back and forth and laughter lasted till we almost got to my house. Of course the conclusion was that this extremism was for illustrative purposes only, and not to be taken literally. However, we all agreed that in the past, and even now, some friends might take it literally...

Later on my husband made a point that on a very small TV, one could still watch the bad programs, if you sat really close that is (lol).

 

[James Thomas Rook Jr.]

Little is known about Bro. "Judge" Rutherford's small screen TV fetish, circa 1939, because back then there was only one channel, and you had to know Morse Code.