memes

Uh, no. They are, and have always been an awful cult that will lie, cheat, manipulate, and otherwise destroy people for trying to leave said cult.

According to their beliefs, those who never heard of Jesus go to heaven as innocents like babies. So by spreading the word they are intentionally damnit most to Hell. Especially given that they believe only 144,000 get to go to heaven.

They have been covering up child sexual abuse for decades. Making children face their abuser, destroying records, not cooperating with the police…

They discourage their members from going to college or seriously pursuing a career. They practice disfellowshipping and shunning, where you lose your entire social circle if you leave or even do something as minor as be known to have watched porn. They trap people essentially - you work a low wage job like cleaning windows because you aren’t supposed to pursue higher education, you are expected to provide free labor for their real estate scheme, and also the hours and hours of free labor going door to door.

They let their children die rather than have blood transfusions. Hospitals and doctors have had to come up with ridiculous “bloodless surgeries” to keep these people alive, because they read a single verse in the Bible flat out incorrectly.

JW’s are a cult. The proselytizing doesn’t convert anyone, the purpose is to have the members routinely rejected to convince them of the evils of society. There is nothing good about the organization; there are certainly individual JW’s who are good people, but it’s a fucking cult.

They want to help but will hurt you and many others unintentionally. Someone holding out a red fire poker when you're stuck in quicksand. They do mean well though.

While that is true, and the hate for any religious practice or belief on lemmy is a bit grating (I'm an atheist), my best friend grew up in the witnesses and was robbed of the only family and community she had ever known when she was excommunicated, because she accepted baptism at like 12 or some shit. Which is a totally appropriate age to be putting all of your support systems and your literal family on the line if you ever change religious perspectives or realize you're gay.

She's now married to her childhood best friend; they had a very cute gay wedding.

It is good that they are generally nice folks. It is fucked up that they think that is an okay thing to do to children. Robbing children of their families for accepting something they were too young to understand is frankly disturbing.

Their goal is to induce you into their abusive cult where they'll take control of your life. These are not harmless or well meaning people.

Individual Jehovah Witnesses are nice. The organisation as whole is incredible evil even by organised religion standards.

Intent alone doesn't matter. According to a lot of Christians their intent is the same but boy are they bad when it comes to executing... according to what I heard from former JWs it's the same for them.

If you want to help or save people, you don't need a common believe or organized religion in general.

Well meaning intent without rational thought can be very damaging, though

That is weird to me, isn't there only room for 140k souls in their version of heaven?

Why would you want to reduce you chances of getting in by adding more potential members?