Whereu, yes I agree there are benefits to discussion of various subjects which can broaden our understanding.
God's servants have always met stiff opposition in their efforts to help people. Jesus Christ’s opponents used every form of ridicule and criticism, with false charges based on any trivial thing that they could find. Because Jesus ate and drank they accused him of being a glutton and a drunkard. (Matt. 11:19) Because he went to the homes of sinners when invited and spoke the good news to them, they said he was mixing with sinners. (Mark 2:15, 16) When he actually cured people, releasing them from the grip of terrible diseases, they wanted to stop him on the ground that he broke their self-made rules concerning the Sabbath day.—Matt. 12:9-14. These religious men preferred to let the people suffer if they could just do away with Jesus, because his preaching and course of action showed them up to be teachers of no value. (Matt. 15:14) They wanted plaudits of men rather than honor for or from God.—Matt. 23:5-7. The apostles experienced the same opposition. When Paul was unjustly in a Roman prison, put there at the instance of religious opposers for spreading the light of the freedom-giving good news, his opponents did all they could to ruin the good effects of his preaching. Paul said about this: “True, some are preaching the Christ through envy and rivalry, but others also through goodwill. . . . The former do it out of contentiousness, not with a pure motive, for they are supposing to stir up tribulation for me in my prison bonds.”—Phil. 1:15-17.
Jehovah’s Witnesses as modern-day Christians are working hard to get this good news preached to every individual. They do not claim infallibility or perfection. Neither are they inspired prophets. But they are trying to live clean lives and to help people by teaching them the good news. Millions are responding.
Jehovah’s Witnesses have opposers today. Some spring out from among their own ranks, just as it was with early Christianity. (Acts 20:30) But what is the objective of such men? It is to tear down. What they say and publish is almost wholly in the form of an attack upon Jehovah’s Witnesses. Do we see them upbuilding anyone? Are they sharing in a great ingathering of clean-living, Kingdom-preaching Christians? If they do draw away someone who is associated with Jehovah’s Witnesses, where is this person to go? Where will he be built up spiritually?
Do modern-day opponents of Jehovah’s Witnesses have a program for building people up in a knowledge of God? Do they offer the people a progressive spiritual education? No. They generally ally themselves with the religious systems of Christendom, often recommending that people join or rejoin the denomination of their choice. In cases the clergy let these disgruntled ones use their pulpits, not to preach the Gospel, but in an attempt to tear down Jehovah’s Witnesses. Furthermore, these men go back to the things that they themselves once threw down and publicly declared as false—the doctrine of the Trinity (‘God in three persons’), the immortality of the human soul, a hellfire of torment for the wicked, and other unscriptural teachings. They say that the Witnesses deceived them, sometimes for many years—the same charge that “false apostles” made against Paul. But now, they say, they have suddenly seen the light—that these doctrines that they had rejected were true all along. They repent at having doubted such doctrines and having talked against these while being associated with the Witnesses.
If a person has cleaned up from doctrines that dishonor God—the Trinity, the fiendish torment of souls in an eternal hell of fire, the destruction of our planet Earth, the support of blood-spilling national warfare and like beliefs that would make the Christian defiled as a part of the world—and then turns back to take up these doctrines again, he is doing what the apostle Peter described of some persons in his day. Peter wrote: "Certainly if after escaping from the defilements of the world by an accurate knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they get involved again with these very things and are overcome, their final state has become worse for them than the first. It would have been better for them not to have accurately known the path of righteousness than after knowing it to turn away from the holy commandment they had received. What the true proverb says has happened to them: “The dog has returned to its own vomit, and the sow that was bathed to rolling in the mire.”—2 Pet. 2:20-22.
