When I was still in the organization, this thought occured to me and it scared me a lot. After all, Jesus talked of an evil slave and I kept thinking that the "faithful and discrete slave" sounded more like the evil slave that Jesus spoke of. It was constantly critical of the flock and hindering their relationship with Jehovah (and have done more so lately by claiming that Jesus is mediator between the annointed class and God).

I don't believe in the Bible anymore, but I think there's a perception problem that exists whether you are on the believer side or non-believer side of the discussion: The Watchtower, governing body and Jehovah's Witnesses as a world religion simply do not matter on the world scene. They are important to us because we were in it. To others, however, Witnesses are a kooky group of people knocking at doors with magazines and doing something besides enjoying themselves on Christmas. That's it!

The Watchtower likes to bring out that they preach the Good News, but that's a bit of a red herring. First off, their version of the Good News is not strongly Bible based (think 1914). Second, while the JWs have had missionaries all over the world, they have always followed other Christian groups into those territories. So other Christians have gone into those lands preaching the Good News and the WT missionaries have come in saying "don't listen to those false Christians, we have the real truth. By the way, let's use the Bibles those false Christians left you."