Introduction

The Jehovah’s Witnesses are a religion that has always claimed to honestly seek out truth without regard for empty tradition or dogma. This honesty is supposed to permeate the organisation and their followers, so much so that Jehovah’s Witnesses often refer to their religion simply as "The Truth".

As a Jehovah’s Witness, I was shocked to discover therefore, that a book published by the Witnesses might contain misleading information. It was in the early 1990’s and I was discussing the origin of life with a co-worker. I used arguments and information from the book "Life-How Did It Get Here-By Evolution or by Creation?" (the Creation book). Specifically, I related how some prominent biologists did not regard evolution as a fact. My co-worker disputed this and suggested that the Creation book had misquoted the biologists. When I went to the library and checked, I found that the Creation book had indeed used quotations from reference books in a misleading way. It was not misleading in some subjective way either - the Creation book claimed that a reference book said something that it did not.

After taking some time to digest this disturbing discovery, I decided to check as many references in the Creation book as possible, to determine how widespread the problem was. This took several years and I ended up with a list of 69 instances where a reference text had been used deceptively.

By this time, the Internet had come into widespread use and on it I discovered that other Jehovah’s Witnesses had made the same discovery about the Creation book and had published the results of their research. One had even published correspondence with Jehovah’s Witness headquarters showing that they had been brushed off. Ultimately, they were disfellowshipped for exposing the truth.

Although it partly repeats the work of other researchers, I decided to publish my findings on the Internet.

Here is my list of misquotations in the Creation book
and here is why I think this matters