Ramblings

Witness teachings differ, in details, from standard Christian doctrine. They use many equivalents and in some parts make things up they believe are “in the bible” that would be considered downright heretical elsewhere. The reason they do this is because JW have crafted their own, handmade “translation” that accurately reflects JW doctrine (and no longer reflects the original bible).
Also, JW tend to be painfully precise with their doctrines. Here a few examples:

I write that JW teach to reject secular authorities as much as they can (well, as far as they can before getting into too much trouble). Strictly speaking this is not correct. Witnesses are taught to “respect” the secular authorities. Here is what my friend would consider to be accurate:

JWs are taught to listen to the secular authorities insofar as the Bible, and more relevantly, the Governing Body agrees with them. They are also taught to be no part of the world (John 15:19), and to reject worldly people and ideas. That is, unless they are preaching, where they have been commanded (Matthew 28:19) to convert people into their cult.
Now, while this is what one could perhaps consider as the “full truth”, the is not the “real truth”. The real truth, and even my friend agrees with this, is the following:

Fuck those demons, we’re gonna be as compliant as we have to be to maintain survival.

The basic premise of JW is that everyone who believes in Big J is good and anyone who refuses to is bad. Unfortunately for them, 99.9% of the world does not believe in YHWH, which means we're all bad. We are seen as a disgrace who reject the truth and we are all Satan's personal demons trying to steer good and faithful people off the path. Almost EVERY other JW doctrine teaches to hate and loathe secular authorities, to defy them and their pesky ideas, keep away from it as far as possible. Only those “in the truth” are real and valuable human beings that deserve to be treated fairly (and even then they still just bully each other), everyone else is a tool of Satan himself. You and me too, and we didn't even know. Just because they have this one line in the bible to hide behind is not enough for me to say that they actually want anyone to respect the authorities - it's what they specifically built as something to hide behind, not a teaching they actually adhere to. And, and let me inject my own bias here, probably meant to protect JW from the total meltdown as complete defiance with secular authorities would probably thin their numbers rather quickly.

The second example is about the usage of the word “heaven”. Strictly speaking, witnesses do not believe in heaven or hell. Their own, specially handcrafted version, ehem “version”, does conveniently not include/wrongly translate that part as to reflect what the founders of JW wanted to believe. You will get them screaming and kicking if you talk to them and act like they believe in this, because it's one of the few things they have going for them in terms of actually being different from mainstream Christianity.

The full truth here is that witnesses believe that demons will die in Armageddon and faithful believers get to live on in paradise or whatever. Something. It does not fucking matter. Just like in Christianity, good things if you are nice, bad things if you are not, exactly what is good and bad is up for debate, but witnesses believe that rejecting Jehovah is bad.

I will continue to claim that they reject secular authorities and I will continue to use the word heaven in spite of this. These argumentations are specifically designed by witnesses to run conversations into the mud by focusing on irrelevant details while, at the end of the day, it's still “heaven” all over again, just with a bit of special JW flavor attached to it.

Remember that these are just two examples and more like this is hidden in the article.