Unverified Claims

In most cases, when Jehovah’s Witnesses make claims in their literature, or quote experts, they fail to provide sources to those claims and quotes.

Therefore, to ensure you are not a victim of misrepresentation, it is important that you find the sources upon which they make their claims so that you can know if you are being duped and tricked.

For example, in the No.2 Edition of The Watchtower, they make the following claims:

• Wars: Between 2007 and 2017, deaths from armed conflict and terrorism rose by 118 percent.
• Hunger: In 2019, 8.9 percent of the world population was starving and 21.3 percent of children under five were malnourished and stunted.

They provided no sources for either of these claims. Without sources, it is very difficult to determine if there is truth in the claims. Or at the very least, one is unsure where the figures came form or whether they have been manipulated to further an agenda.

What agenda might Jehovah’s Witnesses have? They may manipulate the data to further the idea that we are living in the period of time referred to in the Bible as “The Last Days”. Therefore, it is important to know the source to determine if one is a victim of manipulation and fraud.

With a small bit of effort and time, we can verify unverified claims. We will take a look at both sources that we believe Jehovah’s Witnesses have used when providing data on Wars and Hunger.

Wars

According to Our World in Data, deaths from armed conflict and terrorism rose by 118 percent. However if you were to look at it from 2008 to 2017, it rose by 121%. It rose by a whopping 156% between 2010 and 2017. Yet, if you looked at each year after that, the rise diminished. In fact, in 2014, 2015 and 2016, armed conflict and terrorism had dropped when compared with 2017. In fact, why didn’t Jehovah’s Witnesses show the full data set on Our World in Data from 1990 to 2017. That would show that deaths from armed conflict and terrorism rose by 29% only. Not a massive figure when one is trying to show that the world is in its “last days”.

Clearly Jehovah’s Witnesses manipulated the data to give the impression that deaths from war and terrorism have more than doubled when you compare a subset of the data when the reality is that deaths have only increased by 29% when compared with all of the data available.

Hunger

According to Jehovah’s Witnesses, 8.9% of the world was starving in 2019. However, when you look at the data, the figures don’t align. According to Action Against Hunger, 8.9% of the world’s population was not starving, but was undernourished. Starving and undernourished are two different things. What is most interesting is that the same source said that the proportion of those undernourished had declined from a high of 15 percent in 2000-2004. Jehovah’s Witnesses make no mention of that important fact.

While Jehovah’s Witnesses did correctly present the fact that 21.3 percent of children under age five in 2019 were malnourished and stunted, they conveniently omitted the important fact that the percentage of children malnourished and stunted in 2019 is a reduction from 33 percent in 2000. See Action Against Hunger International Nutrition Security Policy, page 5; and Sustainable Development Goal 2, Zero Hunger. See also, The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2020, page 9.

As with the figures relating to War, Jehovah’s Witnesses have manipulated and exaggerated the data to give the impression that the world hunger is in a worse state than it really is.

If you are an avid reader of Jehovah’s Witnesses’ magazine, The Watchtower, do you take what they say without question? Then maybe you are a victim of Jehovah’s Witnesses’ unverified claims.