My perspective of restrictive groups ...

For my part, I don't look at these kind of groups so much for what they believe as the "fruits" of the faith so to speak, how participation in the group influences the life of the individual.

The JW appear to me to be a very restrictive group that uses severe social control and ostracizing practices such as "shunning" and "disfellowship." These things can actually be positive, although they seem a high price to me. More troubling to me is my impression that they tend to discourage higher education and even hobbies outside the faith, and appear to view secular governments and any faith other than the JW as agents of Satan to varying degrees. These things draw strict boundaries between the JW and the rest of humanity, and I find that kind of isolationist tendency problematic in any group when it gets to that extreme.

For these reasons, I find them overly controlling and isolationist for my own tastes, and even view them as somewhat threatening potentially. I recognize that they also have a bright side, which is a relatively harmonious cooperative existence with each other, more or less free of substance abuse and violent crime, and as far as I know, their leaders don't seem to take advantage of them the way things happen in some other groups. But all this harmony comes at a price I find very high.

As a comparison, the early Calvinists in Geneva were also effectively a very restrictive religious group with powerful social controls where even slight deviation was severely punished. However they also solved a number of serious social problems and were remarkably resistant to exploitation by their own religious leaders. This is a good example of how a restrictive group using their shared beliefs and associated social control processes can live in a mostly very positive way under some conditions.

I have a reading list on putative "cults" and restrictive groups on Amazon ...

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/listmania/list-browse/-/20UZHAUJ9GP4N/qid=1040271134/sr=5-2/ref=sr_5_2/002-1346264-1754438

kind regards,

Todd

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