Bible Students) dates back to the late 1800s, when their founder, a charismatic Pittsburgh haberdasher named Charles Taze Russell, preached that Armageddon was imminent and that Christ had already returned to earth “invisibly” in 1874 but would be back for real about four decades later. Russell also claimed that, due to divinely inspired climate change, global temperatures would rise and the world would revert to a balmy, Genesis-like state. Russell’s followers endured no end of insults, and this was before his successors encouraged door-to-door proselytizing, for which the Jehovah’s Witnesses
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