Ann O'Maly

Why banning the Jehovah’s Witnesses won’t work for Russia
BY EMILY B. BARAN APRIL 20TH 2017 The Supreme Court of Russia has a decision to make this week about whether to label the Jehovah’s Witnesses an extremist organization and liquidate its assets. This act would transform the religious community into a criminal network, and make individual Witnesses vulnerable to arrest simply for speaking about their faith with others. While the court case has attracted recent media attention, this move is the culmination of two decades of increasing state hostility to Witnesses. In the late 1990s, Moscow took the Witnesses to court to deny them legal standing in the city limits. After several years of court hearings, the city banned the organization. In more recent years, anti-extremism laws drafted in the wake of domestic terrorism have been turned against Witness magazines and books. Currently, over eighty publications have been placed on the federal list of extremist materials. Even their website is now illegal. So is My Book of Bible Stories, an illustrated book for children, listed alongside publications by terrorist organizations.
If the state criminalizes the Witnesses, it will represent a major deterioration in religious toleration in post-Soviet Russia. It will also put Russia at odds with the European Court of Human Rights, which has repeatedly ruled in favor of the Witnesses in the past two decades. It may make other minority faiths vulnerable to similar legal challenges. In the 1990s, scholars spoke of a newly opened religious marketplace, in which post-Soviet citizens, freed from the constraints of state-enforced atheism, shopped around among the faith traditions. It is fair to say that these days, this marketplace has fewer customers, fewer stalls, and more regulations.
If history is any guide, Russia will find it nearly impossible to eliminate Jehovah’s Witnesses. Soviet dissident author Vladimir Bukovsky once admiringly wrote of the Witnesses’ legendary persistence under ban. When the Soviet Union barred religious literature from crossing its borders, Witnesses set up underground bunkers to print illegal magazines for their congregations. When Soviet officials prohibited Witnesses from hosting religious services, they gathered in small groups in their apartments, often in the middle of the night. Sometimes they snuck away to nearby woods or out onto the vast steppe, where they could meet with less scrutiny. When the state told believers that they could not evangelize their faith to others, Witnesses chatted up their neighbors, coworkers, and friends. When these actions landed them in labor camps, Witnesses sought out converts among their fellow prisoners. Witnesses are certain to revive many of these tactics if placed in similar circumstances in the future.
Moreover, technology makes it far more difficult for Russia to control the religious practices of its citizens. Although the Witnesses’ official website is no longer available in Russia, individual members can easily share religious literature through email or dozens of other social media platforms and apps. While Soviet Witnesses had to write coded reports and hand-deliver them through an underground courier network, Witnesses today can text this information in seconds. Technology will also facilitate meeting times for religious services in private homes.
The Russian government simply does not have the manpower to enforce its own ban. It is hard to imagine that local officials could effectively prevent over 170,000 people across more than 2,000 congregations from gathering together multiple times per week, as Witnesses do worldwide. The case of Taganrog is instructive. Several hundred Witnesses lived there in 2009, when the city declared the organization illegal. A few years later, it convicted sixteen Witnesses for ignoring the ban and continuing to gather their congregations for services. The state spent over a year in investigations and court hearings for sixteen people, a tiny fraction of the total congregation, and then suspended the sentences and fines rather than waste more resources in following through on its punishment guidelines. There are not enough police officers in Russia to monitor the daily activities of each and every Witness, and the Witnesses know it. Under a ban, everyone will face more scrutiny, a few will be dealt more serious consequences, and most will continue practicing their faith regardless.
Russia may nonetheless decide that all of this conflict is worth it. After all, Soviet officials were fairly successful in relegating Witnesses to the margins of society. Few Russians will complain if Witnesses no longer come to knock on their door. After all, even Americans rarely have kind words for religious missionaries at their own doorsteps. In my own research, I have never heard a single Russian, other than a scholar, say anything positive about Witnesses. For the record, my experience with Americans has been similar. On a more basic level, Russian citizens may not even notice the Witnesses’ absence from public life. While the post-Soviet period saw a religious revival for all faiths, far fewer joined the Witnesses than the Russian Orthodox Church. For all their recent growth in membership, the Witnesses remain a tiny minority in a largely secular society.
The vocal determination of Witnesses not to acquiesce to state demands should not cause observers to overlook the very real damage a ban would do to this community. Yes, Witnesses have faced similar challenges before and have dealt with them. For decades, they held their baptisms in local rivers and lakes under cover of night. In the post-Soviet period, new members were finally able to celebrate their baptisms in full view of their fellow believers at public conventions. A long-time Witness who attended one of these events in the early 1990s recalled, “What happiness, what freedom!” A new ban would mean a return to this underground life, to a hushed ceremony in cold waters. This is not what freedom of conscience looks like in modern states.
Emily B. Baran is the author of Dissent on the Margins: How Jehovah’s Witnesses Defied Communism and Lived to Preach About It. Her work explores the shifting contours of dissent and freedom in the Soviet Union and its successor states. She is Assistant Professor of History at Middle Tennessee State University.

Somebody quickly build a Starbucks there or those pioneers will never survive.

The Society has been resistant to using digital visual aids and videos as part of their public teaching. When did you first see an audio-visual presentation routinely used as part of conventions, assemblies and weekly meetings? Only in the past few years, right?
Don't you remember that there was a time when speakers could use slides and cine film as part of their public talks (maybe before your time)? They were a highlight, a change from the humdrum. Then the Society discouraged them. 
For so long, while businesses, schools and churches had long been fitted out with IT equipment, using it as an everyday teaching tool, the Society lagged behind, preferring to stick with the old lecture/platform demo format. Several years ago, a tech-savvy JW friend of mine suggested that the convention technicians made use of the big screens at the arena. The technology was all there, why not make the talks more interesting and memorable by adding PowerPoints and other visuals? He was told off for, what was considered, a worldly view.
I wouldn't, as it does actually come from the Society. It's copyrighted to them and has its own literature code - dgb-E Us.
Should the Jews still continue wearing long robes with a blue thread 2nd millennium BC style to avoid being fashioned after the modern system of things? 
Which decade or century of fashion do you think appropriate for today's JW woman? Or which country's present day fashion (that of Islamic countries, perhaps)? 
Really, if there is nothing scripturally wrong with western women wearing pants, and they are acceptable even as conservative business and formal wear, the Org. is 'going beyond the things written.' And it is the Org. that is setting the standard here. The r&f JWs follow the leadership's direction whether it is explicit or implicit (e.g. the Bethel Dress brochure).
That's because it's frowned on! Go out to the workplace office, into the street, and women in pants are commonplace.
By the way, it is also common etiquette to dress appropriately for the setting. You don't see women routinely dressed as Dorothy, a munchkin, or even the Wicked Witch of the West when they are going about their everyday lives, so your example is a straw man (or woman).

Many JW women would disagree. Pants are often more practical and can even be more modest than skirts. They are accepted as appropriate smart-wear for women in the business world. There are no scriptural grounds against them, and I guess it's just another one of those antiquated attitudes where the JW community needs to catch up with late 20th/early 21st century. It may happen - you never know. Look how the Org has embraced digital visual aids and videos as part of their public teaching after resisting them for so many years. 

And yet, in this Western culture, where women routinely wear pants in formal, informal and business settings, KH culture still frowns upon JW women wearing them to meetings and in service. Why?

(Giannis, Robert King is disfellowshipped so it's unlikely that loyal JWs will read anything he says.)
I remember the controversy when it broke and researched the matter for myself at the time.
The issue wasn't so much that Watchtower became a NGO, but that it also became associated with the UN's Department of Public Information which required assenting to the UN Charter (read it to see what that involved) and promoting the UN's work, aims and values. Every year, as the rules stood, the Organization had to provide evidence to the DPI that it was doing that in order to continue association. This is why the articles in the Awakes during the 1990s softened their anti-UN stance and put the UN's accomplishments in a more positive light.
It's easy to minimize the Watchtower's involvement as the actions of one Bethelite, but he and the other named representative were high-up Bethelites. At least one GB member was aware because he was also listed as one of the representatives on the accreditation forms (W. [Lloyd] Barry). Not only that but, 
"Each article in both The Watchtower and Awake! and every page, including the artwork, is scrutinized by selected members of the Governing Body before it is printed." - w87 3/1 p. 15 par. 18.
So any 'spiritual food' that promoted the UN's work (in contrast to the usual contempt about it) was checked and signed off by members of the GB. It would be those kinds of articles that were provided to the DPI so the Org. could continue its association.
Given that the UN has long been viewed as the 'disgusting thing' of Daniel and the 'scarlet wild beast' of Revelation, it's understandable why many would be stumbled by the Org's actions.

I just paid over $39 for a book. And even though it's well over 600 pages, I don't know what the author was thinking. It's $55 in softcover and $65 in hardback. It's the kind of price you'd pay for a book of academic research.
Anyway I'd have to say that, after about 60 pages that I read this morning, it is clearly the most comprehensive, thorough, well-referenced, and seemingly accurate account I have ever read. It is very balanced, so far, and doesn't try to create negative "drama" out of guesswork. I've seen other authors, even Witnesses, do this sometimes.
Even recently, I've tried to get hold of many of the resources he uses and was unable for many of them. I do have a few pages of resources, that Persson doesn't seem to know about (or doesn't use), but they would only confirm his own research, as far as I can tell. He mentions getting some research from collectors of Bible Student history, and a person named Mike Castro in Rhode Island. I don't know if anyone knows whether Mike Castro is a Witness, but someone pointed him out to me when I was looking for a rare document (special Wt supplement not in the bound volumes because it only went to some subscribers), and he sent it to me in PDF format immediately, no questions asked. I'm afraid to find out that he might be an apostate, so I didn't ask 😮.
Anyway, the whole book title is: Rutherford's Coup: The Watchtower Succession Crisis of 1917 and Its Aftermath
https://www.amazon.com/Rutherfords-Coup-Watchtower-Succession-Aftermath/dp/1778143016/ref=sr_1_1?crid=10XAMD6TVT7N3&keywords=rud+persson&qid=1652964472&sprefix=%2Caps%2C53&sr=8-1
So far, I'm impressed. But one should be warned that the author, Rud Persson (pronounced Rude Person 😁) is a former Witness. Don't know whether he was DF'd, but he does say that he worked with Carl Olof Jonsson on research in the past.

So your argument appears to be: we can only know the Bible is true or its true meaning when other people - the 'right' people - tell us it is true and explain the meaning to us. Is that correct?
I see. Are you saying the 'true anointed remnant' are not men and women, and they have no tune to call?

The overall article concerns general evolution in the Galapagos, not just what happened in the 1970s-1980s situation, where a drought resulted in finches with larger beak sizes, which later reverted to the normal average size when the drought ended. Evolution has gone on for some 6 million years, so of course mutation and the other effects listed in Table 2 apply. But mutation cannot have been a factor in the drought situation, because it happened way too fast, and then reversed. Mutations do not generally reverse.

Creationist simulations in no way represent reality. Pigs can fly in simulations.
The earth has never been stable.
As for maths, go right ahead and present some here.
Not even wrong.

I've already spit out my coffee a few times.
Arauna is a weird combination of ageing, obsolete JW and young-earth creationist. Even though Mommy Watchtower explicitly downgraded YECism as "unscriptural and unscientific" forty years ago, she's stuck in what she learned as a Watchtower drone sixty years ago. 

There's going to be a small stream coming down Annie's everything if you don't stop, Arauna 🤣🤣🤣 You're killing me!

Wrong. Would you like to see the physical calculations that disprove your claim?
Remember that rock is about 5-8 times heavier than water, and mountains and depressions flooded by water would do the opposite of what you think.

The pressure of the weight of the water pushed out the ridges of mountains we see and trenches in the sea.  Some places went higher and some lower

More nonsense. Mutations occur by chance. Evolution by natural selection and other mechanisms that select among mutations is not chance. You're talking out of your ass.

Nonsense. Hundreds of millions of fossils have been found over the last 200 years alone. Here's one where a Velociraptor and Protoceratops killed one another:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22530090-800-stunning-fossils-dinosaur-death-match/
More Creationist nonsense. Here is just one list of verified transitional fossils:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-transitional.html
In the fossil record.
Again, the fact that you refuse to look says a great deal about you.
Wrong. Read Prothero's book.
The same can be said for Creationist claptrap. Except there is a huge amount of fossil and genetic evidence for Evolution. But the only evidence that Creationists put forth is some form of The Argument From Personal Incredulity -- "I can't believe it's true so it isn't!"

So your argument appears to be: we can only know the Bible is true or its true meaning when other people - the 'right' people - tell us it is true and explain the meaning to us. Is that correct?
I see. Are you saying the 'true anointed remnant' are not men and women, and they have no tune to call?

Hm. Your argument doesn't fly. If we play the 'faith and miracles' card, and God is not a liar, why would he miraculously fake the planet-wide geological record to make it appear like there was no global flood if there really had been a global flood? 

Just to emphasize that the issue here is whether or not a global flood happened c. 4,400 years ago. 
https://ncse.ngo/yes-noahs-flood-may-have-happened-not-over-whole-earth
 

On Whether Noah's Flood Is Physically Possible
Consider the amount of water needed to flood the entire earth to a depth sufficient to cover the highest mountains. What depth would that be?
The Watchtower Society quoted a source that estimated how deep the water would be if the earth were completely smooth (Is the Bible Really the Word of God?, 1969, p. 37):
<< If all the irregularities on the earth's surface were to be smoothed out, both above and below the water, so that there were no dents or holes anywhere, no land would show at all. The ocean would cover the entire globe to a depth of 8,000 feet [2,400 meters]! >>
If such a smooth earth had just one mountain during the Flood, it would have to be less than 2,400 meters high for the water to cover it. More mountains or depressions of physically reasonable size would change the figures, but not significantly.
Thus, pre-Flood mountains must have been less than about 2,400 meters high for the Flood waters to cover them.
That means that all of today's mountains over 2,400 meters must have formed after Noah's Flood. But is this geologically possible? No.
The science of Plate Tectonics along with standard geological dating show that plenty of mountains and mountain ranges are tens of millions of years old, and have been wearing down a lot longer than that.
For example, the Himalayas are at least 20 million years old and rose as a result of the Indian Plate colliding with the Asian Plate.
The Hawaiian Island chain is another example. The Big Island is as much as one million years old and rises as much as 13,800 feet (4,200 meters) above sea level (https://www.lovebigisland.com/hawaii-blog/hawaii-volcano-history/). That is already much higher than any possible pre-Flood mountain. But that's not the whole story: the Island is actually the tallest volcano in the world measured from its base on the sea floor -- some 33,000 feet (10,000 meters, but about 15,000 meters if sea floor sinking due to the mountain's weight is taken into account). That means that if the earth had been completely smooth during Noah's Flood, the Big Island would have had to rise at least 25,000 feet (7,600 meters) above the sea floor in the some 4,400 years since the Flood. The Big Island is about 150 kilometers across at sea level and more than 200 kilometers at its base. It is also the biggest volcano in volume, something like 65,000 cubic miles (213,000 cubic kilometers https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/geosphere/article/9/5/1348/132675/Modeling-volcano-growth-on-the-Island-of-Hawaii).
For purposes of argument, let's assume that the Big Island grew to its present size in 2,000 years. That allows some 2,400 years for all of its plant, animal, bird and insect life to accumulate. If it took 2,000 years for 213,000 cubic kilometers of lava to accumulate, that works out to about 106 cubic kilometers per year. That's a lot of lava! We can compare that to the eruption of the Laki volcano in Iceland in 1783/1784. In eight months it spewed some 14 cubic kilometers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laki) of lava, killing about 1/4 of the population of Iceland, lowering global temperature significantly (http://volcano.oregonstate.edu/laki-iceland-1783) and producing widespread famine. The 1815 eruption of Tambora in Indonesia, the biggest in recorded history, produced similar effects such as the 1816 "year without a summer" in Europe and America.
Now, what effects on the earth's climate would volcanic eruptions ten times bigger than the Laki eruption lasting 2,000 years have? Very big effects, obviously. Yet world history between 2,400 BCE and 400 BCE records no such big effects.
The obvious conclusion is that the Big Island of Hawaii did not erupt for 2,000 years.
When, then, did the Big Island grow to its present size?
Again the obvious conclusion is that it so grew during the last million years, just as geologists have found.
Far more could be said about the Hawaiian Island chain, such as the 80 million year old hotspot track showing the growth and decline of dozens of volcanic islands, where the chain of Emperor Seamounts tracks west-northwest and north-northwest for some 6,200 kilometers and disappears under the Kamchatka Peninsula.
Thus, Noah's Flood is demonstrated to be physically impossible just by the geological history of Hawaii.

I don't think so. I've met him in person several times.
What you've watched are Creationist distortions of such debates. And you know it. That's why you're afraid to give a link to any of them.
You have no wits to understand that it was Ben Stein who tricked him into saying that. And it was Stein and his lying Creationist movie makers who edited the film to make it seem like Dawkins came up with the idea on his own.
You were supremely fooled by the Creationist makers of Expelled -- just as you've been fooled by your Watchtower masters.

I didn't hear that one. I heard the conversation between Cyberdyne Systems Director of Special Projects, Miles Dyson and anti-robotics activist Sarah Connor. It got pretty heated, I can tell you!

True Tom Harley said:
Too late.
Thanks for the compliment! I have the utmost admiration for Mencken and his writing.
Bryan's problem was the same as Christian apologists often have today: the Theory of Evolution has nothing to do with the fake 'science' of Social Darwinism. That was originated by one Herbert Spencer, who applied Darwin's notion of natural selection far beyond anything Darwin wrote about. Today it's considered pseudoscience.
Others jumped on Spencer's bandwagon and became popularizers of his ideas, despite the fact that it was a philosophical, not a scientific position. Creationists of all stripes have long beat their drums about this pseudoscience. A Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism) puts it well:
<< Creationists have frequently maintained that social Darwinism—leading to policies designed to reward the most competitive—is a logical consequence of "Darwinism" (the theory of natural selection in biology). Biologists and historians have stated that this is a fallacy of appeal to nature, since the theory of natural selection is merely intended as a description of a biological phenomenon and should not be taken to imply that this phenomenon is good or that it ought to be used as a moral guide in human society. While most scholars recognize some historical links between the popularisation of Darwin's theory and forms of social Darwinism, they also maintain that social Darwinism is not a necessary consequence of the principles of biological evolution. >>
As a discredited logical fallacy, Social Darwinism has no more connection with the Theory Evolution than the carpet bombing of German and Japanese cities had with the Theory of Gravity.
Bryan was a wise man in many ways. As an attempt to describe how nature actually is, science is not supposed to be a teacher of morals.
Since a great deal of criticism of Evolution is based on the fallacy that science ought to be a teacher of morals, all such criticism is fallacious and completely misses the point of science.
Again Bryan was correct. Morality is the bailiwick of philosophy, and sometimes religion -- not mere descriptions of nature.
Yes, it would. But remember that neither science, nor scientists for the most part, start wars: politicians start wars. And politicians use every available means to achieve their ends -- everything from stone-tipped spears to hydrogen bombs.
"Common sense"? In other words, you have no logical arguments. And you deliberately forget politics.
A self-contradictory statement. See below.
First, Wells was a science fiction writer, not a historian. While he wrote a popularized two-volume history series, it was not particularly well received by historians. Second, the statement you quote is a mere description of what happened to become popular belief -- which is in no sense valid science. No more so than today's Trump-inspired popular belief that the recent American election was stolen from him is valid history.
Since Wells became an atheist and came to accept Evolution, his statements about "de-moralization" and "loss of faith" can hardly be called "corrosive" from his point of view. On the contrary, as an atheist he would have considered such things as a net positive.
Even you admit that you have no valid, logical arguments. Only vague allusions to "common sense". Very much akin to the basis of almost all religious belief.
More ridiculously illogical claims. And fallacious, since you assume your conclusion.
He was basically wrong: far more young people today want nothing to do with religion of any kind than ever before.
An excellent statement of your fallacious 'reasoning'.
Yes, cheer yourself on!
The rest of your 'exposition' is the usual combination of "meh" and "not even wrong", so there's no point in my commenting.

Arauna! Arauna!! Lookie lookie lookie how fossils got to be up on Mount Everest -- as a result of the movement of Teutonic, Aryan and Gallic plates!
 
 

Hard to get any goofier than this.