TrueTomHarley

If you are paid, you are clergy. If you do it for money, you are clergy. If you are a “mercenary minister,” you are clergy. If you do it out of love for God and neighbor, and do not collect pay, then you are not clergy and you are NOT extended the same privileges as they for the spiritual aspects of the job. If you can shake the congregation down for a paycheck, then you ARE extended those privileges Is that what you are trying to say? 

*

This fellow invited/cajoled/taunted/practically begged for me to appear on his podcast, then turned hostile when it became clear that I would not. (The pen is mightier than the podcast) I did “appear”, with some tenacity, albeit always respect, on his website. He didn’t endure it long. I am banned there. (Though maybe it is like when the Librarian (that old hen) slapped some demerits on me for some wrong that she imagined I had committed. They were said to be permanent, but they soon vanished. I haven’t checked with Lloyd.) He likes easy softballs that he can swat out of the park.

Will this show air in Rio Linda?

Uh oh. The Rook Factor

@JOHN BUTLER finds it irresistible to point out how I write books, and I hate to let him down. Perhaps from this episode another chapter can be written: “Citing a hierarchy that ‘encourages a culture of silence,’ a Quebec Superior Court judge has authorized a class-action lawsuit for current or former Jehovah’s Witnesses in Quebec who were sexually abused by other members as minors....[The plaintiff] alleges she was repeatedly sexually abused and assaulted by her brother, 13 years older, beginning when she was only 10 months old.” Do I understand this correctly? One child abuses another within a family, and it is the fault of the congregation elders? The Canadian judge stated that: “The organization of Jehovah's Witnesses is very hierarchical, led by men, and encourages a culture of silence.” Take the organization out of the picture for a moment. Are we to imagine that the mom and dad of this family would have otherwise marched their kids straight down to the police station to make sure that proper punishment was meted out? There is a part of me that thinks what really gets in sticks in the craw of this judge is that Jehovah’s Witnesses are “hierarchical,” as though any other organization is not, and that they are “led by men,” as though anything less than a free-for-all ought to be taboo. Perhaps she even implies that men are inherently evil, so that the greatest travesty of all is to be led by them. However, says my nemesis: “My guess is that it's not what happened within the family. It was the coverup within the Congregation.” Well—it is not possible to mishandle what you never attempted to handle in the first place. The clear implication of rulings such as this is that religious organizations ought not to look into the conduct of its members, for it is only by doing so that they can find themselves in such a spot as this. “Be like the mainline churches,” the ruling says in effect. “Preach to them on Sunday and be done with it. It’s none of your business whether they apply it or not.” However, the verse Christians feel obligated to follow says that it is their business. “You, the one preaching, “Do not steal,” do you steal? You, the one saying, “Do not commit adultery,” do you commit adultery?” (Romans 2:21) If you claim that your teachings improve the overall moral fiber, you must have mechanisms in place to ensure that that is in fact the case, especially if your view of God is that he insists on a “clean” people, as free of misconduct as possible. Framed in this way, the ruling is a state attempt to regulate religion, and could be argued on that basis. Plus, such thinking completely ignores the far superior role of prevention of child sexual abuse, in order to zero in exclusively on meting out punishment when it occurs, as though that is the means by which the problem will be solved. How’s that project going, anyhow? Thirty years into the all-out war against child sexual abuse, is it just about snuffed out? Or is it only the tip of the iceberg that has been revealed? I’ll take the kids, Caleb and Sophia, video any day, for teaching parents how to protect their children. I’ll take the 2017 Regional Conventions any day, in which every Witness in the world was assembled to hear detailed scenarios in which child sexual abuse might take place, so that parents, the obvious first line of defense, can be vigilant. Who else assembles all its members and then trains them so? ***~~~*** “Jehovah’s Witnesses have a serious problem of child sexual abuse in their midst?” There are two ways of looking at this. 1.) They do not. 2.) They do, but the situation is far worse everywhere else. One must look no farther than who is being outed as perpetrators. If you want to find deviants in most places, you look no further than the leaders. If you want the same ‘catch’ among Jehovah’s Witnesses, you must broaden your search to include, not just leaders, but everyone. A Jehovah’s Witness leader committing child sexual abuse is rare. Not unheard of, but rare. Elsewhere, it is the pattern. Okay, if the leaders are not committing the child sexual abuse, are they nonetheless "hiding it?" How do they compare with other groups? It is a little hard to say. Nobody else has ever found it. They looked the other way, taking no interest in looking at wrongdoing within their midst. Thus, when child sexual abuse was found, it was a.) found entirely independent of religious affiliation, and b.) it was found that the leaders themselves were the abusers. How would members fare in comparison? There is no data. Nobody ever bothered to look. Courts will go where courts will go. Will they take the above into account? Time will tell. There are few organizations with pockets--it doesn’t matter if they are religious or not--that are not being flooded with lawsuits today. In New York State, my own state, the governor has just signed into law a bill greatly lengthening the statute of limitations for child sexual abuse. Out of nowhere has appeared a major sponsor of programming I watch--a legal firm seeking to sign up clients. The ads briefly eclipsed other legal firms of accident litigation running non-stop ads of how “[So and So law firm] got me $3 million dollars, 15 times what the insurance company offered!” Put together, lawyers have become by far the premier sponsors of television. Can a society really endure that way? Make no mistake. No one is saying that it is wrong to sue for grievances. But one must sometimes ask whether there will be any organized group on earth left standing when the suing is done. Of course, there will be some. Governments can just raise taxes to recoup legal payouts. Businesses can raise prices. But groups like the Boy Scouts, investigating bankruptcy at last report, are out of luck. One wonders how other voluntary organizations will fare. The typical person congratulates the client who has come into an extraordinary bonanza via lawsuit. Then he opens his insurance premium bill. It calls to mind, as a rough parallel, the statement of Alexander Fraser that democracy can only endure until “the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury.” The world has become a lawyers’ playground, with massive transfers of money flowing in all directions--the barristers netting a third, they being the only consistent beneficiaries. When the rules of the game change, you can hardly blame the small players for adjusting to accommodate them. There was a time, those my age will remember, when nothing was so crass as for lawyers to advertise. It was against their universal code of conduct, possibly even against the law. It explains the phrase “ambulance chaser”—you actually had to chase an ambulance to sign up a client before another lawyer could. You couldn’t just broadcast to the whole wide world that you were scouring the earth for clients. Someone dear to me was sued several times with regard to property, in another matter that had a very long statute of limitations. When what proved to be the final lawsuit came in, the person sought to make defense through his insurance lawyer, but that one attempted contact several times and could not get a response from the firm bringing suit. Finally, that firm admitted that they were having a hard time locating their client. Seemingly, they had left no stone unturned in seeking business and had finally found “aggrieved” ones who’s cases were so tenuous that they couldn’t even be bothered to show up and make them. I wonder, too, whether the popular demand for public apologies isn’t largely just a PR event, or even worse, an encouraged legal strategy to secure a clear admission of guilt, thereafter better enabling future lawsuits. Few things are done for the noble ‘window-dressing’ reasons that are given. At any rate, it is worth noting that when the government of Australia apologized for decades of child sexual abuse, and opposers praised that apology to the heavens because they thought they could thereby embarrass Jehovah’s Witnesses, the victims nonetheless rejected it as ‘too little, too late.’ Better than any apology is prevention. Of course, it is good to call in the grief counselors in the aftermath of a school shooting. But it is far better not to need them in the first place. The situation is a far cry from the Quebec of 70 years ago, during which 400 Jehovah's Witnesses generated 1600 arrests, on charges as minor as peddling without a license but as major as sedition. A key case involving sedition was lost before the Supreme Court of Canada, but was overturned on a rarely-used provision of "rehearing," at which the Court acknowledged that Witness literature and ministry included nothing that incited to violence--a necessary ingredient of sedition--but only contained that which made a powerful faction squirm. The situation is much different today, with altogether different charges, and the game is barely recognizable. But deep within, is the underlying intent not nonetheless the same, cloaked behind a veneer of righteous indignation?

This is rather old, nonetheless I tried to do it justice when it first appeared: Few things cause more distress in the world of celebrities than a neglected birthday celebration. Yet Serena Williams presented them exactly that woe with regard to her baby daughter, soon to turn one. “Serena and husband Alexis Ohanian won’t be throwing an over-the-top birthday bash for their baby girl…In fact, they won’t be throwing a party at all,” reported Caitlyn Hitt for the Daily Mail. Why? Serena says: “We’re Jehovah’s Witnesses, so we don’t do that.” She repeats the tack that she took with President Obama, back when she was “excited to see Obama out there doing his thing….[but] I’m a Jehovah’s Witness, so I don’t get involved in politics. We stay neutral. We don’t vote...so I’m not going to necessarily go out and vote for him. I would if it wasn’t for my religion.’’ Let me tell you that she took heat for it from people immersed in civic affairs, not to mention from those who dislike Witnesses. Notwithstanding that the support organization of Jehovah’s Witnesses encourages congregation members to give reasons for their stands and not just say “I do it because I’m a Jehovah’s Witness,” there are times when the latter response is exactly the right thing to say. The actual reason takes a while to explain and people don’t necessarily want to hear it. You have to know your audience. I have come to like Serena Williams more and more. She doesn’t buckle under pressure, mumbling something half apologetic. No. She says: “We don’t do that.” She reminds me very much of a young Witness named Jackie who was hounded at school for her modest way of dress. She threw it right back at them. “I set the style!” she told the would-be bullies. “If you want to be cool, you dress like me!” Speaking of modest dress, Serena hasn’t exactly done that over the years on the tennis court. Even given that you want freedom of movement in sports, you will hear her criticized for that from time to time, often from people who think they can embarrass Jehovah’s Witnesses on that account. Outspokenly she has thanked Jehovah for her tennis victories, yet how does that work with the flag at the Olympics? Jehovah’s Witnesses are circumspect about the flag of any nation, declining to salute, not for any reason of protest, but because of the second of the Ten Commandments. And didn’t she cuss out that official at a certain match? Ah, well, athletes have been known to do that and people cut them slack. After all, if she was mild-mannered Clark Kent, she would find transition into Superwoman difficult. So she has sent mixed signals over the years. Why would that be? Ah, here it is in the Caitlyn Hitt article: Last year she told Vogue, “Being a Jehovah’s Witness is important to me, but I’ve never really practiced it and have been wanting to get into it.” Okay. She was brought up in the faith and has made part of it her own but not entirely. Apparently, she is not baptized, a big event for Witnesses. Now, with a child, she means to change some things. The birth of a child will frequently trigger a shift in priorities. Likely, she is conscious of a spiritual need not completely attended to in her own case and she does not want the same for her daughter. Since Jehovah’s Witnesses call each other brother and sister and I am old enough to be her dad, I tweeted: “Knock it out of the park! You go, my daughter.” I’m sure she saw it out of the gazillion tweets she receives each day, many from JW detractors telling her that she is nuts. Her outspokenness has served her well in another instance. When the man she was dating wished her a Happy Birthday and she responded as she does now for her daughter, the man admired the courage. He “saw this gesture as Serena stepping outside her comfort zone for him and decided immediately that he wanted to marry her.” It only gets more interesting. He is Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian. He is not a Jehovah’s Witness and was not raised with any religion at all but is reportedly okay with Serena’s faith. Now, it turns out that Reddit is a huge online discussion forum in which topics are hosted for everything under the sun. One of those groups, with thousands of participants, is dedicated to bringing down the organization of Jehovah’s Witnesses. When the Philadelphia Inquirer reporter wrote four incendiary articles about Jehovah’s Witnesses, he used this group as his source of information and between articles he checked in with them, as though Trump playing to his base. It therefore reminds—I mean, it is not a type/antitype kind of thing—but it sure does remind one of Jewish Queen Esther of long ago, married to the wealthy Persian King who had been maneuvered by enemies into decreeing that her people be destroyed. The sentence surely would have been carried out but for Esther’s (putting her life at risk to do it) bold intervention. Yeah, why don’t you go in there to Mr. Ohanian, you Reddit Witness haters, and tell him that his wife is crazy? That sounds like a brilliant plan to me. Tell him that the reporter from the Philly paper is on your side. Just make sure that you read up on Haman before you do it. Look, it is not parallel in all respects. Nobody is literally threatening to kill anyone, but they are threatening to kill the Christian organization that supports and coordinates the worldwide work that Jehovah’s Witnesses carry out, just as like-minded Witness haters are now doing in Russia. Moreover, Mr. Ohanian cannot be expected to pull the group’s Reddit credentials; he runs a website dedicated to free speech. There is also a pro-JW group on the site, as well as a squirrelly in-between one, seemingly supportive of Witness teachings but unsupportive of the human leadership. Such will always be the sticking point in the divine/human interface. See Doesn't Do Birthdays. Part 2 From the book TrueTom vs the Apostates!

Possibly the lawyers discard some because they are not convinced that they are truth. Or (more likely) they are not convinced that they have anything to do with the Watchtower

Please go to court hearings and see how many times an elder is the perpetrator. Then go to those of other groups, where you will find that it is nobody but their leaders coming under legal fire. It is the court hearings where one must look. For lawyers will take the cases that seem easiest to win over those where allegations are more tenuous. For all I know, you wrote many of the stories at lambs. But it is the ones that lawyers adopt because they seem provable that count. And very few are elders as perpetrators.

It is not possible to mishandle what you never attempted to handle in the first place. The clear implication of rulings such as this is that religious organizations ought not to look into the conduct of its members, for it is only by doing so that they can step into messes like this. “Be like the mainline churches,” the ruling says in effect. “Preach to them on Sunday and be done with it. It’s none of your business whether they apply it or not.” However, the verse says that it is their business. “You, the one preaching, “Do not steal,” do you steal? You, the one saying, “Do not commit adultery,” do you commit adultery?” If you claim that your teachings improve the moral fiber, you must have mechanisms in place to ensure that that is indeed the case, especially if your view of God is that he insists on a “clean” people. Framed that way, the ruling is a state attempt to regulate religion and could be argued on that basis. Plus, such thinking completely ignores the far superior role of prevention of CSA, in order to zero in exclusively on meting out punishment when it occurs, as though THAT is the means for the problem to be solved. How’s that project going, anyhow? Thirty years into the all-out CSA war, is it just about snuffed out? Or is it only the tip of the iceberg that has been revealed? I’ll take the kids you have criticized, Caleb and Sophia, any day, for teaching parents how to protect their children. https://www.jw.org/en/bible-teachings/children/become-jehovahs-friend/videos/protect-your-children/ I’ll take the 2017 Regional Conventions any day, in which every Witness in the world was assembled to hear detailed scenarios in which child sexual abuse might take place, so that parents, the obvious first line of defense, can be vigilant.

Let me get this straight. One child abuses another within a family, and it is the fault of the congregation elders? Is it alleged that: Take them out of the picture for a moment. Are we to imagine that the mom and dad of this family would have otherwise marched their kids straight down to the police station to make sure justice was done? There is a part of me that thinks what really gets in sticks in the craw of this judge is that Jehovah’s Witnesses are “hierarchical”, whatever that is supposed to mean, and that they are “led by men,” as though anything less than a free-for-all is evil. Perhaps it is even implied that men are inherently evil, so that the greatest travesty of all is to be led by them.

If I come across someone in the ministry, church person or not, who does some kind of good works - say, running a soup kitchen, I do nothing but say good things about it. It is undeniably a good work, and we are not doing it. I don’t say anything about painting the Titanic. I don’t say anything about Jesus instructing his disciples to put first the kingdom proclaiming work. I’ll get to those things, but only later. It is a matter of prioritizing and of building connections with the one I am speaking with. Would he advise helping people, @Srecko Sostar? The side he has chosen doesn’t even know how to do it. In the US, there are two political parties. Both say they want to help people. Neither says that they want to hurt them. Yet they incessantly squabble and between them nothing gets done. Google the one about the Red Cross raising half a billion dollars in the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake and then squandering almost all of it: https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-red-cross-raised-half-a-billion-dollars-for-haiti-and-built-6-homes How is that world he has chosen doing in its goal to fight injustice and suffering? Does he almost have it snuffed out? Jehovah’s Witnesses direct their blows where they will do the most good - publicizing what is the permanent solution. He shouldn’t go patronizing them as though he’s found a better way. If anthing, his is the course that comes up short. Our people are not so naive as to think that human rulership will remedy suffering and injustice. If anything, it is the cause of it. Paul says it. You do good towards all & especially those related to you in the faith.

Of course it is so, Equivalent. But the point is that if you are basing your accusations on what is unknown, there is nothing that you cannot condemn.

I happen to know that every single person in the township where you live is a child abuser. But it is kept hidden, kept quiet, kept secret. Sheesh.

I didn’t overreact even a little bit. The person making accusations always pleads for more “balance” when his accusations are rejected. There is nothing wrong with writing Russia with regard to the primary cause and not writing Russia with regard to every other cause.

There are two ways of looking at this. 1.) It has not been. 2.) it has been, but it is far worse everywhere else. One must look no farther than who is being outed as perpetrators. If you want to find deviants in most places, you look no further than the leaders. If you want the same ‘catch’ among Jehovah’s Witnesses, you must broaden your search to include, not just leaders, but everyone. An JW leader committing CSA is rare. Not unheard of, but rare. Elsewhere it is the pattern.

Well, I will concede that I can’t quite get my head around those Old Testament prophets being as concerned about their dress and grooming as we have sometimes made them out to be.

Well...probably...who isn’t? What! Are you going to tell me that you are as concerned about MY suffering as you would be that of a family member? And just because I acknowledge you will be MOST concerned with the suffering of family, that does not mean that you are UNCONCERNED with the suffering of everyone else. Why would you try to spin it that way with Jehovah’s Witnesses? It is no more than Galatians 6:10 “Really, then, as long as we have time favorable for it, let us work what is good toward all, but especially toward those related to [us] in the faith.” What’s wrong with that?

Sigh...how can people be so ridiculous? NOBODY floods the field with letters for every cause under the sun. EVERYONE does it for the cause they hold most dear.

Here is an opinion that doesn’t agree with yours, @Srecko Sostar: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/russias-persecution-of-jehovahs-witnesses-is-reviving-dark-practices-of-the-past/2019/03/02/f098ff00-36e1-11e9-854a-7a14d7fec96a_story.html There is the obligatory jab at POTUS & VP, disliked politically. But the opinion is spot on. And yes, it WOULD be fine if they weighed in, even with many many wrongs to choose from.

There are three factors at work that come together to make ‘the perfect storm.’ 1) Misperceptions due to 100years East-West hostility and the fact that Witness HQ is in the West 2) A dominant house church guarding its turf, where 90+ % identify, though few are devout (or even believers) 3) A fanatical group of irreligious ‘anti-cultists’ who exaggerate or manufacture negatives of the faith while (being atheistic) negating the positives. #3 is at work everywhere, ever ready to strike the match. In Russia it finds perfect kindling, but it holds out the match everywhere. I wrote of it here: https://www.tomsheepandgoats.com/2019/01/the-anti-cultists-are-directly-responsible.html They do take a stand. They have categorically renounced violence for any reason throughout their existence. What is wrong with you? How can you not know this? In my opinion, someone who has been a Witness should not ask a question as stupid as the day is long. It is a perfectly fine question for a non-Witness to ask. But not someone who knows better.

I think they are finding it a challenge operating in a land where the constitution says they can be Jehovah’s Witnesses but the law says they can be Jehovah’s Witnesses as long as they are not Jehovah’s Witnesses. This may make perfect sense to you, but I think they are finding it a challenge.

It’s pretty well documented that they may removed literature from their Kingdom Halls and public ministry long ago. Whether some have it squirreled away in other places, I wouldn’t know. I would think it unlikely because nobody is crowing about finding it. When police did find some at Kingdom Halls, security cameras clearly showed they had planted it there themselves.

Those are some pretty thorough policemen over there

Oh, and here from the article is another example of 1984: “The law bans the faith, so punishing them for exercising their faith is merely punishing a violation of the law. This argument is perfectly Orwellian. Translating Lebedev: We declared your religious faith to be extremist, and you are not allowed to be extremists. So we are arresting you for being extremists. But feel free to practice your faith and have a good day.” Does it square with other applications of 1984 that you have seen, @James Thomas Rook Jr.?