TrueTomHarley

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.?

They actually don’t distribute literature there. Their proselytizing consists of only speaking from the Bible itself. They have conformed to all laws, draconian though they may be, and the recent incidences of torture are considered by believers to be efforts to manufacture evidence that they are not.

I opened a service meeting part once with that experience of a hostile householder telling our brother to talk to his dog if he wanted to speak with anybody. Whereupon the brother knelt and did just that, after which he straightened up and told the householder: “You’re dog wants a double-sub.” Young Stevie, who nobody thought was paying the slightest bit attention, seemingly asleep, said to his parents: “What’s Brother Harley talking about? Dogs can’t talk!”

If I had a dollar for every comment that has invoked a 1984 scenario with regard to Jehovah’s Witnesses, I could retire wealthy. Can you think of anyone who has made those comparisons? As it turns out, the only ones actually fulfilling 1984 are Witness enemies in Russia. If memory serves, wasn’t Mr. O’Brien, on the surface, a pleasant and refined man, posing as Winston’s friend, before revealing his true character? Does that remind you of any current Witness opposers here?

This Winnie the Pooh business is not playing well in China:

It would depend upon whether I wanted to threaten someone or have them rolling in the aisles laughing.

Still, I’ll put off the verse for as long as I can. ”they went about in sheepskins, in goatskins, while they were in need, in tribulation, mistreated; and the world was not worthy of them. They wandered about in deserts and mountains and caves and dens of the earth.”

I wrote about this video: At a supposedly confidential 2017 meeting of elders, leaked for Internet perusal by a self-styled freedom fighter—a meeting dealing with the ramifications of child sexual abuse litigation, a Witness representative stated: “Well, we know that the scene of this world is changing, and we know Satan’s coming after us, and he’s going to go for us legally. We can see by the way things are shaping up.” It is not hard to imagine what certain ones are doing with the explanation that “Satan’s coming after us.” How could he say it? With religion in general, it is the misconduct of leaders that has come home to haunt them. With Jehovah’s Witnesses, it is misconduct of members whose cases allegedly were mishandled. God help us if the members of other faiths are put under the magnifying glass, as with Jehovah’s Witnesses. On the other side of the world, Jehovah’s Witness are banned in Russia for reasons having nothing to do with child sexual abuse—the topic was entirely absent, as government and media partnered to whip the public into a froth, hurling many virulent accusations against the faith—but never that one. There, it is “professing the superiority of one’s religion.” There it is being Western spies disguised as a religion. There it is blood transfusions, and should a Witness refuse one and thereafter die, the death is invariably attributed to the refusal, with leaders of the faith likened to murderers. Surely, somewhere along the line it should be acknowledged that Jehovah’s Witnesses have absolutely no deaths at all attributed to illicit drug abuse, overdrinking, and tobacco use, save only for when someone is slipping into old habits. All things considered, they are, far and away, the ‘safest’ religion out there. Yet they are said to be the murderers. Keep in mind that we are speaking of the faith whose members are universally recognized as ‘pacifist,’ who will on no account resort to violence or support war efforts. It is highly unusual for a large group of people to have absolutely no blood on their hands in this regard, but they do not. Is it so crazy for the Witness spokesman to say: “Satan is coming after us?” Given the foregoing, it would be crazy for him not to. One thing that we know about opposers: they will always overplay their hand.

In my chapter ‘On Women. Part 1’ I described him thus: “I think it will turn out as when the ever-capable female British intelligence officer commented to Foyle, of the television show Foyle’s War, about the full-of-himself male officer that she, for the time-being, had to play second fiddle to: that he was overconfident and not really too smart. He would overreach and fall of his own weight. She had seen it before.” And I was NOT the one who, on first laying eyes upon him, called him a “bearded slob.” For he life of me, though. I could not bring myself to rebuke this brother. As much as I think we overdo it sometimes, and I just cannot get my head around Old Testament prophets being as obsessed over their dress and grooming as we have sometimes made them out to be, there IS something to be said for changing out of your sweatshirt before filming your ‘podcast.’

And “deservings got nothing to do with it.” KA-BLAM!!!

I believe it works that the lawyers charge a certain percentage, no less than a third. However, costs of the trial come out of the client’s share, not the lawyer. Legal costs can be astronomical. “Expert witnesses” of various sorts do not testify for free, nor do any sort of private investigators, nor fact-finders, but often make a very lucrative living out of so testifying. Everyone has their hand out, and I have heard of cases (anecdotal evidence only, and unrelated to CSA) in which the client’s net share is very small indeed.

This is true for every book, with the exception of my own, where each new word is a refreshing delight.

I would think quite a few. That is not contested. Anthony Morris has stated that at one time, we were all a little naive over the magnitude of the problem. By “we,” he may mean society in general or Witness society in general. Either one fits. You know, I want to be careful on this. I certainly don’t want to minimize it. But neither do I want to pronounce it the certain kiss of death to ever again being a complete person. Maybe it is like certain things that frequently result in cancer. Many succumb to the cancer. Yet many overcome it. And many don’t get it in the first place. I mean, there appears to be nothing more common than CSA. And it is not particularly new. Ancient Greece is embraced as a pillar of Western civilization. Nothing then was more common there than pedastery. It was an entrenched value of that society, a universal practice never condemned. Some considered it the highest form of love. So, bad as it may be, it cannot be THAT much the unrecoverable kiss of death. To be sure, Richard Dawkins was speaking of non-penetrative abuse, but he has written in his book The God Delusion that he thinks the whole impact of CSA is vastly overstated. It happened to him and he got over it. Is he right? Who knows? At the very least, his remarks shed light on the prevalent thinking of a time not too long ago, that we now try to adjudicate based upon today’s standards.

And just LOOK what happened to my Datsun pickup when I parked in their lot! I thought I was going incognito, but apparently not. (Photo credit: Silver Elephant)

I seriously got under the skin of the JWSurvey.org owner. (I don’t quite know who runs it, but this fellow is definitely a main player, if not the owner) Both on his site, where I was banned, and on Twitter, where he, almost with every tweet, taunted and insulted me, and I let most of them stand unanswered, never responding in kind. I may have called him a ‘big baby’ a time or two, but nothing more. Several chapters of True Tom vs the Apostates are based upon my interactions with him. One of the corkers came when he took issue with the December WT about women in trying relationships with men given to abuse and he DAILY tweeted his urging to various women’s groups, tagging them each time, that they look into such “appalling" "orders" from an organization with absolute "control" over its women. They failed to respond. He kept it up for over 50 straight days! In time I wrote a counter article and began appending my tweets to his, such as: “Sheesh! Even Jehovah’s Witnesses do not call EVERY SINGLE DAY!” and my favorite (around day 50): “It’s as though he says to [these women’s groups]: ‘GOD****T, ANSWER me when I’m talking to you!!’”

I was really steamed at how Joe Paterno took the primary hit on this for fulfilling his legal duty but failing “to go beyond the law.” The man’s lifelong reputation had been sterling. He was to become villain of the year, fired from his decades-long career where he had garnered nothing but praise , and he was dead in two years. A similar scandal broke a short time later with regards to SU coach Jim Boeheim. He initially said a very perilous thing, but he quickly did an about face and managed to redeem himself. I posted about both these events: https://www.tomsheepandgoats.com/2011/12/jim-boeheim-and-joe-paterno.html I even have a personal anecdote about Boeheim. I was once a part of a student news production team that rotated positions weekly. When it was my turn as ‘sportscaster’ I interviewed the coach in the stands with the team practicing below as a backdrop. I didn’t know the first thing about basketball, yet he patiently answered all my ‘questions.’ He may have even suggestd a few.

It’s quite all right, Billy. We’re on the same team, and both out in a strange realm where conventional tactics may or may not be the way to go.

Not only will I not spoon feed you, but I will revisit a prior contribution of yours where you feigned concern for brothers in Russia. Of course, in one sense it’s not feigning. It’s real. I know that. But in a truer sense it is a good cop/bad cop scenario in which the good cop really hopes that his prey does not fall into the clutches of the bad cop because he knows how bad that cop can be. Nevertheless the two are working in tandem, with the identical goal - in this case that Jehovah’s Witnesses not be Jehovah’s Witnesses. I would submit that the good cop is the worst of the two in a sense, for he keeps his malice concealed, and approaches in the guise of a friend. It is in your case that the passage of Matthew 10:28 most readily applies. [Jesus words:] “do not become fearful of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; but rather be in fear of him that can destroy both soul and body in Ge·henʹna.” A thug is a thug is a thug. His malice is easily understood. Not so with one who poses as a friend/benefactor on the Internet. You big baby! @JW Insider can hit 8000 words and not even break a sweat!

Yes, but it means nothing. You have frankly said that you don’t trust anybody in any capacity, anywhere, at all. Everyone has some whom they they trust. You have admitted to having no one. It long pre-dates any association with Jehovah’s Witnesses. It’s very sad and you are taking no actions to fix that situation here. Moreover, you do not perceive that such a tragedy may just have resulted in warped judgement.

I’ve given thought to this. Strip them of it. Why should they be allowed to enable child sexual abuse? Make them report to police anything they learn from a client as soon as they learn it. If the profession actually cares about children, it will promptly accede to this. Of course, they would scream to high heaven that they have noble reasons not to do this. I would agree with them. It makes their job (that of defense attorneys) all but impossible. The point is that there are noble reasons for the other two relationships to exist, as well. Exercising them does not automatically make you a lover of child abuse. And I keep coming back to that November 20th, 2011 Democratic and Chronicle article (which unfortunately is now behind a paywall - if anyone has access, I would appreciate if a pertinent line or two was fair-use quoted) that two thirds of all professionals who ARE mandated by law to report child sexual abuse fail to do it.

I know it’s my second shot at this and that you did not argue with the first one. But I wonder where you got this from. It’s quite the opposite. Not only are they not looked down upon, but they are greatly respected because congregation members know what is involved. There are two possibilities. 1.) You read it somewhere, or 2.) You think it yourself. If you read it somewhere, then I would submit that it is deliberately planted by those who dislike Jehovah’s Witnesses in order to dissuade anyone who has left from returning. If you think it yourself, then I would suggest that your perception is off. I do not blame you for it. I also would not categorically state that there are not yo-yos here and there that might give cause for that perception, but it is not the reality. It only hurts you to think it. It is not true, but my point to you is that even if it were, it is only true in your case if you accede to it. Don’t, if at all possible. Sometimes we are our own worst enemy.