And what’s with the idea that blood transfusions are a sin? That it’s better to die than to get one? I’ve been told that nobody’s earthly life was ever saved by a transfusion, and it’s similar to the blood letting of earlier times.
Here’s a web site that discusses that. http://www.commontruth.com/Blood.html
It’s worth noting that the Jewish interpretation is that it is forbidden to eat blood, and there’s quite a lot of detail in kosher slaughter and treatment of meat to ensure that blood is removed from food.
But Jews distinguish between eating food and a medical treatment that doesn’t involve eating.
Another story from the 50s: apparently, blood transfusions and the consumption of hotdogs were both forbidden following this same principle. I have no idea, but I’m guessing the hotdog prohibition fell by the wayside many years ago. I don’t remember any other JW food taboos.
Jews also hold the preservation of human life to take priority over keeping the prohibition against blood consumption.
If following a Jewish law would take a life (i.e. driving someone to the hospital on the Sabbath) the law states that the law must be broken.
Yes. Saving a life is the top priority.
Nope. I do have a hard time thinking that we humans are the top of the food chain, so to speak, that there isn’t more out there, but it’s just a possibility. Could there be a god? Sure. It may be benevolent, malevolent, or just indifferent. I need evidence at this point to believe in something after so many years of faith in something that flew in the face of actual evidence. I could be labeled atheist, agnostic, or as I like to say, I believe in possibility, which leaves all sides open where there isn’t evidence, but that means I don’t have to claim unsubstantiated things any longer as fact.
I’ll speak to the blood issue. Acts 15:20 was the scripture most referenced regarding it. It says to abstain from blood. That short mention is enough for the JWs to decide that blood must be abstained from in any form.
If you read the context of those verses, Paul is showing the issue that was occurring where the Jews and Gentiles were starting to mix. Jews didn’t eat meat or foods that weren’t properly bled, and Gentiles did. It was pretty much, as far as the context makes sense to me, Paul just telling them to abstain from blood as a whole because they were having arguments and people were taking sides. So they just decided that all should abstain to keep the peace.
We never had any discussion as to the context. It wasn’t until after I left that it came up in my research. I may be a little off, but I think my explanation holds up, it has been a year or so.
JWs hold that blood is a symbol of life, and life belongs to God. Of course, by refusing blood transfusions, Jehovah’s Witnesses are putting the symbol (blood) above the actual thing (life).
I’ve never heard of JWs being forbidden to eat hot dogs, but I have heard of them not eating things like blood sausages.
Fun Fact: JWs say that a blood transfusion is the equivalent of “eating blood”. I believe one of their verses that they use mentions that term. They see a transfusion as though one was eating blood, like blood sausages or meat that wasn’t properly bled. At one point they held that an organ transplant was the equivalent of cannibalism.
Another Fun Fact: JWs in recent years have decided that “blood fractions”, the four dominant parts of blood (plasma, red blood cells, white blood cells, something else?) can be taken without officially taking blood. Lol, where in the Bible does it say THAT? Can people have sex fractions too and be okay in the organization’s view? A little oral or mutual masturbation could be a sex fraction since it’s not intercourse, right? Oh, and where do those blood fractions come from? Why donated blood, of course, which they do not do and condemn. It really takes a lot of mind bending to be a JW as the years go on.
So I guess a vampire couldn’t be a Jehovah’s Witness!
Can you give me some information on how JW’s treat women? As equal to men? Or people who should obey Paul’s opinion to sit down and shut up in church and be subservient to their [del]masters[/del] husbands?
Haha, well, it seems like you know the angle that the JWs are going with this. To be fair, although the husband is the “head” of the family, he is supposed to do so with love and not as some sort of dictator, while cherishing his wife. The wife is supposed to respect and love her husband. The reality is though that husbands often abuse that and honestly, so do some wives, which I’ll explain.
There are apparently a lot of abusive husbands in the organization. I’ve just heard so many stories of wife-beating losers that use their “headship” as reasons to be whatever they want. I’ve also seen wives use the “headship arrangement” as an excuse not to participate in life, not to have to take a stand for anything, etc. My mom often came to me with complaints about my dad when I was a kid. He had told her to do something or not to do something, and either way it went against what she thought was best or wanted to do. Rather than just doing so, and mind you, we’re talking very minor things here not dropping twenty grand on a new car, she would always defer to headship. I’d tell her that didn’t make sense, that she should have control over her own life, and she’d use headship as an excuse. It drove me nuts, and I was just a kid. I point that out because that’s an angle that most don’t think about.
As far as in the congregation, women can’t be teachers, a la Paul’s counsel. Did I mention in an earlier post that he seemed like a douchebag, lol. Women do take the lead in the public preaching work that the JWs do in that they put in the majority of hours. There are also many more women than men in the JWs. Many struggle to find a marriage mate and end up single for life. It is very tough for JW women. They are definitely second class citizens and quite powerless.
Very interesting thread, thanks! Glad to hear that you are happy!
How do people rise in the church and how does someone become top management?
Yes, that’s what I’ve always wanted to know, the inner workings of the church in the top tiers. Does anybody profit financially by the commitment that is demanded from the followers? In my experience, there’s almost always an elite or clergy that somehow takes advantage of their sheep, be it financially or in terms of power, especially with such controlling and rigid cults. I always suspect that there are some guys secretely (ok, sometimes even openly :rolleyes:) sitting on a pile of money and laughing their asses off at the deluded herd.
Good questions. I’ll do my best to answer with what I know, and try to make it understandable.
Let’s start with who actually is at the top. That would be seven men in New York known as the governing body of Jehovah’s Witnesses. They serve at the world headquarters there. They direct the organization. Also in New York is are committees like the writing committee that researches subjects and puts together the various publications. There are other committees, but I am blanking on what they are right now. It’s not something that the average JW knows much about really. In fact, until the past few years, nobody really knew who those on the governing body were. The JWs took great pride in that because it showed that nobody was in it for fame or fortune but they were very humble men instead. In the past few years they’ve become extremely visible with the new JW tv station online which they are the faces of, and with video feeds of their talks and such that are piped into their conventions and assemblies. Now everyone knows their names and they’re highly visible.
In the JW heirarchy everything emanates from New York and those seven men. There are other branch buildings throughout the world, each taking care of some region. Out of each branch come district overseers that take care of making sure that a smaller region of each country is taken care of, and beneath them are circuit overseers that take care of an even smaller region. Below that you get to each individual congregation. At the congregation level you have elders that take the lead in the congregation as a body, not individually, and you have ministerial servants that are their helpers. Of course, everyone that I’m mentioning here has a penis. No ladies allowed in the club. That doesn’t mean that all “brothers” have such a position, many are just regular old “publishers” in the congregation, your average JW that goes door to door and lives the JW life.
How does one rise up the ranks? Well, the more indoctrinated you are, the less you question, the more you do all of the things they want from you, the more you show good qualities that they want, the faster you’ll rise. It also doesn’t hurt to have connections, but being zealous will get you noticed. They use 1 Timothy chapter 3 as a place to outline such qualifications.
Taking on a position of ministerial servant or elder in a congregation is a huge time commitment on top of the huge time commitment of just being an average JW. Circuit overseers visit a different congregation each week and make sure that the congregation is running smoothly and that the body of elders is following protocol. So it takes over your entire life. Those brothers, and their wives if they have one, do that and that alone. They are given a small stipend, a car, insurance, and often furnished an apartment adjoining one of their Kingdom Halls (churches). The district overseers watch over the circuit overseers.
If a brother is an exemplary CO or DO they may be asked to the headquarters or a branch. I can’t say how they move up from there as I’ve never been there, but let’s face it, the more hard core you are and dedicated to the cause the higher you’ll rise.
So then it kind of comes down to why those people are so dedicated. We usually see someone at the top and figure they’re in it for money. The governing body does get to fly around the world first class, they have the best apartments at the headquarters (which aren’t exactly palatial), they have power over millions of people. I honestly think that most of them have good intentions but within the toxic beliefs of the organization. They’re just as brainwashed as everyone else but more dedicated. They’ve given their entire lives to it.
It is kind of hard to figure out exactly what the payoff is other than just that they believe the story entirely and have bought in themselves to the highest degree. There are lots of conspiracy theories but nothing tangible. Back at the start there was on man in charge, a president, and some of those guys had mansions to stay in and nice cars, though honestly that was only one of them that I know of (Rutherford).
There are some interesting things though. For instance, each congregation is highly transparent with their money at the lowest levels. The organization itself though, as a whole, doesn’t provide financials. We knew where every dollar was spent locally when we donated, but we never knew what it went for higher up. Nobody is paid at the congregational level at all. Circuit and district overseers do get modest incomes to keep them on the road making sure things run right. If the magnificent 7 in New York are living large, nobody has seen any evidence. They have ramped up the rhetoric in asking for donations. They are starting to sell off properties. They sold off their buildings in Brooklyn or are in the process of doing so as they’ve got a new headquarters built in Warwick(I think), away from the big city. They are getting hit with some settlements for child sexual abuse issues, so maybe they’re selling some things off to pay for those. I don’t know. It’s all speculation there, and ultimately JWs are among, if not the, poorest religion per member according to some Pew Research studies. They discourage college and their members often have very low wages and no marketable skills. So they don’t do a good job of making sure money comes in on that level. It’s all kind of perplexing.
Another story leading to a question:
Way back in the 1980’s when my sister had gone off to college and I was still in high school, she brought a textbook home over the holidays. The textbook was for a survey course on something like Religious Studies 101. As I was flipping through the various chapters I came across a passage that said (and, obviously, I’m paraphrasing here), “Scholars of religion and theology are well aware that the Abrahamic tribes referred to their deity first as Elohim and later as YWH, intentionally avoiding the inclusion of vowels to avoid breaching the commandment against using the deity’s name. Accordingly, there is consensus among knowledgeable experts that references to the deity as Je-ho-vah is an ignorant interpretation of the Hebrew characters.”
And when I read that I thought, Gee, that’s a surprisingly firm statement to make in this book. I wonder why they did that?
And then I continued browsing around through the book and learning tidbits about the Zoroastrian, Buddhist, Hindu, Greek, and other belief systems.
It wasn’t until a couple years later that I started hearing things on the news about Jehovah’s Witnesses doing this or that or being involved in some kind of newsworthy controversy. But those events were on the other side of the country and I couldn’t talk to anybody about that passage.
So: How do Witnesses (or their leaders and spokesmen) respond to the suggestion that they lack enough basic knowledge of their own scriptures to properly name the deity they claim to follow?
One of my students once bragged to me that JW’s came to his door and quoted a passage from the Bible and he responded by pulling out his King James version and said, “Really? It reads differently in mine…” and they quickly went away*. I realize, of course, that KJV and Gideon’s are two of many accepted versions, but is the JW version widely accepted across denominations, or only amongst JWs? If the latter, how do they digest the fact that their version is…well, is apocryphal too strong?
—G?
*I thought the described action was obnoxious, but I must admit I’ve done worse to discourage their visits.
First let me say that I’ve never heard that about YHWH being used to discourage the use of God’s name. It kind of makes sense though.
There’s a lot to the whole Jehovah thing. I guess the answer to your first question is that they don’t answer it. They find quotes to prop up their version, even if they have to take them out of context, and use those to confirm whatever they want to believe. There’s no real discussion of critics. You’re told what to believe and you believe it. There’s not much time spent on anything but that.
The “New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures” is their Bible, and theirs alone. They started back in the day with the King James, I believe. There was an interlinear done by them at some point alongside the NWT, I think, but it was before my time. All I ever knew was the NWT. They’ve made a major revision in the last few years, not too long before we left the religion.
JWs believe that they have restored the name Jehovah accurately to the New Testament (or Christian Greek Scriptures as they call it). They believe that their use of the name Jehovah is one identifier of the fact (as they see it) that they alone have “The Truth” (where’s that trademark symbol, lol). They really do believe in Jesus, but it is Jehovah that they emphasize in all things, though they call themselves “true Christians” (which means that other versions are false). They don’t really care what you or any Bible scholars say about their translation unless it confirms what they want to hear, and then they’ll publish it and let their followers know that you said it. Cults don’t have much time for those that knock what they believe. As time has gone by their meetings and literature has become so dumbed down that any idiot can understand, and they don’t go deep much anymore on subjects.
If you want to go deep a bit, here’s a great write up on their use of Jehovah in their translation. This particular site has a ton of great information about Jehovah’s Witnesses:
My Aunt is a JW, so I was thinking I’d not have a question, but I did think of one:. When 9/11 happened, she got much more strict (like a lot of religious people). Did anything like that happen with you guys? And in what form did it take?
I know that my aunt used to make excuses to show up for the Christmas meal, although she’d skip the actual celebration. We gladly laid off the Christmas stuff to keep the family peace, with her and my uncle and cousins.
Second, she was divorced, and married to a non-JW husband (who has since converted after my grandmother’s death). How exactly does all that work?
Modern Hebrew, like Arabic, is normally written without vowels. Was it different 2500 years ago?
Of course she got strict. 9/11, much like every other disaster (tsunami in Japan, earthquake in Haiti, and so on, is the beginning of the end of the world). JWs are pretty much the only people on earth celebrating quietly to themselves when disaster strikes or wars occur. You don’t want to be caught not doing everything right when Jesus comes at Armageddon to destroy those not in his favor. So she got strict because shit got real for her, so to speak. All of the sudden her little bubble was shattered and it scared her that she might not quite be on the straight and narrow.
Jehovah’s Witnesses believe that before Armageddon will come a period of time known as the “Great Tribulation”. During the GT, the powers that be, starting with the United Nations, will turn on organized religion and destroy it. They will outlaw all religion, but Jehovah’s Witnesses will stand resolute. They like to conjure up images of the Nazi concentration camps and make you think that someday you’ll be in one. I know as a kid I always had that fear in the back of my mind, that eventually it would all come crashing down and I’d be separated from my mom and dad and have to stand firm for my beliefs in the face of unspeakable torture, and that doing so meant my everlasting life even if it meant giving up my life now.
After the GT God will step in and basically let everyone know that they were wrong, Jehovah’s Witnesses were right, and then he’ll destroy everyone else. But don’t worry, those of us JWs will walk right into a new paradise earth, and the birds will pick your bones clean as your bodies are strewn about. Good times.
If that’s not a message of love, I don’t know what is.
I saw a great meme today of Jesus knocking on a door, asking to be let in so He could save those inside. When the inhabitants asked what he needed to save them from, Jesus says, ‘From what I’m going to do to you if you don’t let me in.’ I don’t think Christians realize how awful a person the deity they worship would be considered if they took a step back and looked at how they say it shows its love.
Very interesting thread! We’ve had some experiences in our family with the shunning and I’d like to get some verification on some things.
My sister in law was raised very strict JW. No going to the movies, no going to dances, no dating, etc. Well, she met my brother when she was 16 and long story short, she was kicked out of her home shortly after for refusing to stop dating him. She came to live with us and thus left the faith. Cue shunning. Now, she married him eventually, invited her family and they didn’t come. She had a child and tried to get her mom to see the baby, no go. She got pretty sick at one point and the ONLY reason her mother went to see her was because she got ‘permission’ from the elders.
But jump to now. She’s got 4 kids and is still not JW. But she talks to her family. She visits them occasionally but with two stipulations. She can’t just drop by. It has to be planned. And she can’t share a meal with them. My brother and the kids can, just not her. So is this some sort of altered shunning? Because she’s not JW anymore but still has contact with her parents and brother.
Another question I have about this is no matter where she moves, the local JW seem to know she was a former member and always try to bring her back. Seriously, they’re at her door every Saturday. They’re polite and if my brother asks them to stop they usually will for a few months but they always come back. Is there some sort of internal registry that tracks people like this? It’s pretty creepy how they always know.