Do we have any J’s Ws on the Board? If so, could you explain what the basic beliefs of your religion are?
Last night I was watching (OK, OK, make fun!) one of those real-life ER shows. This elderly couple was brought in with serious car-accident injuries. The man was probably going to die, the woman almost certain to survive—but they both refused blood transfusions (the woman even refused to have her own blood recycled back into her!), so they both died. Their son stood there over their bedside, reading prayers at them while they expired. The surgeons were obviously ready to bitch-slap the lot of them.
Can anyone explain the reasoning behind this? I am not really conversant in what most religions believe, but this one is a completely closed book to Baby.
JWs are one of those sects that believe any medical help is interference with God’s will. If God wills them to die from their injuries, that’s what’s gonna happen. If God wills them to recover, there you go. Having a human intercede is cheating.
At least these people had their own choice to make. Periodically one hears of the parents of a child with appendicitis or something similar who refuse treatment, and the child dies a painful, horrible, totally avoidable death.
Actually, Sauron and One Cell are just spewing anti-JW bigotry. I asked a JW in my office and she explained her church’s beliefs to me, at length. You owe me, Eve.
Nah, I don’t think so—you’re confusing J’s Ws with Christian Scientists. The lady on the show was perfectly willing to undergo surgery to repair her injuries: AS LONG AS NO BLOOD WAS USED. So of course she lost so much blood that she died.
Goboy, you seem to be on target—can you elaborate? I don’t know Leviticus from Shinola.
They don’t believe any such thing. If you’re going to attempt to answer the question, you should attempt to actually be in possession of the answer. You’re confusing Jehovah’s Witnesses with Christian Scientists and some other sects.
As goboy explained, and as the JW website explains, JWs refuse transfused blood as a violation of God’s laws. They do not refuse medical treatment. In fact, although I certainly don’t adhere to their religious precepts, they and other sects have led doctors to develop technology for bloodless surgeries. Such technology can only benefit everyone in the long run, particularly when the blood supply is low.
I work very closely with a JW. He’s only tried to save me once. When I first started at my present job, everyone made a big deal about taking me to the side and quietly explaining that I should not tell him to have a Merry Christmas/Easter/whatever as he did not celebrate holidays (every day is the same in the eyes of the Lord, you should worship the same every day of the year). The next time I saw him, I asked him the date of his birthday.
We have a great relationship; he’s actually very laid back and takes it in stride when I ask him questions. I’m agnostic but I still celebrate Xmas and I slip all of the time. Just the other day I gave him a big hug and said, “Merry,uh…Monday?” and he laughed his ass off.
One thing that I’ve never gotten straight: his logic is at times slippery when it comes to the whole material possessions thing. I asked him once after reading a thread here what his view on materialism was and he replied that “even Jesus wore fine linen”. Hmmmm. That would explain his desire for the finest in turquoise and canary-yellow suits.
The way he restricts his children bugs me, though. None of them are allowed to read the Harry Potter series because of the “witch craft” therein. They aren’t allowed to watch cartoons and he keeps them out of school around Thanksgiving so that they aren’t pressured to participate in any glorification of the nation. However, he does allow them to play video games and spend hours on the net.
Another thing I don’t get: he and his wife celebrate their wedding anniversary. That is the only milestone day that is okay to recognize and I just don’t understand why that one is okay when birthdays are off limits.
Well, that’s what I know.
Oh, one more thing: I asked him about the Jehovah thing and we almost came to blows over it. He says that Jehovah is the closest approximation to the name of the Lord and that you can’t worship God unless you call him by name. He said that a prayer is like a contract and unless both parties are clearly defined then the contract is null. You can see how the “heated discussion” started.
Regarding medical treatment and JW’s here is another thread wherein this was discussed. dougiemonty weighs in on the JW side of the debate, which became a bit heated at times.
OK, I am brought into the hospital bleeding profusely and the doctors want to sew me up and tranfuse me and I say, “No—my body is controlled by space aliens and if you put earth blood into me, I will explode!” Can’t they transfuse me anyway and just say I am obviously nuts? Why can’t they do the same with JWs, who refuse to have their lives saved? How far can “freedom of religion” be carried?
And what’s with not voting or celebrating any holidays? How does that interfere with their form of Christianity? What do other Christian sects think of the JWs’ beliefs?
In most states, aconscious patient or legal guardian has to give permssion for any invasive procedures, including transfusions, even if the rationale has to do with space aliens. Any hospital that transfuses a patient against his or her will would be open to assault charges and serious legal trouble. Again, the law varies from state to state, so YMMV.
Eve- I believe that there was a case (which I read about in News of the Weird where a patient refused to allow doctors to re-attach his self-severed hand because he felt that his hand contained an evil spirit which would strangle him were it re-attached.
A few months later, and on medication for his schizophrenia, he sued said hospital for not re-attaching his hand despite his protests. He lost the suit.
JWs don’t vote or serve in the military because they believe the world is under Satan’s control.
A lot of other Christian denominations don’t see JWs as Real Christians[sup]TM[/sup] because there are some pretty significant differences between orthodox Christian theology and that of the JWs. For instance, Witnesses believe Jesus was really the archangel Michael, not God himself, and that he died on a stake and not a cross. They also believe that there is no Hell. When non-Witnesses die, they die forever.
If you are in need of emergent care and you are unable to give or decline consent, doctors can treat you anyway. If, however, you are able to decline for whatever reason, the refusal stands unless you are declared incompetent in court.
That would almost never happen in the case of an adult JW, but it happens regularly with kids whose parents are JWs.
THE Hebrew name of God is written as 4 consonants. Written Hebrew had no vowels until the 7th century – the reader was assumed to just “know” which vowels belonged in a given word. The English translation of these 4 consonants is Y H W H. Starting around the 6th century B.C., Jews became superstitious of saying the name of God out loud, and so the proper vowels with which to pronounce YHWH faded from common usage. Modern research indicates that the most likely pronunication of YHWH was “Yahweh.”
However, when the ancient Romans decided to translate the bible into Latin, they didn’t have access to modern research. They had to guess at how YHWH should be pronounced. The guess they came up with was that it ought to be pronounced “Ye-HO-wah.” Now, Latin does not have the letter “Y” or the letter “W”. Transliterated into the Latin alphabet at the time of the Latin Vulgate translation of the Bible, “Ye-HO-wah” would have been spelled “Iehovah.” (Classical latin pronounces “v” as “w”.)
Eventually, the Roman empire collapsed. The Roman Catholic Church, however, did not collapse with it. They continued to use the Latin Vulgate translation of the Bible as their canonical bible, and continued to use Latin as their official language of international discourse. However, there were certain shortcomings in classical Latin that the Catholics decided to fix. One of those fixes was the addition of the letter “J” to indicate a “short” or “consonantal” letter i. “J” was pronounced like a modern English “y”. “Iehovah”, thus, came to be spelled as “Jehovah.” Over time, the pronunciation of Ecclesiastical Latin (as the Church’s version of Latin came to be called) evolved to the point where “v” was pronounced as a modern English “v” rather than as a “w”.
Finally, when those back-waters hicks from England decided to start saying “Jehovah” in their own language, they of course pronounced the “J” as a modern English “J” rather than a “y”. Thus, the modern Anglicized pronunciation of Jehovah.
There are probably several steps in the evolution of the word “Jehovah” from “Yahweh” that I’ve left out, but basically that’s the gist of it.
What bugs me about the J.W.'s is their insistence that Jehovah, and not Yahweh, is the correct name of God.
A long time ago, my mom’s boss was a JW. They were pretty good friends, and his family would often come to our house, to talk, hang out, whatever. They even gave us a cat! They also gave us a book. My mom just told me it was their “Bible”, and being about 5 or 6, I didn’t doubt her.
However, me and my sister looked at the book, after we were told not to. And it frightened us! They were these big scary pictures that had bizarre images of Heaven, I think. Well, it certainly nothing that is found on Earth anyway.
Does anybody know what I’m talking about? Or is this too vague?
Tracer is pretty close to complete on how YHWH came to be written Jehovah. One small detail he left out: Since no good Jew (except the High Priest at one ceremony in the Temple on Yom Kippur) could speak the Ineffable Name of God, whenever YHWH came up in scripture it would be rendered aloud as Adonai (“Lord”). To remind readers of this, it was written in Masoretic texts (which provided the classical consonant-only Hebrew with vowel superscripts) with the vowel marks “a - o - a” Remembering that J, I, and Y were identical and so were U, V, and W until modern typography, this gives the result Y(=J) - a - H - o - W(=V) -a - H.
“JWs don’t vote or serve in the military because they believe the world is under Satan’s control.”
Yikes—is this really what they believe? How, then, can they buy any products, work at jobs, live in neighborhoods? Shouldn’t they be even more hermitic than the Amish? Do they pay taxes?
