Heya guys, a friend of mine told me to have a look at the transcript for this weeks Radio National 'Religion Report'. Peter Mosier from Quote.Watchtower.ca was interviewed re the lawsuit the WT have against him, claiming punitive damages for what they say is material that seeks to embarass them (lol! as we know they do a damn fine job of that themselves). This is despite the fact that Pete's site is designed only to present a sequence of direct quotes from WT publications on related topics, and no personal comment. Anyways, I've posted the brief transcript below. There are links to Peter's website, and if you haven't already indulged and are in for some hearty amusement, tuck into the section on masturbation;)) ...ciao, froggy x
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/8.30/relrpt/stories/s1501367.htm
Wednesdays at 8.30am, repeated at 8.00pm with David Rutledge
Jehovah's Witnesses vs website
9 November 2005 Program Transcript
Finally, last month, legal proceedings were initiated by the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, better known as the Jehovah’s Witnesses, against a website called Watch Tower Society Quotes . As the name suggests, the website is dedicated to providing quotations from more than a hundred years of Jehovah’s Witnesses’ literature. The website doesn’t overtly criticise or condemn any of the material. So why do the Jehovah’s Witnesses want it shut down? And why are they going after the website’s owner, Peter Mosier, for court costs and over $100,000 in punitive damages?
I spoke with Peter Mosier at his home in Toronto, Canada.
Peter Mosier: I was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, my parents are still currently Jehovah’s Witnesses and I’m the third of six children and about half of my siblings are still Jehovah’s Witnesses. Technically I became a Jehovah’s Witness at the age of 17 when I was baptized into the religion. It wasn’t until years after that, that I learned that I had not been given, nearly, a complete picture before making that important decision.
David Rutledge: Of course you haven’t just left the organisation, you’ve gone to the trouble of setting up this website. Why have you set up the website?
Peter Mosier: I wanted other people to know what I knew before they made a similar decision. If they still chose to become a Jehovah’s Witness, that’s fine. God speed and more power to them, but I know that personally I would not have made the same decision if I had in an easily accessible collected and in my opinion, fair and neutrally presented collection of Watchtower material, access to that same information. It was never my intention, and it still is not my intention to lead people away from any religion, to lead people, to follow after me or follow after what my beliefs are, it was simply to provide carefully researched, accurate and fully referenced and cited information, so that people could learn before making a decision.
David Rutledge: What are some examples of the sort of material that you’re keen to bring to the public’s attention on this website?
Peter Mosier: Oh gosh, there’s so many, I’ve collected them over the years. They, in the 1930s completely rejected the germ theory of medicine, which you might be asking, “Well what does that have to do with religion”? Well it doesn’t have anything to do with religion, except that this religion specifically made this a point to put in their books in the 1930s and ‘40s, how vaccinations don’t work, vaccinations are dangerous, it’s never been proved that any disease is a result of germs, and at that time Jehovah’s Witnesses rejected vaccinations on very much the same grounds that they now reject blood transfusions, on a combination of both biblical interpretation and a belief that there’s also a scientific backing that makes that decision make sense.
David Rutledge: So basically what your website is doing is quoting from Jehovah’s Witnesses religious literature, from their own literature. That being the case, why do they want to shut the website down?
Peter Mosier: Well that’s the big question, and I guess you’ll have to ask them to get the complete answer. In their statement of claim in the lawsuit against me, they suggested that the purpose of my website in their opinion was not for research and scholarly review, but rather was intended to embarrass them.
David Rutledge: When you go to the website though, you’re not just displaying the material, you’re highlighting certain passages from the Watchtower publications in bright yellow, so that the casual reader is immediately drawn to examples of self-contradiction or other suspect passages. So it seems that your main purpose is to embarrass the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Isn’t that what you’re doing?
Peter Mosier: Well it’s kind of a Catch-22 situation. If I’d included just the highlighted portions, I felt I would be opening myself up to criticism by saying Well, you’ve probably taken that out of context. You’ve taken one or two sentences out of a book. So I made a deliberate effort to try to include a reasonable amount of surrounding material so that one could see that it was contextually correct and I hadn’t twisted what they said, and the points I was trying to make with regard to whatever topical page we’re viewing is on topic and on points. But then the pages get quite long and difficult to read and cumbersome, so in order to just make it easier for the reader I then went back and highlighted the portions appropriate to the page in question. I mean obviously everyone has an opinion and everyone has a bias, and I’m certainly no different in that. I have bent over backwards and done what I can to make sure that the information was fairly presented and accurate and wasn’t misleading in any way. And it would be very easy for me to follow the course of some other websites from former Jehovah’s Witnesses where they kind of get on a soapbox and say, you know, ‘Look this, this, and this, therefore I think that they’re all wrong, or made a mistake,’ or whatever, and sort of give their opinion. I didn’t want to give my opinion, I just wanted to be basically a source of factual information and let people draw their own conclusions.
David Rutledge: One thing that interested me was that the site looks like the official Watchtower site, you’re not using the Watchtower logo, you were at one point, but you’re not now, the banner at the top though is still the same size and colour as the banner at the top of the official site, the lettering’s very similar. Why have you created the site to look so much like the official Jehovah’s Witnesses site?
Peter Mosier: I don’t think it’s that similar. I certainly like their choice of colours, and I agree that there is a colour similarity, but I don’t think there’s any restriction on using one person’s website colour on another website, and in my opinion, that’s sort of the extent of the similarity. Let’s put it this way: if that was the biggest concern that they had, I would happily change the colour scheme. It was merely an arbitrary late-night decision. I said, Oh, they’ve got a nice green one why don’t I use that kind of thing? That hasn’t come up in either the statement of claim or their cease and desist demand which they sent back in January, that was never mentioned as an issue.
David Rutledge: But what has come up, and I suppose to me it looks like it could be part of the same strategy, that the website uses meta-tags, like Watchtower, and Jehovah’s Witnesses and Official, so that anyone entering these terms into a search engine looking for an official Jehovah’s Witnesses website is quite likely to stumble on to your site. Now aren’t they justified in having a problem with that?
Peter Mosier: Well as I understand it, you can put whatever you want in the meta-tags of your site first of all, although obviously they’re claiming otherwise. My counsel suggested that that’s not the case and you can put whatever you want in your meta-tags. The other thing is it’s interesting that most of the large search engines certainly Google and I believe Yahoo basically ignores meta-tags these days because they felt there was too much possibility for abuse, for websites to put tags that weren’t appropriate to the content in the meta-tags in order to trick the search engines into finding them. So in a sense it’s kind of a moot issue. Again, if meta-tags were their only concern, first of all I think the concerns are misplaced and secondly I’ll happily just eliminate them, because I don’t think it’s going to change fundamentally the valuable information collected at site.
David Rutledge: Peter Mosier, operator of the Watchtower Quotes website on the line there from Toronto. And I should add that the Watchtower Society didn’t respond to the Religion Report’s request for an interview.
And that’s it for this week, don’t forget to check our website, nobody’s tried to shut us down yet.
Thanks this week to Noel Debien and our technical producer, Jenny Parsonage.
Guests on this program:
Peter Mosier
Webmaster, Watchtower Quotes
Further information:
Watchtower Quotes
http://quotes.watchtower.ca/
Presenter: David Rutledge
Producer: Noel de Bien