Hello folks. As you might have been aware, about a month ago after the Catholic abuse settlements were made public AKA Jeff composed a great letter to the editor example to send to our newspapers if we wanted to use it. I was so impressed by his letter decrying the witnesses hypocrisy in condemning the Catholics but not admitting their own fault, that I submitted it to a local newspaper in a county near Sacramento , California which has a good amount of readers from Lake Tahoe to Sacramento. This newspaper is going to print this next week. The editor was raised a witness and her mother was dfed and mistreated by the witnesses, so I think she has an ax to grind also in getting this information printed.I will print this letter again if any of you would like to use it to bring this to your local medias attention.Thanks Jeff!
Letter to the Editor
In recent days, as is well reported in this newspaper, the Catholic Church paid out a record $660 million to compensate victims of sexual abuse.
Not many months back , a lesser known evangelical group, Jehovah's Witnesses , also paid a settlement to 16 unnamed alleged victims of sexual abuse within the religion. The long time alleged coverup of these sins within that church make it, at least in some ways, even more heinous than that of the Catholic Church. Dateline broke the news on television with a program called " Witness for the Prosecution" in May 2002. That program is still available to doubters via the internet. Several alledged victims of child-rape within the religion exposed the coverup. They were quickly silenced by being excommunicated from the faith. Their only sin was pain and anguish from sins left covered and hidden. The director of a non-religious organization devoted to giving these children ( or adults later in life) a voice , Bill Bowen, also a Jehovah's Witness at the time, was quickly expelled also. His sin? Protecting the children. His organization, Silentlambs, is prominent in the fight against these horrific attacks and rape of children within religion, particularly within Jehovah's Witnesses, which he is intimately familiar as a long time elder.
Not long ago, Jehovah's Witnesses distributed a major flyer to the public, in which they decried the hypocrisy of religions that hide pedophilia within the church. Likely you got that little flyer in your door. In it , they picture a Catholic priest, intimating a disgust with religion of that nature. Interestingly, they are now found to be precisely like the church they condemn, and have condemned for decades. Yet, among the rank and file in this group, most continue to be unaware of the hypocrisy that has ended in hundreds of it's members being expelled and " shunned". The sin for which they have been expelled, was a desire to protect others from monsters hiding in the shadows of this religion.
The panoramic depth of this problem has been well documented. It is just a mouse click away on any desktop computer from within the privacy of your own home. Please make yourself aware. Protect your family, some of whom may someday think that they might join one of these insolar groups. While no one wants to imply that all churches have the same level of problem in this regard, ( there is likely some of it in all of them ) , the uneducated are always the victims of the pseudo-religious groups that cover up such crime.
By the way, in the case of the Catholic settlements, there was no restriction placed on the compensated victims. In the case of Jehovah's Witnesses, the recipients of the settlements, were "gagged" to assure they did not write books, or place simple letters in the local papers like this one. In so doing, I hope to be at least a small part of a large voice for those who must remain silent. These isolationist evangelical groups, many of whom believe that God is using them exclusively as the " truth", are unfortunately covering the sins of it's leaders with the tears of it's children.
So there you have it, the letter. Thanks to Jeff for this and hopefully the rest of us may use this to spread the word of these heinous crimes in our own ares