Tim Kilgore vs. E-Watchman GETS BLOODY!!!

by Tuesday 22 Replies latest jw friends

• 

  Farkel

  Tuesday,

  Actually, all the good points you raised were addressed around 8 years ago by a former poster named "Gedanken." He was a friend of mine. I spent many hours socializing with him and in his home. He is a former JW. He has a Phd in Chemistry, and was a Professor who taught at UCLA and collaborated with Princeton and UC Berkeley on various projects. He taught at Utah State University when I first met him.

  After he looked at all the acceptable "fractions" the WTS allowed dubs to "voluntarily" take, he concluded that there was only ONE MAJOR component of blood that was not on their list. Water. So if "water" was also an option on the back of the blood card, dubs can basically have a normal blood transfusion. But due to the idiocy of the pharisaical Watchtower Printing Corporation, the only drawback is they can't take them all at once together. They just have to take them all in broken up chunks, one-after-the-other, which as we all know is exactly what Jehovah intended with his "Slave's" Bible-Based instructions which are so vital to our physical and spiritual health in these trouble times.

  Farkel
• 

  garyneal

  After he looked at all the acceptable "fractions" the WTS allowed dubs to "voluntarily" take, he concluded that there was only ONE MAJOR component of blood that was not on their list. Water.

  What about saline solution? Isn't that simply salt water?

  It amazes me how my dub wife can look at this blood doctrine and not see the idiocy of it. "Blood fractions cannot sustain life," she says, yet add all of the allowed blood fractions together, mix with water and TADA, you have something that sustains life.
• 

  TD

  It amazes (And perplexes) me why JW's would think that "Sustaining life" is the moral tie which renders transfusion objectionable.

  When a JW attempts to link the transfusion of blood with the eating of blood on the basis that both transfusion and eating are acts which typically sustain life, they are using a shared moral positive rather than a shared moral negative as the link.

  No act is rendered morally objectionable because of a shared moral positive with another act.

  Let's use a classic moral dilemma as an example: In Les Miserables, the principle protagonist steals a loaf of bread to save the live of a starving child and for this, receives a lengthy prison sentence and is stigmatized for life. --Hence the question: Is it wrong to steal to save a human life?

  Personally, I would say, "No. A human life is worth more than a loaf of bread" but let's set that objection aside and assume just for the sake of argument that it is in fact, wrong.

  Why would it be wrong? Is it wrong because it is stealing or is it wrong because it sustains life? It's hard to imagine anyone suggesting that sustaining life is what makes it wrong, yet that is the essence of the JW argument that sustaining life is what makes the use of blood in transfusion wrong.

  To me, it really shows the degree to which an otherwise intelligent person's moral sense can be crippled by an authoritarian system.

  Transfusion may be a morally objectionable means of sustaining life, just as eating blood would be a morally objectionable means of sustaining life, but neither is wrong because they sustain life. Sustaining life is a goal that is both ethically and morally defensible.

  A real argument against transfusion (Which I have yet to hear anyone, anywhere make) would state in concrete terms the moral principle that is violated by eating blood and then demonstrate that transfusion violates the same principle.