Debator,
My name s debator! Not some long gone ex-posters name.
Okay
--A word of advice though. If you want to make a clean break with a past persona on the internet, always use a spell and grammar checker. The pattern of mistakes each and every one of us make in written composition is as unique as a fingerprint.
You appeal to emotion however cleverly worded regarding CoC doesn't hold up in the face of it's commercial history. It was published and provided Ray with money to live on among more publications he did on witnesses.
The commercial success or failure of a book is immaterial to the content of that book. The content of this particular book is exactly what the title suggests and the forward states. If you had read it, this would not even be in question.
The moment he made any money on it takes away any credibility of him being this hard done by person.
That is a post hoc judgement that doesn't accurately speak to his motivations and thoughts at the time the events described in the book actually transpired. I'm not sure what "hard done by person" means, but I do remember the special talks he started giving which strongly emphasized being true to your personal conscience. They seemed a little odd at the time. I didn't know Mr. Franz, but in retrospect, I think his personal dilemma and the erosion of his confidence was at the time, very plain.
"lacking Moral integrity" another baseless aspersion with no facts to back it up.
"Morality" is defined as a system of conduct and ethics that is correct and virtuous. Precise definitions vary somewhat, but the moral code in the Bible is good enough for me. Breaking this code without contrition would constitute a lack of moral integrity. What does the Bible's moral code preclude? One thing that is condemned in the strongest possible terms is lying.
In the late 70's the two-class salvific doctrine came under attack from within. One of the objections that was raised was the usage of the Greek word, παος in Revelation. An attempt was made to address this objection in the August 15, 1980 issue of The Watchtower. However the defense consisted of claiming that the word occurs in the Bible at places where it most certainly does not occur. (Box on page 15) In all, nine scriptures were involved. No correction or retraction was ever made
The Watchtower taught from its very earliest issues that the parousia of Christ had commenced in 1874. This was not changed to 1914 until the mid 1930's. However starting in the early 1950's the Watchtower began claiming that the Bible Students had pointed forward in advance to 1914 as the date for the parousia, a claim that is clearly impossible and thoroughly contradicted by history. That claim has been periodically repeated ever since. This cannard is still repeated from the platform at JW conventions.
Responsibility for the death of an innocent person is also condemned in the strongest possible terms:
The proscription on transfusion medicine has been marked by numerous policy reversals. Gamma globulin was forbidden before it was allowed. Albumin was forbidden before it was allowed. RhoGAM and WinRho were forbidden before they were allowed. Intraoperative auto-transfusion and Isovolemic hemodilution were both forbidden before they were allowed. Hemoglobin based blood substitutes were forbidden before they were allowed.
Reversal of past positions is at the very least a tacit admission of the error of those past positions. Is a teacher responsible for what they teach? According to the Bible, they are. In practical terms, this means that people made life and death decisions as a direct result of erroneous teaching. Despite this, the JW parent organization refuses to acknowledge any responsibility and defiantly continues to make rules on preparations and procedures that do not involve whole blood.
Like others you use the easy target of prophecy fulfilment which in every Biblical example is only 100% in hindsight and only truly gets seen at fulfilment but we are still meant to use it.
In deference to you, I've given other examples above.
one by one interpretations get refined until they get fulfilled and we can look backwards and see the truth of them from how God inspired them originally. refinement in interpretation is not a sin but a necessity.
If this is true, then prophetic interpretation prior to fulfullment cannot legitimately be elevated to the status of Christain orthodoxy. If the JW parent organization agrees with you on this, then they have certainly displayed a lack of moral integrity by demanding doctrinal conformance on minutia, which in retrospect have needed further refinement
What lenient standard? All mankind is imperfect ATM to expect perfection is your unrealistic expectation on our Shepherds, that you ask of no other religious shepherds other than Jehovah's witnesses not even the Pope who actually does claim to have Papal infallibility.
As one of Jehovah's Witnesses you should know that the real problem with imperfection does not lie in making a mistake, it lies in continuing to make the same mistake unrepentently. There is no possible way you could not know this as it is the basic precept of your judicial arrangement.
Imperfection can be excused, but only up to the point where the number and type of repeat offenses removes any doubt of recalcitrance.
When you throw this principle to the wind and attempt to write off every transgression as simply imperfection, you are creating a standard so lenient that any member of any religion could use it. A member of the Catholic faith could say, "Yes I know the church has made serious mistakes and teaches things that I don't agree with. But these are only imperfect men doing their best and I trust in God to eventually sort things out."
As I've already pointed out, this reduces the issue to an entirely subjective question of how much imperfection you're personally willling to tolerate and thereby makes it impossible to judge a religion's performance with any objective standard.
