Quendi: I believe you are describing the "judicial committee" trial the Sanhedrin had for Jesus Christ. It is an apt and chilling biblical example of the WTS way of doing things, isn't it?
Ding! Give the man a prize!
It's really is eye-opening and mind-opening when you realize that the modern day Judicial Hearing Procedures of JWs are almost completely the same as the Biblical account of the trial of Christ. The only thing missing is the crucifixion at the end. But then disfellowshipping and shunning are the modern psychological equivalents.
Have you read Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. It is an interrogation of the social and theoretical mechanisms behind the massive changes that occurred in western penal systems during the modern age.
Foucault begins by contrasting two forms of penalty: the violent and chaotic public torture of Robert-François Damiens, who was convicted of attempted regicide in the mid-18th century, and the highly regimented daily schedule for inmates from an early 19th century prison. These examples provide a picture of just how profound the changes in western penal systems were after less than a century.
Foucault wants the reader to consider what led to these changes. How did western culture shift so radically?
He believes that the question of the nature of these changes is best asked by assuming that they weren't used to create a more humanitarian penal system, nor to more exactly punish or rehabilitate, but as part of a continuing trajectory of subjection.
Prison is a form used by the "disciplines", a new technological power, which can also be found, according to Foucault, in schools, hospitals, military barracks, etc.
The shift was primarily from a PHYSICAL form of subjection to a PSYCHOLOGICAL form. It would seem that the WTBTS model of psychological subjection is right in keeping with Mr. Foucault's theory.
MrFreeze: Medical treatment by who? Jack Kevorkian?
Apparently you don't know Jack. Dr. Death only assisted in suicides of terminal patients that wanted to die with dignity. Hardly the same as a JW Judicial Committee. That's "spiritual murder" with all shreds of dignity carefully and painfully stripped away.
