Looks like a proctologist..............(get rid of that beard brother)
Latest WT: "Refusing to appear before a JC is like refusing medical treatment"
by cedars 99 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
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King Solomon
By their own logic then, the sentence delivered to Jesus was clean, upright, just, as it was the decision of the duly-appointed and YHWH-sanctioned Sanhedrin, which serves as the very model upon which the current Judicial Committee is based. Who is anyone, as mere rank-and-file, to question the decision of the Sanhedrin over the action of separating Jesus from the community, in order to keep it free from apostacy?
JW's as a group are the first to demand their legal right to "informed consent" for medical decision-making, since they were involved in many of the court cases which fleshed the principle to it's current status in the U.S. legal system. (As a review, the idea is that a person has the fundamental and basic human right to decide what happens to their own body (if they're competent to do so), as the ultimate act and expression of their basic human right of self-determination.)
Irony being, they'll fight for that right of "informed consent" in order to refuse blood, but don't defend the right of a fellow member when they choose to exercise it in order to ACCEPT blood. Instead of recognizing an individuals' right to ACCEPT treatment (the OTHER side of the informed consent coin), they will collectively deal with such weak-in-faith JWs in a manner consistent with that found in the Sanhedrin.
As far as the "informed" bit, JWs are about anything BUT "informed consent" when it comes to their members: they feed them falsehoods about the dangers of blood transfusion, etc. They are tampering with the "informed" part, when a doctor has a moral and legal obligation to present risks AND benefits of a proposed treatment. And because of the threat of DFing as a Sword of Damocles hanging overhead, they also tamper with a member's ability to offer "consent", free from threats.
So what most JWs have is not actually "informed consent", but the exact polar opposite: "uniformed coercion".
Which, if you think of it, it's actually perfectly consistent for a religion that believes that God's threat of death for not worshipping Him in Armageddon is fair, isn't considered undue pressure, and that man's decision to do so or not can EVER be classified as an expression of his "free fill" (so many JWs parrot this, when they say, "God didn't want to create Adam and Eve as robots, FORCED to love and worship Him". Nope, that's EXACTLY what God wanted, as that's the outcome as presented: love me or die).
BTW, if you are able to read this and actually comprehend it, congratulations! You clearly are free of the topsy-turvy World of a cult, where you are regularly told that "black is white", "up is down", and "hate is love". Everyone chants that stuff in unison at meetings, so it MUST be true, right? Otherwise, you'd have to consider that 7 Mil people could be wrong.... ;)
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Quendi
Momma-Tossed-Me points to another practice of the WTS star chambers: disfellowshipping in absentia. When I pointed out how unjust and unscriptural this was to other Witnesses, the silence that followed was deafening.
Quendi
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00DAD
Blondie, thanks for posting WT "Scriptures" to back up my quip!
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sd-7
00DAD, you just opened my eyes a bit wider. The Sanhedrin. That's their scriptural precedent...that's just horrible. And yet it was obvious. Should've seen it from a mile away.
I regret ever going to my committee. I just had to know, had to see it with my own eyes, to realize just how the true face of Jehovah's Witnesses shows itself in its purest form. I was kind of over a barrel, too, with my wife, so...it was a political decision, though probably if it was really political, I would've brown-nosed my way to a reproof (in theory). At the same time, I don't regret it, because it gave me my own story to tell, one not subject to the possibility of being an unverifiable anecdote from someone else.
Hmm. Not looking forward to seeing these jokers again at the convention...coming soon...
--sd-7
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00DAD
sd-7, Glad to be of service!
The practice of disfellowshipping in absentia proves what it's really all about: Authority and Submission.
Everything else is just window dressing.
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Scully
And yet, doctors and nurses respect the rights of patients to refuse treatment.
Can the WTS say that about people who refuse to submit before a Judicial Committee™? Or do they just judge those people as being evil, gossip about them maliciously to others and reject their association on the basis of their refusal?
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Quendi
The deceitful, mendacious, false and hypocritical practices of this cult have only made me all the happier that I've made good my escape. Like some other posters to this thread, I have appeared before a judicial committee and discovered that these men had no intention of helping me. Meeting in secret, they felt free to vent their hatred, spleen and contempt for me unrelieved by any desire to be understanding, helpful, patient or kind. Our first meeting, the one in which they decided to disfellowship me, was the least hostile. Everything went from bad to worse from that time on as I wasted five years seeking a reinstatement the committee had no intention of granting.
I should have realized that when the elders told me that even though they did not want to disfellowship me, they had no choice! If it wasn't their choice, then whose was it? "Clearly", as the WTS would say now, the decision was based on some formula laid down by the organization that was a "one size fits all" approach. At that time, I wasn't capable of discerning that this meant the organization's claims of divine sanction and support were completely false. It took several more years before I wised up. I wanted to resume my friendships in the organization, and even that desire should have told me something was wrong. Why? Because if this arrangement was truly of divine origin, my chief concern would have been my relationship with God and Christ, and not my standing with other humans.
I've really appreciated blondie's contributions to this thread because they underscored what the biblical pattern really was: An open air meeting that, while presided over by duly constituted judges, was conducted in such a way as to make sure that nothing was done covertly or in secret. Jesus said the same would take place among his followers, telling the disciples that if a wrongdoer wouldn't listen to his brother or the reproof of a small group, the next step was to "speak to the congregation". Not a select group of men, not in secret, not without input from others in the community, but publicly so that all would understand what had transpired. (Matthew 18:15-17) As 00DAD has shown, it was the Sanhedrin--hardly the model for Christians to follow--who operated below the radar in order to carry out its murderous agenda.
The most sickening thing about the WTS slant is the equality it places on its own publications with the Bible itself. It blatantly ignores the fact that the two are entirely at variance with no way of reconciling conflicting instructions. But the cult's ways are so subtle that most of its followers think the two are equivalent, and that no possible conflict could or would exist.
As we see the Society's problems mount and its sins catching up with it, a fader friend asked me did I feel sorry for the organization. Considering the families shattered, friendships ended, and lives lost, there is no way that I can or ever would. For decades the WTS has sown to the wind. My hope is that I will see it reap the whirlwind. When the wicked witches in Oz were finally destroyed, nobody shed a tear for them but rejoiced for all to see and hear. If I'm still around when "The End" finally comes to the WTS, I plan to do likewise.
Quendi
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redvip2000
Yes, this is of course ridiculous.
But more interesting, is the decreasing quality of the convincing arguments that the WT society uses as we move ahead in time. I'm not sure if i'm the only one noticing this, but as of late, the quality of the written pieces especially when it comes to logic and argument leaves a lot of be desired.
It's understandable since most of the writers probably don't have any formal education to do this job, but IMHO the quality of the written content in the publications was much better years ago.
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00DAD
"Because of what they perceive as defects in the elders, some individuals who engage in serious wrongdoing in the congregation have refused to appear before a committee of elders assigned to help them. This could be likened to a patient who loses out on the benefits of a treatment because he does not like something about the doctor." - w2012 10/15, p. 13
There just SO MANY things wrong with this paragraph that it's hard to know where to begin dissecting it. A lot of really good analytical comments have already been made, especially addressing the ridiculous comparison of a JC of 3 Elders that are completely untrained to be anything other than amateur WT tools to highly educated medical professionals.
Here are a few more completely absurd and wrong-headed statements that I just noticed (if they've already been commented on I missed it):
- "Because of what they perceive as defects in the elders ..." - Right away this lame argument starts with the assumption that the REASON people refuse to attend a JC is because of "defects" of the elders. I'm sure we can all think of a few other reasons people might refuse to attend. How about they "perceive .... defects" in the very JW Judicial process itself. Or could it be that they know that if they speak their minds truthfully that the outcome is a forgone conclusion: Disfellowshipping!
- "... some individuals who engage in serious wrongdoing ..." - Notice how those that refuse to attend are already adjudicated as guilty of "serious wrongdoing." Likely that's true in many cases, at least as JWs define "serious wrongdoing." Nevertheless it is clearly NOT true in all cases. Doubts or disagreements are another very common reason for a person to separate themselves from the organization. When individuals are suspected of this then two elders are assigned to investigate and/or a judicial committee is formed to carrying out sentencing if the elders believe they have sufficient evidence to charge the individual with apostasy or the like.
- "... a committee of elders assigned to help them." - The stated reasons for disfellowshipping are allegedly first and foremost to protect Jehovah's name and reputation, secondly to keep the congregation clean and then LAST to "help" the sinner and "restore the wrongdoer." Funny how they left those first two out. I wonder why? (Not really.) In practice, most individuals "helped" by a JW Judicial Committee feel anything but helped.
Wow - So much dishonesty and deception in just that one sentence!
00DAD