by dugout 46 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
I get highly irritated when this subject comes up. This idiot gave a talk in my hall recently and said that transfusion of blood and eating blood was the same thing. My wife accepts this reasoning. How can I shut this bullsh@@# down please help.
peace
One of the things that helped me cut through the bs was to read the context in Acts 15. Realizing that the whole discussion was nothing more than Paul trying to mediate the differences between the Jews and Gentiles of the times who were having a difficult time assimilating together opened my eyes. It wasn't some proclamation of law, just Paul telling the Gentiles to lay off eating blood to avoid upsetting the Jews as they tried to work together.
There are also lots of good points over at JWfacts.com on the matter.
http://ajwrb.org/is-a-blood-transfusion-a-meal
On this argument rests the entire blood prohibition. Is the argument valid?
Definitely not! Consider the case where two patients are admitted to a hospital because they are not able to eat and thus sustain themselves. One patient is given a blood transfusion, whereas the other is given I.V. Dextrose or the equivalent. Which one will live? Obviously, it is the one given I.V. Dextrose which can actually be used by the body as food. The patient given the blood transfusion will die because blood is not food, but simply the vehicle used to transport it.
As seen earlier, the WTS has appealed to certain doctors to support their ideas that a blood transfusion is eating:
“It is of no consequence that the blood is taken into the body through the veins instead of the mouth. Nor does the claim by some that it is not the same as intravenous feeding carry weight. The fact is that it nourishes or sustains the life of the body. In harmony with this is a statement in the book Hemorrhage and Transfusion, by George W. Crile, A.M., M.D., who quotes a letter from Denys, French physician and early researcher in the field of transfusions. It says: ‘In performing transfusion it is nothing else than nourishing by a shorter road than ordinary – that is to say, placing in the veins blood all made in place of taking food which only turns to blood after several changes.’” (The Watchtower, Sept. 15, 1961, p. 558)
What the Society does not tell its readers, is that this doctor, Jean Baptiste Denys, lived in the 17th century. (It turns out that Dr. Denys never said the words attributed to him by the Watchtower). Medical science long ago abandoned this idea. Later, the Society tried to appeal to another authority, the Dane Thomas Bartholin, but now they at least admit he also lived in the 17th century. Why has the WTS found no support for this peculiar idea among more recent medical experts? Because there are none. Not even the medical doctors who are themselves Jehovah’s Witnesses will ruin their reputation by supporting this claim.
The simple fact is that a blood transfusion is an organ transplant, not nutrition.
It took a long time, but this fact is now admitted by the Society:
“As cardiovascular surgeon Denton Cooley notes: ‘A blood transfusion is an organ transplant.’” (Awake! Oct. 22, 1990, p. 9)
“When doctors transplant a heart, a liver, or another organ, the recipient’s immune system may sense the foreign tissue and reject it. Yet, a transfusion is a tissue transplant.” (How Can Blood Save Your Life, 1990, p. 8; emphasis in original)
In times past the Society would argue that a blood transfusion was objectionable because it constituted the eating of blood:
“Each time the prohibition of blood is mentioned in the Scriptures it is in connection with taking itas food, and so it is as a nutrient that we are concerned with in its being forbidden.” W58 9/15 575 Questions from Readers
When they finally caught up with the previous sixty years of scientific knowledge, in the mid 1960’s, and they came to appreciate that blood transfusions are not a “feeding on blood,” they were faced with a dilemma. For the last few decades, the society has tried to get around this problem by referring to blood transfusions, not as eating blood, but as a sustaining of one’s life my means of blood. This is an unwarranted insertion of a concept that is not scriptural as we have already seen. Ironically, the blood components that the society does allow are taken precisely to sustain ones life...read on
Booyakasha!!! (Like Ali G would say; big laugh)
When it comes to blood issues, forget about it. The little amendments made to it is as far as the WTBTS will go; and I'm even surprised they've given in that much on the matter.
You all do your thing, and let JWs do their thing; eat it, transfuse it, bathe in it, whatever, and let JWs be with their interpretation and reasoning of the text. This keeps coming up every so often; boring.
Blood is part of the deep indoctrination I can't and don't want to get rid off; don't give it to anyone, don't want it from anyone. As old as I am, have never or any member of my extended/immediate family has ever needed health treatment that could not be satisfied without the use of blood. The issue is highly hyped and overrated by the anti-JW crowd.
Give it up already. Peace out!
DY
One simple question:
"So, if a man were starving to death, would a blood transfusion save his life?"
Doubtfully yours...oh dear....
As old as I am, have never or any member of my extended/immediate family has ever needed health treatment that could not be satisfied without the use of blood.
You and yours have just been lucky..long may it stay that way
The issue is highly hyped and overrated by the anti-JW crowd.
In memory of the thousands of new mothers and young kids with leukemia who have died already,or are at terrible risk from their misguided policies we EXJW's will keep fighting the Watchtower
The issue is highly hyped and overrated by the anti-JW crowd.
You should say that to the face of someone whose mother / wife / sister died from hemorrhaging in childbirth, or from acute blood loss after an auto accident, or from leukemia, or anyone else whose death could have easily been prevented by a transfusion of a banned blood "component".
There are thousands of them, shouldn't be too hard to find one.
I get highly irritated when this subject comes up. This idiot gave a talk in my hall recently and said that transfusion of blood and eating blood was the same thing. My wife accepts this reasoning. How can I shut this bullsh@@# down please help.
Feeding patients is essential to good medicinal outcomes. Historically a good surgeon could repair damaged tissue of an injured patient, but if the patient was unable to eat afterward the patient would die despite having their tissue repaired. Hence medical providers sought a means of introducing nutrition to a body without a patient having to eat by the usual method.
One obvious method to explore was intravenous administration of nutrition. This is called parenteral nutrition. Lots of different liquid concoctions were tried, including blood and products rendered from blood. In the case of blood the only product rendered from blood that was found to offer nutrition when administered intravenously was plasma proteins. Oddly enough, Watchtower doctrine lets JWs accept transfusion of all the plasma proteins they would care to accept! That's a real kick in the pants of the notion that transfusion of blood and eating blood are equivalent! The ONLY blood product that is at all USEFUL as parenteral nutrition is ACCEPTABLE under Watchtower doctrine. (PS: Medical science does not advocate use of plasma proteins in/as parenteral nutrition because there are much safer and less expensive options which also have much greater availability.)
For more on this subject perhaps the following will be useful:
Just some more information to add to the blood doctrine issue.
... other ancient civilizations thought blood has some sacred significance upon the observation of when blood poured out of the body of an animal or human, that life stoped, hence blood is life by the creator (Gods).
...In 1945 when this doctrine was first introduced it was also said by the head bible theologian of the WTS.( F Franz ) that to take someone elses blood into another person would in a effect infuse that person's ill character and personality elements into the person who received the blood transfusion.. Yes I was shocked by this too, its in one of the WTS early books written about blood transfusions.
The no blood Hebraic law was simply a dietary law which was devised upon the ending of life, there is no ending of life in the medical procedure in blood transfusions, ie. blood isn't taken out of a dead human being in this medical procedure.
.... Taking in fractions of whole blood is still taking in blood , nowhere in the bible does it mention about its OK to take in segmented parts of blood.
....The most staunch and rigid Orthodox Jews have never looked upon the blood issue as what the JWS have come up with and they still hold to the procedures written in the bible /Torah on the Kosher blood letting of animals before they are consumed for food.
Fred Franz thought himself as great bible theologian when he was at the WTS.
This is the same person who used the 6000 year dating calculation twice once in 1943 and again in the late 1960's to calculate that mankind had lived 6000 years from Adam.
Which was again used previously by C T Russell in the early1900's, so he just extrapolated what has already was used by previously published works by the previous leaders of the WTS., he was essentially a pretentious fraud of a knowledge bible theologian but nevertheless took the adulation of being one by the surrounding members at the WTS. HQ.
I had a medical doctor explain to me the difference between taking blood into the body as a transfusion as opposed to eating blood.
A friend of mine received blood transfusions for hemorrhaging esophageal varices. While he was recovering, several days later, he was behaving strangely (in the doctor's words - "loopy").
The doctor explained his behavior to me:
"When a person gets a blood transfusion, their body does not usually have a problem accepting the blood. However, when a person digests their own blood, and that is what happened to your friend - it does something funny to their brain and they behave as though they are drunk - "loopy". It takes a few days for the blood to be completely digested and after that, they will return to their normal behavior. We don't know why this happens but it does."
After being told this, I got to thinking about the bible verses that dealt with god's prohibition on "drinking the blood of your enemies" and getting "drunk" on that blood.
Eating blood does very different things to your body than what accepting a blood transfusion will.
