I have a cousin in jail who has a JW cellmate and he's been having talks with him. From his letters he's starting to sound confused and telling me some of what they say makes sense. I really want to send him the book COC but per prison rules I can't ship it to him myself and copies from amazon are so expensive. I really need a licensed third party publishing company I can order it from to ship directly to the prison. It's so frustrating it's taking so long. If my cousin comes out of prison a jw I'll have deborah to thank.
Availability Crisis of Conscience.
by Ben131895 31 Replies latest jw experiences
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Simon
I think that's a tad harsh ... what you're saying is that sending a copy of that book is the only possible way to prevent someone becoming a JW?
Wouldn't "I have been a JW, let me tell you some facts" also work? So why is it all on here to "save" your cousin and none of it on you?
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Gayle
I think with all the WT literature we read/studied for 'years,' we need all we can get or a lot of these WT exposure books to unravel the WT cobwebs that stunted our mental growth for so long.
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jookbeard
looking like CoC and the other Commentary Press publications will just fade away and become distant memories the only outlet will be the few PDF's and the exorbitant Amazon/Ebay copies and I sense there will be very few of those left, shame the debacle of this has dragged on for far too long.
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Witness My Fury
I think this is dead in the water. It will be too little too late to be of any use having wasted all the goodwill they initially had as well as the opportunity for good sales if priced appropriately.
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Sevan
For me, I really needed CoC. It confirmed so much of what I was already thinking/feeling and really exposed the Watchtower in the gentle and kind way that I needed. Anger just turned me off and made me think "apostate" and shut down. Ray Franz had a fantastic way of expressing himself.
In addition, he destroyed the illusion of the Governing Body, which I really needed. As a r&f witness, you are constantly asked to look up to and revere the gb. You are told they have a special helping of Holy Spirit and deep closeness with Jehovah. That they are specially equipped to interpret and understand the scriptures. That they are the most humble and like Jesus. Even though I was already strongly suspecting otherwise, especially after Anthony Morris III came on the scene with all his hateful vitriol, I needed that confirmation and proof.
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konceptual99
I read Crisis of Conscience and In Search of Christian Freedom recently as a PDF on Scribd. Not sure if this is a legal distribution or not.
There are zero legal electronic copies of CoC and ISoCF. AFAIK there is no way of purchasing a print copy other than the second hand market on ebay/Amazon etc. Any PDF you read is being distributed without the permission of the copyright holder.
The copyright holder provides updates on her efforts to get this published once again here:
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Sevan
I don't understand. Why is this book so difficult to get published?
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konceptual99
That, Sevan, is the $1m question.
There seems to be 3 main factors:
1 - Copyright
A big issue seemed to be the legal formalities around copyright ownership. If you read the details on the link I posted to Commentary Press you will see that the current copyright holder has been working hard to establish that ownership and prevent unauthorised print and electronic copies from being distributed.
2 - Content
Since sorting the copyright it would appear the copyright holder has been working to make sure the manuscript is up to date and in a format suitable for modern publishing and has the correct assets (e.g. photos). This apparently includes the work required to support other languages.
3 - Publisher
According to my reading of the info on the website, the copyright holder is working with a publisher to get both print and electronic versions delivered and published. I also read into this that this also includes the global audience, presumably other languages as well.
Bear in mind this is just my reading of what has been posted online about this so I would welcome any corrections from those more knowledgeable than me on this.
The copyright holder has faced some criticism and comment on here since there are routes to doing rapid electronic publishing as well as low cost short digital print runs. I am sure that some feel there are different ways of approaching the project and would not do things in the same way.
The long and the short of it however, is that none of us are the copyright holder. We don't have the responsibility she has. It's easy to sit on the sidelines and say "you should do it like that" when you don't own the problem. Regardless of what any of us think, the copyright holder is trying to get there and we all hope the day that CoC is available once again is not far away.
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Londo111
These books need to be totally open sourced.