Dunsscot,
Re: #1& #2 I appreciate your honesty and forthrightness. Your response to #2 however seems to border on the contradictory. You seem on one hand, to recognize the seriousness of enforcing a false teaching in God’s name while at the same time dismissing it as the natural, inevitable and small consequence of teachings formed through affirmation, negation, and then by negating the negation. The most natural solution would simply be not to enforce some of the more obviously unresolved teachings, a proposition you almost seem to agree with. As a result, I am not sure of whether you do or do not believe that enforcement of doctrinal conformity on a teaching in the processof being resolved dialectically can be rationalized as conscionable.
Re: #3 I have a lot of problems with this paragraph. The idea that Witnesses perform anything resembling risk/benefit analysis when it comes to transfusion medicine is laughable, as the WTB&TS has, in ways that would be criminal for a secular publisher, seen to it that JW’s are thoroughly misinformed on this topic. I can elaborate if you want, but the idea that viable alternative treatments to “blood” can be presupposed to exist is a fairly good example of this in and of itself.
I asked you in another thread to align, if you can, the respective situations of Abraham and JW’s. You have, without responding to that request, not only reasserted that comparison, you have done so to the exact same person that found it lacking, no less. Abraham acted in obedience to a clearly enunciated, direct command from God himself. JW’s, in the absence of anything resembling a demonstration of either physical or moral equivalency apply to a medical situation, a scripture written to resolve a dispute over the necessity of circumcision and adherence to other aspects of Old Testament Law. As if this was not questionable enough, they typically do this by invoking as a stand-alone construction a phrase with an incomplete predicate apart from the biblical context that completes it. They thus set a standard of adherence that is simply assumed and cannot be shown to have originated with God. How does this compare with the example of Abraham?
Lastly, I felt that I did juxtapose the JW blood doctrine alongside the greater framework of JW teaching. It should be obvious that JW’s have on one side of the scales, some very clear scriptural injunctions concerning the sanctity of the gift of life and the severe penalty associated with unjustly depriving a fellow human of this gift. Consequently, when it comes to a minor child or some other dependent for whom one is responsible for, JW’s need something of sufficient “weight” to balance those scales and justify withholding a blood-based therapy when death is a likely result of such a course. The observations of your professor are interesting, but the question of whether adult Jehovah’s Witnesses have the right to refuse blood, is irrelevant to that issue.
Tom