Three years after I stopped going to the KH, the local gestapo got wind that I was smoking and sent over a detachment of their best and brightest (read: IQ = 79).
After a couple of meetings in which I had my fun with them (like pointing out that I had worked with brother A in his cleaning business between contracts once, and noted he had an electric meter that he used to steal electricity from Georgia power; and brother B was three-quarters shit-faced there in my living room on Mattingly & Moore, his rot-gut of choice; and brother C, a gutter installer, was using inferior materials and charging superior prices), I told them they didn't have the objective moral authority to question me on an issue of subjective morality.
Besides, I told them, as long as they tolerated in their midst the continuing presence as an elder of C.B. Mitchell, troll of some note famous for taking young publishers to Braves games and getting stinking drunk and for "skinning the sheep" (you know the kind, drunk on his own importance and authority and referring to himself constantly as a "glorious one") they could not claim any sensitivity to moral issues of any kind.
In short, I said, you guys have no moral authority to judge me in any way and to stop coming to my home; they would not be allowed in again.
They DFed me a couple of months later. When the letter arrived, certified, I returned it unopened. But I know that's what it contained. I was - get this - living with my JW parents at the time, having just gone through a divorce, and MY OWN FATHER spread the DFing news throughtout the entire family even though my parents lived 300 miles from the congregation just outside Atlanta, and my JW family lived no where near Atlanta. I continued to live with my parents, though, even though they weren't even supposed to be speaking with me. I guess you can pick and choose among the rules that apply to you and the ones that don't
Anyway, yeah, they can and do try people in absentia in their ecclesiastical kangaroo courts. Gives'em a sense of power.
Francois
Where it is a duty to worship the Sun you can be sure that a study of the laws of heat is a crime.
