http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/man-who-almost-died-after-refusing-blood-transfusion-hits-out-at-harmful-jehovahs-witness-teachings-35756799.htm

Friday 26 May 2017

Man who almost died after refusing blood transfusion hits out at 'harmful' Jehovah’s Witness teachings

Rebecca Lumley

May 25 2017 7:38 PM

http://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=0b84577c-6c04-4259-af99-669a0ca6e41a

Disfellowshipping is Hard to Do

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http://www.watoday.com.au/wa-news/former-wa-jehovah-witness-charged-with-alleged-historic-child-abuse-offences-20170512-gw37yd.html

May 12 2017

Former WA Jehovah Witness charged with alleged historic child abuse offences

• Brendan Foster

A former member of the Jehovah Witness congregation will appear in court next week after he was charged with sexually assaulting four boys.

The charges stem from ongoing investigations linked to the Royal Commission into institutional child sexual offences.

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Police allege between 1993 to 2013, the 44-year-old man sexually assaulted four boys aged between 14 and 16 at the time of the offences.

The alleged abuse is said to have occurred in Chidlow and Mundaring and during the period in question the man was an active member of the Mundaring Jehovah Witness congregation.

The 44-year-old man has been charged with a string on sexual offences and is due to appear in the Midland Magistrates court on May 23.

If you are or have been a victim of child sexual abuse, or if you have information about someone being abused, please contact police on 131 444.

https://www.revealnews.org/blog/australia-does-what-u-s-wont-investigate-jehovahs-witness-cover-up/

Australia does what U.S. won’t: Investigate Jehovah’s Witness cover-up

By Trey Bundy / May 18, 2017

Peter McClellan is an Australian judge and head of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. Credit: Screenshot / CNN i

A former Jehovah’s Witness in Australia is scheduled to appear in court this week to face charges that he sexually abused four teenage boys between 1993 and 2013, according to a news report.

The case is significant because it stems from an ongoing investigation by the Australian Royal Commission Into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, which found that Jehovah’s Witnesses do not to report child sexual abuse to law enforcement as a matter of policy.

The commission obtained records from the religion’s headquarters in Australia detailing allegations of child abuse going back to 1950. Investigators identified 1,006 alleged abusers, none of whom had been reported to authorities. The commission referred hundreds of those cases to law enforcement and now we’re starting to see criminal charges filed.

“We hope that this arrest is one of many that police make against perpetrators within the JW faith that have got away with their crimes for far too long,” said Lisa Flynn, an attorney who has represented hundreds of victims of child sexual abuse, including former Jehovah’s Witnesses and some who have appeared before the Royal Commission. “It is a very positive step that we are seeing police investigations, and now, subsequent arrests.”

Meanwhile, the U.S., which is home to more than a million Jehovah’s Witnesses and the religion’s global headquarters, appears to be doing nothing.

As part of a three-year investigation into the Jehovah’s Witnesses child sexual abuse policies, Reveal contacted the FBI, attorneys general in New York and California, the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office and several members of Congress, and found no indication of a government investigation.

This despite at least 20 child sexual abuse lawsuits pending against the Jehovah’s Witnesses across the country, including some in which the religion’s leaders have violated court orders to turn over a national database containing the names and congregations of child abusers going back decades.

Irwin Zalkin, a San Diego attorney who represents victims of abuse, has gone to court repeatedly to get the Jehovah’s Witnesses to turn over their child abuse database. But so far, the organization has has defied judges’ orders to give up the names of any perpetrators. Zalkin worries that they could still be abusing children.

“It’s a public safety issue,” Zalkin told Reveal last year. “At this point, this needs to be investigated.”

READ MORE: https://www.revealnews.org/blog/australia-does-what-u-s-wont-investigate-jehovahs-witness-cover-up/

For new posters, I would like to explain how the figure of $12,500,000 was reached as the payout by the Watchtower to secretly settle 9 lawsuits involving 16 plaintiffs back in the Spring of 2007.

BTW, there weren't 6 lawsuits settled secretly by the Watchtower back in 2007 as RO claimed.

Please read the following excellent article about the settlement: http://watchtowerdocuments.org/new-evidence-in-jehovahs-witness-allegations-msnbc/

I've pasted two paragraphs from the article regarding the amount of one secret settlement with a plaintiff below, although the entire article is worth reading.

Here it is ten-years later and I decided when I saw this thread to share some background information about how the total amount of the settlement was arrived at.

As you will read, the article states that one plaintiff received $781,250. Personally, I knew of that figure before the article came out so out of curiosity, I multiplied the figure by 16 (plaintiffs) and the total was exactly $12,500,000.

And that's how the amount of the total settlement was arrived at. Of course, there is no proof that each plaintiff received the same amount, but why not - all the molestations were equally awful - so why should any one victim be given more than another.

To this day, I believe my guess of the total amount was accurate because the settlement took place just a few months before the jury trials were to start - April 2007 which I had reliable info from within headquarters that Watchtower knew they would lose.

The attorneys, Love and Norris, were desirous of putting Ted Jaracz on the stand. Knowing Jaracz as well as I did, I knew he would never agree to it and would probably settle which he did.

Jaracz was such a nasty, arrogant person, and, in his anger, I felt he told the attorneys to settle and then threw at them the figure to offer to get rid of the cases and bad publicity - $12,500,000, to be split among 16 plaintiffs, hence the settlement amount for each of them - $781,250. That amount is recorded in some court documents which can not legally be released but came to the attention of attorneys at MSNBC.

By the way, 3/4's of a million dollars was not an unusual amount awarded to victims of child abuse over the years. In fact, I had reliable information that it was the average paid out by the Catholic Church to victims of molestation by priests. It is not unreasonable to think that a researcher in the WT's Legal Dept. suggested something like that for each victim.

New Evidence in Jehovah’s Witness Allegations – MSNBC

The Jehovah’s Witnesses have settled nine lawsuits alleging church policies protected men who sexually abused children for many years.

By Lisa Myers and Richard Greenberg
NBC News Investigative Unit
updated 2:43 p.m. PT, Wed., Nov . 21, 2007
Article Source: MSNBC

Paragraph #5:

The Jehovah’s Witnesses recently agreed to pay to settle that lawsuit and eight other similar cases, without admitting wrongdoing. The cases all involved men the church allegedly knew had sexually abused children. The settlements for those cases are confidential and filed under seal.

Paragraph #6: However, NBC News has obtained a copy of one of the settlements from the McLean lawsuit, and it may offer an indication of the potential magnitude of the payouts. According to the court record, the church agreed to pay $781,250 to the accuser, who claimed McLean abused her from age 3 to age 9. (After legal fees and other costs, the accuser was set to receive approximately $530,000.)

Lawyers for the plaintiffs declined to comment. READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE AT:

http://watchtowerdocuments.org/new-evidence-in-jehovahs-witness-allegations-msnbc/

Barbara

Didn't I say this article is "thought provoking"? It seems to be "post provoking" too.

Interesting observations! Hope there will be many more viewpoints expressed for us to think about.

Barbara

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/when-is-a-religion-extremist_us_590de8e3e4b046ea176aeb98

When Is A Religion ‘Extremist’?

Tim Rymel, M.Ed.

Governments who support “religious freedom” over the equal human rights and dignity of others condone, and even endorse discrimination.

In April, Russia’s Supreme Court labeled Jehovah’s Witnesses an extremist religious group. “It effectively means that holding their beliefs and manifesting them is tantamount to a criminal act in Russia. They risk new levels of persecution by the Russian authorities,” said international legal counsel, Lorcan Price.

In America, most of us think of Jehovah’s Witnesses as that occasional Saturday nuisance. They interrupt our morning breakfast or afternoon chores to tell us their version of the Christian faith. They cheerfully drag their families along for quiet strolls through the neighborhoods, and pass out Watchtower Magazines for us to throw away later.

Annoying? Yes. Disruptive? Usually. But extremist? That depends.

Growing up in the Pentecostal faith, I was taught that Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, and Catholics were not Christians. Anyone who converted to those, or other non-mainstream Christian sects, was deceived by the devil. Though we didn’t use the word “extremist” to define those religions, we certainly saw them as a threat to the true people of God who were susceptible to “false teachings.”

Religion, to paraphrase Merriam-Webster, is generally a belief in the supernatural with a commitment to keep up the attitudes and practices surrounding that belief. In other words, religion is more than just a belief it is an action. For some, that means attending church on Sundays. For others, it means killing people for believing the wrong things, or believing in the wrong way.

The BBC noted that Al Qaeda’s purpose is to avenge “wrongs committed by Christians against Muslims.” The organization wants to implement a “single Islamic political leadership,” and drive away non-Muslims from areas it deems belong to the nation of Islam.

ISIS, on the other hand, is a group of Scriptural fundamentalists who believe all other Muslims are apostates. William McCants, director of the Project on US Relations With the Islamic World at the Brookings Institution, says that ISIS wants “to restore the early Islamic empire called the caliphate and eventually take over the whole world.”

Most of us can agree that Al Qaeda and ISIS are extremist groups. After all, they plan and implement terrorist attacks. They kill people, sometimes brutally. But is violence the only indicator of religious extremism?

It could certainly be argued that when a religion becomes violent it becomes extremist. But even Christianity, in it’s many definitions, has a sorted history, which is seldom talked about and often dismissed. From the Spanish inquisition to the convert-or-die tactics used on Native American Indians, Christianity has been used to commit horrific acts of violence throughout the centuries. Judaism, from which Christianity arose, recorded shocking details in the Torah of the slaughter of entire populations, including women, children, and animals.

Any religion, which purports to, alone, have all truth, and to, alone, have a direct line of communication to God, has a propensity toward extremist ideology. As University of Notre Dame Professor, Gary Gutting, points out:

The potential for intolerance lies in the logic of religions like Christianity and Islam that say their teaching derive from a divine revelation. For them, the truth that God has revealed is the most important truth there is; therefore, denying or doubting this truth is extremely dangerous, both for nonbelievers, who lack this essential truth, and for believers, who may well be misled by the denials and doubts of nonbelievers.

Any religion that denies the value and humanity of others is an extremist religion. Whether those actions lead to direct harm, or simply reduce protections through legislation, extremist ideology seeks to create one class that is believed to be more valued than another.

The grandstanding that fundamentalist Christians have done since marriage equality passed in 2015 has created a growing, and disturbing trend toward extremist Christianity.

READ MORE: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/when-is-a-religion-extremist_us_590de8e3e4b046ea176aeb98