Drearyweather, I understand your point. The following is offered in the spirit of a sincere caution, not just for you, but for anyone tempted to corral people's visceral reactions to what they see happening.
I am quite certain what is happening in that photo. Five JWs are faithfully following the directions of the Governing Body of Jehovah's Witnesses rather than the explicit instructions of Jesus, while pretending to themselves and to the world that they are adhering closely to what the Bible teaches.
Essentially, your emotional appeal is to only feel empathy for the rank and file JWs while condemning the source of the instructions they are following, and while condemning elders who wield presumptuous authority over others like a weapon.
Humans are not required to only feel one emotion at a time. I don't like the way you attempted to constrain emotional reactions to only one segment along a specific spectrum when it is perfectly okay to feel empathy for these people while acknowledging, and emotionally responding to, their cult-dictated calloused and insensitive cruelty toward a fellow human. I'm going to credit that you may not have been fully aware you were doing that.
Has the cult numbed them and desensitized them to the plight of the least of these? Most certainly. Is that entirely their fault? No. Do they deserve indignance along with empathy? You bet.
We are no longer in a cult. We get to feel mixed emotions, and we have no place shaming others into our perspective on which emotions are the "correct" ones to have. Perhaps when you were in the cult you had a position to "call people out" for how they said they felt about things they saw. And you are right when you note that any of them could be family members of mine. Family members who shun one they say they love at the behest of a self-aggrandized publishing company.
I am ashamed of my family's choices. I am indignant that they follow men's commands, derived from conjectured opinions about the Bible, while they reject the direct commandments found in the very book they claim to hold sacred. I am wistful that they will choose better. I miss them terribly. I am regretful of the wasted productivity and energy that I see them spending on nothing at all more than wishful thinking. I am empathetic with their self-destructive cycles of thought that trap them in a cult. I am furious with them for siding with a cult against their own flesh and blood. I am appalled at how callous they are toward the current dismal plight of the least among us, while acknowledging that their convictions in the truth of false promises of divinely granted future delights is the source of all of their calloused responses.
I feel all of those things. At the same time. Which of these are the wrong ways to feel, in your opinion?
I suspect you have also felt all of these ways, simultaneously. I believe you have overstepped because a narrow spectrum of emotion surged to the surface in you, for a moment, and you rationalized a basis for that to be regarded as the "right way" to feel. When someone else has different emotions surge to the surface, that doesn't make their resulting perspectives wrong, or deserving of any correction at all.
Jehovah's Witnesses are doctrinally guided to become "insensitive louts."
Do you disagree with that statement of fact? If so, I can share reams of information from their own doctrinal literature with you that can educate you otherwise. Just let me know.
The vast majority of Jehovah's Witnesses comply with that doctrinal guidance because of fear of social ostracism; an evil punishment with many varieties. A few of them are formal and official, most of them are informal and are "felt" rather than stated.
