Did you tell him that? [that if he is going to ‘defend’ Jehovah’s Witnesses, he should not just hammer away at doctrine]

No. His name came up yesterday in this thread or another ongoing one. It was many years that I emailed him to ask if he was actually a Witness, and he said then that he was and in good standing. I’ve no idea whether that is still the case.

His answer is different from mine when the malcontents on Twitter keep asking me whether I am a Witness or not, and I answer with “Neither am I telling you by what authority I do these things.”

People are incredible. They think that they can slam you anonymously—and all that you stand for—and then expect you to be forthcoming with personal details whenever they request. “You yourself are saying it” is another answer that works well. 

They have pretty well decided that I am not a Witness, due to their own paranoia that if a Witness so much as strays one inch from “orders,” he is immediately drawn and quartered. I have said such things as: 

“I asked a similar question about the liar who represented himself on Twitter as Geoffrey Jackson (and Anthony Morris): ‘Is he really a Witness?’ It seemed like it should have been a very easy question to answer. So I asked him. He said that he was!”

and

”If you go online to flame them, [JWs] while still claiming to be a Witness, you may have trouble. Drop the claim, and you can flame them all you want.

If you explode in rage at counsel not to get into cat fights, you may have trouble.

But if you write a book letting the air out of their complaints, will you? Time will tell.

Do you really truly in your paranoid heart of hearts, think that nobody knows of the book—when you are the first to decry them for sticking their nose everywhere?”

At such times, I link to the book, TrueTom vs the Apostates!”

The book itself alludes a few times to the question, such as:

And now I must face the music from my own side, and there may be some. His continual taunts at being “not allowed” were surely overdone, and it must have made him feel a little silly when I kept coming nonetheless, until he felt compelled to “not allow” me himself. Still, nobody here thinks it is the bee’s knees to engage with these characters, and I may hear about it. And they could be right. Maybe I am the yo-yo on the Jerusalem wall singing out just when Hezekiah is telling the troops to zip it. But I just couldn’t take it anymore.

The Witness organization cannot be expected to defend itself on social media, if on any media. It takes the scriptural view of Jesus at Matthew 11, noting that grumblers slam him no matter what he does, before finally saying, ‘Don’t worry about it,’ “wisdom is proved righteous by its works.” It is like David who kept mum as ‘all day long they muttered against him.’ ‘It is like the plowman who knows that if you look behind while plowing, the furrows get all flaky.’ They don’t do it. The common view of opposers is that the Witness headship is telling members what to do, while it cynically manipulates all from above. That view is wrong. They practice what they preach and they do it themselves. The organization headship cites Hebrews 13:7 about ‘imitating the faith of those who are taking the lead among you.’ They don’t go on social media at all. They prefer a less raucous channel, and content themselves with news releases at the website that inform but do not kick back at the critics.

It is scriptural. It is proper. But there is a downside. By staying mum on specifics, essentially our enemies get to define us to the news media who refer to a cover statement about “abhorring child abuse” as “boiler-plate” and then go to former members who will eagerly fill their ears with accounts that we could counter by adding context but don’t. What’s a reporter to do? He goes to who fills his ears.

It will fall upon the Witness journalist to do it, if it is to be done, and there aren’t many of them. If fourteen years of blogging, not shying from controversial things, does not qualify me to take a shot at it, what does? If you are in a spiritual paradise, or even a vacation paradise, you do not have to concern yourself with removing the trash. It may be even dangerous to do so, because there is broken glass and used syringes. It’s not for everyone, and maybe for no one. But I thought I’d give it a go, and I at last got under this fellow’s skin, the big baby.

This was in the chapter ‘Banned From the Apostate Website!”

Of course, I am using Greg as a pretext to launch my own diatribe. I have no idea of where he is now (as I didn’t then), or whether he is friend or foe. Hope he doesn’t mind. Most authors enjoy publicity—almost any publicity will do, and mine of him is not bad. It is merely inconclusive.