Prince’s death put fentanyl on the map as a national health crisis. It wasn’t unheard of before. But to the general public, the malady was vague. It often takes celebrity doings to put something front and center. This was the case with Prince. As the book ‘Tom Irregardless and Me’ may be the largest repository anywhere of Prince’s non-music life with accent on his JW life, it too put fentanyl on the map. An excerpt:

“[Soon after his death,] Dr. Chris Johnson wrote that he is

'forced to paint an unflattering picture of the industry that I have been a part of for the last 15 years. I wish I could tell you that this epidemic was due to an honest mistake. That the science was unclear or had mixed results that only later became evident. But I can’t. I also wish I could tell you that the only reason the problem persists is a ‘lack of physician awareness.’ But I won’t. The reason this opioid problem started and the reason it continues is sadly for the most American reason there is: business.'

“At one time, Dr. Johnson points out, American doctors prescribed opioids as did doctors everywhere: for pain relief from cancer or acute injury. He then tells of a drug company, introducing a new opioid product in 1996, that swung for the fences. It didn’t want to target just cancer patients. It wanted to target everyone experiencing everyday pain: joint pain and back pain, for example:

'To do this, they recruited and paid experts in the field of pain medicine to spread the message that these medicines were not as addictive as previously thought. . . . As a physician in training, I remember being told that the risk of addiction for patients taking opioids for pain was less than one percent. What I was not told was that there was no good science to suggest rates of addiction were really that low. That ‘less than one percent’ statistic came from a five-sentence paragraph in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1980. It has come to be known as the Porter and Jick study. However, it was not really a study. It was a letter to the editor; more like a tweet. You can read the whole thing in 90 seconds.'

“Does the industry that made the drugs that killed Prince come crawling to his crew, friends, and fans to beg forgiveness? No. It sends one of its customers to transfer blame to Prince himself for allowing “VIP syndrome” to occur. In today’s arena of sexual harassment accusations, the mere hint of blaming the victim brings instantaneous wrath. But the medicine man doesn’t hesitate to do it to Prince. I’ll side with the performer’s bodyguard, Romeo, any day. Fiercely loyal to his boss and friend, he shoves back at some reporter trying to plant the notion that Prince was an addict: “He may have had to go to the doctor and they prescribed something for him but as far as his abusing drugs, that’s not him.” Yeah! I don’t want to hear doctors blaming Prince for VIP syndrome! I want to hear Romeo defending him like a grizzly bear its cub!

“. . . Get these pill peddlers away from here so we can restore Prince’s good name! He wasn’t obnoxious and he wasn’t hard to please. In 2003, he was baptized as one of Jehovah’s Witnesses. He afterward credited his new faith for turning his life around. His lyrics, once breathtakingly raunchy, cleared right up. “You only have to meet Prince for a few minutes to realize the extent to which God rather than the colour purple, now influences how he lives,” the Daily Mirror wrote. He didn’t swagger around at the Kingdom Hall he attended, as some might expect from a celebrity. Instead, he wore a plain business suit and it could be hard to pick him out. Some described him as shy.”

The specific company still evades justice, though it has gone bankrupt. Perhaps in the business world, that is the extent of justice anyone can expect. But no one has personally been held liable, even though countless people have died and continue to die from the fentanyl crisis it introduced. Not only was the opioid medicine fantastically addictive, but it did not last 24 hours, as had been advertised. It lasted maybe 6 hours. When the physical pain returned, doctors would not prescribe more, not wanting to fuel addiction. It said right on the package ‘24 hours hours,’ not six. Pain is a very unpleasant thing. Desperate patients like Prince sought out substitutes on the black market and this is how the fentanyl crisis was unleashed.

It is a little like the documentary ‘Inside Job,’ an analysis behind the 2007-2008 financial job that destroyed the lives of many. ‘Why do you think there has not been a systematic investigation?’ the director asks a business professor. ‘Because then you will find the culprits,’ is the cynical but true answer.

You would almost think that the people who fixate on “manipulation,” “behavioral control” and so forth, would spend direct a bit more attention toward these woes, where the casualties are truly staggering.

******  The bookstore

In a group, one Witness said. “I really like Brother Noumair’s talks. He’s a good speaker.” My friend waited . . . and waited . . . and waited . . .and then burst out laughing. She was waiting for a B part—an example, a qualification, a contrast. Nope. That was it, the complete comment. “*Everybody* likes Brother Noumair’s talks,” she told me. She had just assumed there would be a B part.

I thought of that exchange with regard to a short talk he gave recently about Job. “He’s a digger,” my wife says. I mean, the guy conducts the Gilead school, so of course they are going to select someone who has a gift for “digging.”

My latest book, ‘A Workman’s Theodicy: Why Bad Things Happen’ opens with a verse-by-verse discussion of Job. It takes up 30% of the book. For the most part, it departs from whatever the Witness organization has said. In fact, it has to. A review of the JW Library app reveals large swaths of Job untouched by Watchtower publications, and some of the verses that are touched just lead to some type of ‘Bible trivia,’ like what the “skin of your teeth” means. My book instead considers a wide range of commentators. Since some regard the Book of Job as the greatest literary work of all time, it is not hard to find commentators

I would have squeezed Noumair’s remarks in there, somehow, had the book not already been released. They are that unique. He highlights the confrontation between Jehovah and Satan that results in a permitted test on Job’s integrity. He reviews verses to show that every inch of the way, Jehovah is in complete control, as he reveals what is in the Devil’s heart and allows an issue to be settled. As soon as it is settled, “the gavel goes down” and Job’s state of captivity, which likely lasted less than a year, is reversed. The lesson? Confidence in God’s power, which in turn leads to confidence on the part of those who trust him. And the assurance that trials, once they are endured, come to an end.

‘A Workman’s Theodicy’ goes on to cover a wide range of theologians, some of whom have asserted things nearly unrecognizable to those of any traditional Bible community. Scholars widely regard Job as a product of two books fused together. The first two and the final chapter are part of a “fable.” The poetry in between represents the “theology” of maybe one, maybe multiple authors. (Opinions differ) “Is the intellectual appeal of this approach that by so dividing Job into two portions, you are in position to understand neither?” I explore the question.

The book also looks at the theology of a popular Jewish rabbi, Harold Kushner, who has written much on Job and the light it sheds on God’s coexistence with evil. Guided by modern critical techniques, he all but presents Satan as God’s hit man, assigned to do his dirty work. He does not sense any particular enmity between the two parties—they work as a team, in his view. He also resolves the question of evil by deciding that God is not all-powerful. He means well, but he is at time outmaneuvered by “Leviathan,” to whom he assigns a new meaning.

It is too bad I couldn’t have squeezed Noumair in the book. Maybe I will in case I revise it later. He would have made a fine addition. See: “We Can Endure Like Job,” a talk searchable at JW*org.

******  The bookstore

“Okay, so we DID cheat,” say the later guardians of the Septuagint. “But you didn’t CATCH us cheating! We managed to slip our fraud into the New Testament before you could catch us. So it’s all good.”

That’s what it boils down to with the Septuagint, the Hebrew-to-Greek translation of the OT that served as the basis for writing the New Testament. There is no question that early Septuagint manuscripts use the divine name. Latter Septuagint manuscripts have removed it. The issue becomes WHAT version did the NT authors use—the before or after? So far, evidence suggests the after, though common sense suggests the before.  (See the post: the Divine Name in the New Testament)

Say what you will about the Jews avoiding pronunciation of the Divine Name. They never REMOVED it. It takes a special type of sleaze to do that. But somewhere from early on, people with such qualities removed the Name for Lord (kyios) in the Septuagint, which has enabled a furtherance of the trinity doctrine. Prior to that, it had been either ‘YHWH’ transposed into Greek or the Greek equivalent letters (IAO) employed in that Hebrew-Greek translation.

The only question becomes, not whether there was fraud or not—there clearly was—but did the NT writers catch it? The record of extant NT manuscripts so far suggests they did not. Surely the Word of God will not be transmitted through such devious methods! That’s why translators of the NWT proposed a theory that, just as the Name was quickly defused in the OT, and removed in the Greek Septuagint, the same thing may well have happened with early Christian manuscripts.

Frankly, I suspect the New Testament writers DID search out the uncontaminated Septuagint copies. At least two such manuscripts date from the first century. A change so fundamental as that, removal of the divine name for ‘lord’ must surely have caught someone attention. It would be like attending the Kingdom Hall for years and years, then one day discovering it had been renamed the Empire Hall. Someone would have noticed that.

Almost always, persons who fervently argue the trinity do such from a personal revelation. In my time, it was Billy Graham’s “Come Down and Be Saved!” Conversion was instantaneous, whereas Witnesses are well known to require a long period of Bible study, along with a trial period of the JW way of life, before getting baptized. Trinity people are known to convert instantly. Thereafter, whatever the Word says or does not say regarding Jesus and his Father makes no impression at all upon them. If a point seems to go their way, they’ll take it. If it doesn’t they ignore it. They have acquired their sureness from another source, that of a personal revelation.

Perhaps “sleaze” is too strong a work for removal of the unique divine name, to be replaced with “kyrios.’ Perhaps it is just an extension of the same uber-sensitivity to the name that caused its disappearance. On the other hand, since you’re supposed to be careful in handling the Word, perhaps sleaze is the right term after all. Many acknowledge the confusion presented by the generic “kyrios” in the NT placed where the distinctive name of God in the OT used to be. But trinitarians welcome the “confusion” and pass it off as doings of the holy spirit.

The New World Translation’s move to restore the divine name in the New Testament is unconventional move. No one has said differently, nor have the NWT translators themselves in their appendix (A5). Obviously, I can understand how many people would think only existing NT manuscripts be considered, not shenanigans in the source Septuagint. Maybe the NWT even jumped the gun on this point. But they are honest with regard to their reasons, and the reasons do reflect scholarship. And except for the ferocity of those determined to advance the trinity doctrine, nobody is overly concerned about it. To them, it is just one more variation in the challenge of translation ancient languages related through multiple sources.

Counting revisions, every year or three someone presents a new English translation of the Bible. They all differ. But they all work. Each has its own reason for existence. Each thinks it can better represent the thought expressed in the ancient languages inspired by the Bible’s true author. Each incorporates the latest findings of scholarship. Each is unique—no one would go to all the bother of translating the Bible if it was just to rubber-stamp a prior version.

Bible readers have long accepted some accounts related in scripture as genuine, even though outside of scripture there is no evidence it is so. Then, archeologists come along and discover that evidence. In this case, the “account” is the clear testimony of scripture that Jesus and God are not one and the same. NWT translators think maybe some parallel development will shed more light on “kyrios” vs ‘IAO.’ In the meantime, they run with what they have based on Septuagint versions.

Several foreign-language translations of the Bible—in German, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch and Portuguese—do contain the divine name in the NT. I’ve never heard anyone make a complaint. If you ask AI about it, making clear you want no reference to Jehovah's Witnesses or the New World Translation, it still comes up with lengthy justifications, albeit minority, for included the Name in their New Testaments. I admit I was surprised at this myself. I thought it was only JWs who have reasoned this way. It’s not. Said AI (Grok):

“Some translators and scholars have argued for continuity in the use of the divine name across both the Old and New Testaments, especially in cases where the New Testament quotes Old Testament passages that originally contained the Tetragrammaton. For example, when New Testament writers cite passages like Isaiah 40:3 (“Prepare the way of the Lord”)—where “Lord” translates יהוה in the Hebrew—some translators believe it is appropriate to render the divine name explicitly as “Jehovah” in the New Testament to reflect the original intent of the quoted text. This approach is often motivated by a desire to preserve the distinctiveness of God’s personal name and to avoid conflating it with generic terms like “Lord” (Kyrios in Greek), which could refer to other figures in different contexts.

“Some translators and scholars have posited that the divine name may have been used in the original Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, or at least in early oral traditions, but was later replaced with Kyrios (Greek for “Lord”) or Theos (Greek for “God”) in surviving copies. This theory, while speculative, is based on several historical and textual considerations:

“Some translators point to historical evidence suggesting that the divine name was known and revered in early Christian and Jewish communities, even in the Greek-speaking world. For example: - Certain early Christian writings, such as those of the Church Fathers, occasionally reference the divine name or discuss its significance, though they do not provide clear evidence of its use in New Testament texts.

“In certain theological traditions, there is a strong emphasis on the importance of God’s personal name as a means of distinguishing the God of the Bible from other deities or generic concepts of divinity. This theological perspective has influenced some translators to include “Jehovah” in the New Testament, even in the absence of direct textual evidence, as a way of highlighting God’s unique identity.

“In some languages, the transliteration “Jehovah” became a familiar and traditional way to refer to God, especially in Christian contexts. Translators in these languages may have chosen to use “Jehovah” in the New Testament to make the text more accessible and relatable to their audience, even if the original Greek text does not explicitly support it.bFor example, in certain African, Asian, or indigenous language translations, the use of “Jehovah” may have been adopted to distinguish the God of the Bible from local deities or to align with missionary traditions that emphasized the divine name. This practice was often driven by the cultural and linguistic needs of the target audience rather than strict adherence to the Greek text.”

******  The bookstore

My wife and I had people from out of state come into town to work on a Kingdom Hall remodeling project nearby and they needed a place to stay. Sight unseen, we handed them the keys to our house while we were heading away on vacation. There are people who would pay anything for such a brotherhood in which you can place such trust in total strangers.

At the Independence Day church, Mr. and Mrs. O’Malihan heard of this and decided to do the same. The first guests who stayed at their house broke their TV. The second set of guests tracked mud throughout the house. The third set found the Go Packs and raided the funds set aside. The fourth set emptied the house completely and the O’Malihans returned to four bare walls. Steamed, they contacted the Independence Day church headquarters. “Oh, yeah, that happened to us, too,” they were told. “No, they’re not congregation members – they’re imposters. But we have such a half-assed organization that any scoundrel can pull the wool over our eyes in a twinkling.”

The first paragraph is true. I just made up the second. But what I like is how with Jehovah’s Witnesses, not only may you enjoy a good relationship with God and his Son, but as a pure gimme, you get a united worldwide brotherhood. Why anyone would throw that away from insistence that their own viewpoint prevail is beyond me.

The world is more dangerous than before, so the organization safeguards more than before. It is not like in the 1970s, when I, on a whim, drove to a St. Louis International Convention of Jehovah’s Witnesses and presented myself at the rooming desk with the expectation that someone would put me up for the four or five days. They did. The only way that they knew I was a Witness was that I said I was. I stayed with an elderly sister and her non-Witness husband who treated me as though one of their own. But that was long ago, and “wicked men and imposters have advanced from bad to worse,” says the verse. Today there is vetting, only possible with organization, so that you know people are who they say they are. 

You can do more with organization than you can without. It is no more complicated than that. In the case of an organization such as Jehovah’s Witnesses, devoted to spreading “this good news of the kingdom throughout all the inhabited earth,” seamless organization of voluntary efforts has enabled an entirely new channel of Bible production and distribution,  so that ‘Big Business’ is not in charge of distributing the Word of God, and everyone stays on the same page in the process. Organization is the obvious way that Jesus’ prediction comes to pass: “Most truly I say to you, whoever exercises faith in me will also do the works that I do; and he will do works greater than these.” Greater works than Jesus? It can’t be done through disconnected individuals.

******  The bookstore

Jehovah’s Witnesses stand on blood transfusion will have saved far more lives than it has cost. This is because, here and there, courageous doctors have sought to accommodate it. In doing so, they have made transfusion therapy safer for everyone, either by just not giving one or by using bloodless techniques in its stead. An April 2008 New Scientist article entitled ‘An Act of Faith in the Operating Room,’ reviewed study after study, and concluded that for all but the most catastrophic cases, blood transfusions harm more than they help. In short, the “act of faith” referred to was not withholding a blood transfusion. It was giving one.

We all know blood is a foreign tissue. We all know the body fights to eliminate foreign tissue. Not that such complications can’t be dealt with, but eliminating transfusions where they are unnecessary avoids the problem entirely. Time was when a blood transfusion following surgery was more or less routine, like topping off the tank. It no longer is. Thank Jehovah’s Witnesses for that.

I wrote up a post of the New Scientist article, the first two paragraphs are reproduced here:

“When speaking medicine with someone who doesn’t care for Jehovah’s Witnesses, one finds that “blood transfusion” is always linked with “life-saving.” There are no exceptions. The noun and adjective must never be separated. At least, not until recently. At long last, the link is beginning to crumble. “Life-threatening” is fast emerging as a reality to offset, in part, the “life-saving.” Not among JW detractors, of course, who will still be chanting “life-saving blood transfusions” as they are lowered into their graves. But among those who actually keep up with things, matters are changing fast.

“It is the only conclusion one can reach upon reading the April 26, 2008 New Scientist magazine. Entitled ‘An Act of Faith in the Operating Room,’ an article reviews study after study, and concludes that for all but the most catastrophic cases, blood transfusions harm more than they help. Says Gavin Murphy, a cardiac surgeon at the Bristol Heart Institute in the UK: “There is virtually no high-quality study in surgery, or intensive or acute care, outside of when you are bleeding to death, that shows that blood transfusion is beneficial, and many that show it is bad for you.” Difficulties stem from blood deteriorating in even brief storage, from its assault on the immune system, and from its impaired ability to deliver oxygen. In short, the “act of faith” referred to is not withholding a blood transfusion. It is giving one.”

The remainder of the post, for anyone interested, is found: Here

Of deaths attributed to refusing transfusions, it can never be said than refraining from blood is what killed the patient, since plenty of people die despite being transfused. Of the few who have died where bloodless techniques were not available, that indeed is tragic. Yet people routinely put their lives on the line for all sorts of causes—country, science, often things as frivolous as extreme sports, and they are always lauded for it. Only for an unpopular religion is it condemned. The New Scientist article doesn’t answer every concern regarding transfusion therapy. But it does provide context and helps defuse all the crazies who charge that JW are on a ‘right-to-die’ quest. Their stand has overall vastly improved medicine.

Not to mention how risks from declining transfusions are compensated 1,000 times over in the Witness arena by their no-tolerance policy of tobacco, illicit drugs, and overdrinking. An anti-Witness activist truly interested in preserving life would direct his or her attention almost anywhere else. It offends the sensibilities of any reasonable person to ignore the top 100 causes of death to fixate one’s fury on the 101th, yet that is exactly what anti-Witness “activists” do.

They are very single-minded in that anti-JW world, obsessed with one thing. Should nukes ever be employed, something that the 90-seconds to midnight Doomsday clock suggests, all people everywhere will respond with horror at the news. But on the anti-Witness internet forums, the crazies will be obsessed with how JWs might be using the catastrophe to “manipulate” people into thinking the world is bad.

******  The bookstore

For the most part, Witnesses can coexist with Darwin. The things he observed on the Galápagos Islands are but examples of  ‘animal husbandly,’ which has been around forever and is not controversial. Where Witnesses might speak against Darwin, it is because of (correctly) anticipating the truckloads of dogma that atheists will drive through the door he cracks open. But Darwin himself is not too controversial. His examples, what he wrote of, is called “micro-evolution.”

Witnesses look more moodily on “macro-evolution,” the notion of all species deriving from common ancestors. They don’t like it. But, generally speaking, they have the attitude: “Let scientists be scientists and Bible students be Bible students.” It’s not the hill they choose to die on. A book on macro-evolution, written in 1985, has never been replaced or updated. Macro appears to violate the “kinds” of Genesis, and for this reason it is looked upon skeptically. But the Watchtower has written that this wording in Genesis “implies” macro is wrong. Whenever I see “implies,” it is an indication to me of not being dogmatic. When push comes to shove, many who believe in God have said, ‘Okay, God did create the diversity of life we see today and evolution is how much of it happened.’ Frankly, life programmed to adapt via accumulation of genetic change strikes me as no less miraculous than potter-made life.*

The only aspect of evolution remaining is abiogenesis, which is technically not evolution at all. It is a matter how finding how life arose in the first place. Was it the ‘spark of God’ or was it the gradual accumulation of random chemical and physical circumstances? Jehovah’s Witnesses allow no place for the last option at all. Their most recent offering, “The Origin of Life—Five Questions Worth Asking,” downloadable at JW*org, is exclusively on this topic.

Written in 2010, it is cutting edge for its time. The questions it addresses have not changed, so it still comes across as cutting-edge. One wonders who wrote it. It will not have been the GB member who got straight A’s in high school science. I explored the idea in the book ‘Tom Irregardless and Me.’ Every once in a while, there is some top-notch scientist who becomes a Witness. My guess is that after a certain ‘trial period’ so they know he or she is going to stick, they ask him to look over their science department with observations and even updates. My book tells of a certain scientist who became a Witness, who taught at Cornell, a published author on aspects of evolution, whose book comprised curriculum for some courses, to explore that conjecture.

***

By default, most persons not in Cornell suppose Hebrews 3:4 to be valid, that “every house is constructed by someone.’ They have never encountered anything different—not just of houses, but of anything. If it seems like it has been designed, it has been. They know of no exceptions. Therefore, they readily extends the idea to “but he that constructed all things is God.”

It actually takes a substantial dose of “education” to pound this bit of common sense out of a person. The school system is relentless at the task. Yet, even when it has succeeded, there are some who come to regard their efforts as brainwashing and revert to the common sense they once knew.

*On one of Nita’s Bible studies with Jade, a series that debuted at a summer convention and ran several episodes, Jade says something like, ‘You think he’s got a little factory up there where he just cranks them out?’ Nita doesn’t say that he does, and the study slides on to other things. The series seems to have come to an end. The apocryphal word is that the sister who played Jaded tired of the publicity—people stopping her everywhere to ask about it and her. Thus, she is like another sister I wrote about in Tom Irregardless and Me who was featured in a Memorial advertising campaign, on flyer, magazine cover, and video. Worried that the publicity might have gone to her head, I phoned her to find out. Her publicist said that it hadn’t.

There is also a report in the book of when Prince would attend conventions, dressed in a suit, hair not all frizzed up, blending in far better than anyone would expect. Some Witness was interviewed after his death who said his appearance would cause a “mild stir,” but for the most part, people would leave him attend in peace. But, what is a mild stir for him might have been overwhelming for anyone else. 

******  The bookstore