It’s war! we’re told, What kind of war is it? Is it the kind of war where one dresses in the forest in bright red like the Revolutionary War British and nothing could be easier than to pick them off?

Is it the kind of war where you hunker down in the trenches and lob letters that you know by faith will find their targets?

Is it the kind of war where you send out some Hushais to thwart the counsel of conniving Ahithophel, such that when he saw that his counsel was thwarted he went out and strangled himself as a forerunner of Judas? Yeah—that’s what I’m talking about! (2 Samuel 15:34, 17:7, 23)

Whatever kind of war Jehovah’s Witnesses fight, it’s a war where you don’t speak ill even of those who speak ill of you. In overturning the verdict of the Russian Supreme Court (and the next day Russia withdrew from the European Union rather than abide by the decision), the European Court of Human rights noted, “…it is significant that the texts [used to assert that JWs were “extremists”] did not insult, hold up to ridicule or slander non-Witnesses; nor did they use abusive terms in respect of them or of matters regarded as sacred by them.”

Enemies foment ‘trouble by decree,’ says Psalm 94:20. But sometimes the decrees are overruled—like this one of a lower court that said Witnesses couldn’t disfellowship as a last-ditch attempt at discipline and then the high court of the land (Belgium) said they could. No Witnesses had been consulted in that first trial, the High Court found, only their critics. Without internal discipline, it is impossible for a faith to be not swayed by shifting societal norms. That is the war—between those who want such swaying to occur and those who want the faith to stay true to its biblical charter.

There was also a rebuke of that country’s ‘anti-cult watchdog’ for issuing a report based on allegations, press clippings, and television offerings—the distinguishing feature being that any allegation that could be checked turned out to be false. Again, no Witnesses had been consulted. For a land that claims to be democratic, you’d almost think they’d allow people to defend themselves.  “The judgment will surely become a key precedent.  . . that scholars of religion are a more reliable source on these matters than journalists and anti-cultists, and that governmental agencies dealing with the alleged “danger of the cults” are not above the law and can be legally prosecuted when they spread false information and slander.” wrote BitterWinter.

Then there was Special Secret Agent Jack Ryan—yes, ‘JackRyan’ was his handle. Witnesses don’t have anyone who corresponds to this, nor even a Hushai. Special Agent Ryan, who issued a ‘Special Report’ of an ‘agent down’ at Bethel. Seems they recruited a young woman already there, who they knew or should have known, had some instability to her personality, and they sent her rifling through the Bethel files! She was found out.

Jack appears flabbergasted that HQ is not cool with this, as though any other organization would be. They 'interrogated her' for two days, he reports. The 'interrogation' was so grueling that she reported for a second day, when it was discovered that her pilfering was not for some innocuous cause or some misunderstanding, but to spirit whatever she found to Jack’s friends who have dedicated their lives to working against kingdom interests. Bethel showed her the door. 

"It was reported that when she arrived home, her Jehovah's Witness family and friends treated her terribly," Jack’s SPECIAL REPORT says, as though any other family would be bursting with pride to see their offspring attempting sabotage on what they held dear. He doesn’t clarify “treating her terribly,” which you think he would have done if it was truly that terrible. Doubtless she didn’t receive a hero’s welcome.

The story then takes a tragic turn. She took her life, triggering Jack’s ‘Special Report.’

I told him that if it had really happened, he killed her himself—maybe not he personally but his ‘team.’ They recruited an inexperienced and vulnerable young woman, and filled her head with nonsense of how she was a guerrilla freedom fighter liberating the oppressed, that her people would thank her like the flying monkeys of Oz thanked Dorothy for dousing the wicked witch, etc, oblivious and uncaring to the certain trouble that would befall her when she was found out. These people are crazy.

It’s fine for JackRyan (aka a Tom Clancy CIA spy character) to fantasize like an adolescent, but to manipulate others into his world of paranoia—well, he presents the consequences. And then he thinks issuing a Special Report will cover the damage. 

Sheesh! It’s as though he tries to recruit Tom Cruise on his mission to take out Witness HQ. Tom Cruise turns him down, not because the mission is impossible, but because it is ridiculous. He knows Jack and his are mostly hacks trying to settle old scores and work off grudges who should have moved on in life ages ago.

If Jack’s team must assign blame for the young woman's death, surely it is themselves they should point to. Recruiting someone once a fine servant of God, perhaps someone dismayed upon finding life was not Santa and the elves, but that there are real people doing their flawed best—and using her to further their own ends. I'm tired of their hate. Many of these ones have turned to atheism, so they are beyond all question "fighters against God." (Acts 5:37-18)

No war is fought without plenty of espionage but with Jehovah’s Witnesses there really doesn’t seem to be any. They do with their critics as Jesus did with his critics: “Do you know that the Pharisees stumbled at hearing what you said?” he was asked. “Let them be,” Jesus replied. “Blind guides is what they are. If, then, a blind man guides a blind man, both will fall into a pit.” (Matthew 15: 12-14) Start to tussle with him and maybe you’ll fall in, too. As Nietzsche put it: “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”

******  The bookstore

What Lett said was: 

“Now, if we think about it, we're not born as friends of God because we're born as sinful offspring of Adam. Actually, when we think about it, we're born as enemies of God. Sometimes you'll hear people say of a little baby, ‘Look at that little angel,’ but more accurate would be to say, ‘Look at that little enemy of God.’ Now, of course we love that little baby and it's now not hopeless because our loving creator has made reconciliation with him within the reach of everyone. We can become a good friend of God and that close relationship with Jehovah will become our most valuable possession.”

Notice how he twice said, ‘when we think about it?’ You have to do that—think about things. You don’t just parrot sound bites to make people you don’t like look bad. O, you spiteful fellow, who quotes scripture by the bushel basket but never lays hold on the one that applies, besides the reference to Adam in Genesis, the place to focus is here:

“…through one man sin entered into the world and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because they had all sinned—.” Romans 5:12

“when we were enemies we became reconciled to God through the death of his Son,” by exercising faith in him, which a baby cannot yet do, and thus is temporarily ‘grandfathered’ via the faith of it’s parents. (vs 10)

Now, as for Bro Lett, for a guy who will quote Job 12:11, “Does not the ear test out words As the tongue tastes food?” you’d almost think he’d test them out a little more before letting loose with a phrase that every evil cherry picker will use to “distort the right ways of Jehovah.”

But I hate to think what Vomodog would have done to Jesus for his, ‘Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has everlasting life, and I will resurrect him on the last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink.’ John 6:54-55

Vomodog taunted, “Please tell me if he is truly adhering to and following Christ as a model.”

Taking into consideration that passage in John, I would say Lett is supremely adhering to and following Christ as a model, in fact, more so than any of the other HQ staff.

Imagine: what sort of vile person would comb through a convention in which every talk explores the theme verse (Psalm 34:14) ‘Seek peace and pursue it’ to find and exploit a faux pas?

Gif: Crying baby gifs/ tenor

It may be just an example of God ‘laughing at the wisdom of this systems’s wise ones,’ proof that his anointed are, as in the first century, seldom of ‘noble birth,’ nor ‘wise,’ but decidedly ‘uneducated and ordinary.’

I’ll take substance over style any day. Turn on the TV and you can see endless people whose ‘style’ is impeccable. Among them are some of the stupidest people whom God ever let roam the earth.

******  The bookstore

Vic Vomodog screamed at me, the way he does these days—and to think we once pulled shoulder to shoulder in the great work! “When you even USE THE TERM ‘overlapping generations’, it admits tacitly that a generation is A GENERATION which has a singular definition.”

Look, this is not hard. From the standpoint of the listener, the generation of  his contemporaries ends when the lifespans of every one of them has expired. The lifespans of geezers like myself go back 100 years. The lifespans of my grandkids go 100 years in the other direction.

It’s a Bible interpretation. Can I prove it? No. Can I disprove it? No. But it is not particularly hard to understand. Should the bros have made it? I have no idea; it’s not my call. If it’s wrong it’s on them. All I have to do is acknowledge, ‘Well, that’s what they’re saying these days.’

Why risk joining those donkeys from 2 Peter heehawing over how since the days of our forefathers all things are exactly the same?* I see the malcontents on the ex forum ecstatic over how, now that they have cut loose from the faith, the world is their oyster, offering them boundless possibilities for personal fulfillment. Everyone else knows it’s going to hell in a handbasket.

Though few of them would know who was president the year prior to their birth, they have made themselves “expert” on a tiny sliver of ancient Persian history. The exJW who emailed me a few times and then left a nasty review of the masterpiece ‘TrueTom vs the Apostates’ (UK site) based that review on the 607 topic that is nowhere even mentioned in the book. I mean, if I write a bad review of ‘Gone With the Wind’ it shouldn’t be because I don’t like wind. What this means is I need a few loyal ones to write reviews to balance it out. But even if I get more bad reviews, it’s the tonnage that better puts it on the radar. I mean, the promo material of the book alone makes clear it will be a good read, or at least a unique one. I’ve never seen anyone else cover the material in depth. Nor is it the end. Already it is time for ‘Round 2’ but there are several intervening projects.

(Photo:Gone with the Wind Museum in Marietta.jpg, Wikipedia)

So eager is this fellow to undermine his former religion—and yes, I have the email exchange, which I will reproduce in time—that he cites some book claiming WWI was not that big of a deal, that there have been many similar ‘world wars’ and that even WWI wasn’t originally called that. ‘Yeah, it’s because they didn’t realize at the time there as going to be a sequel,’ I told him When they did, that would have been the perfect time for them to rechristen it “World War VII” per his theory. If I didn’t know better (and I don’t unless/until I check it out) I’d say the book was written solely to undermine Jehovah’s Witnesses. I have never heard of world war redefined.

I really don’t mind if it breaks down this way. Whatever the merits of 607, it does call attention to the fact that God has a timetable. Irrespective of our efforts to figure it out, he does have one. Let these guys take the other side of that—that he doesn’t, and in fact, there is no government of God nor even any need for one, that humans are doing pretty well on their own, thank you very much. Let them take that side. It goes back to the original issue from Eden. God says humans can’t rule themselves (know good and bad). They say they can. I don’t mind it shaking out that way.

“The game is the same; it’s just up on another level,” to put Bob Dylan’s words in a context he never dreamed they would be put in.

*First of all know this, that in the last days ridiculers will come with their ridicule, proceeding according to their own desires and saying: “Where is this promised presence of his? Why, from the day our forefathers fell asleep in death, all things are continuing exactly as they were from creation’s beginning.” (2 Peter 3:3-4)

To be continued….here

(Not to worry: This does not mean the series ‘Things that drive you crazy about the faith—and how to view them” is complete. It has just been temporarily superseded.)

******  The bookstore

This is a multi-part series. See Preface,  2nd Preface,  Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Each part links to the next.

How to help your teenager? is the theme of a recent series of talks. Several pointers are offered, all valid and good. But the elephant in the room is ignored because revelation says nothing about it. Maybe that teen who needs help is over there on the anti-JW Internet forum where he is drinking up bile by the vatful directed against his faith. Yet discovering that he is will do nothing to help those trained in ‘knowledge through revelation.’ They don’t know what is there, and ‘revelation’ tells them not to find out. “This means war!” one brother says about the contest with apostates, and doesn’t touch on how the very first thing you do in war is seek detailed reconnaissance on the enemy—know what they are doing and saying—if only to effectively pop them one in the jaw.

It just makes for odd situations, the counsel to avoid at all costs apostate speech. It makes for illustrations such as, ‘would you drink even a little bit of poison?’ although you do exactly that when you take one of the old-style vaccines (not the new-style RNA ones), the kind that gives you just a little bit of the disease to stimulate your body to mount a defense against it. It creates an almost superstitious fear of apostates for the power they supposedly wield. It creates a convention part in which a decades-long record of faith goes up in smoke when the person begins reading material ‘critical of Jehovah’s organization.’ That can happen?

It can, but ‘knowledge via revelation’ of how disastrous is apostate speech can lead one to think it is the mere words that sink a person. An empirical approach would be to heed what psychologists say: You do well to avoid ‘toxic people,’ because over time they corrode your well-being. There is something about aggressive apostasy—directing massive energy against former friends—that all but screams ‘toxic people,’ like the psycho ex-divorce-mate who just cannot let go.

“If errors were what you watch, O Jah, Then who, O Jehovah, could stand?” says Psalm 130:3. It is ‘knowledge by revelation.’ In this case it dovetails perfectly with ‘knowledge by experience.’ When it comes to the enemies of anyone today, errors are all people watch. They also magnify, enhance, and sometime concoct—see it play out on the internet with any public figure. Nobody ‘can stand’ in the face of the constant onslaught.

The very first thing you do to attack the faith is ‘strike the shepherd,’ so that the ‘sheep will scatter.’ One need not even drop the pretense of loving God that way, but can pose as a ‘freedom fighter’ or some such role. It was arguably even true with Judas. He and God were tight—there were no problems there! But that fraudster claiming to be the messiah was not at all what Judas was expecting, and so he turned upon him.

Interestingly, the final straw with Judas appears to be Jesus’ words, “For you always have the poor with you, and you can do them good whenever you want to, but you will not always have me.” (Mark 14:7) ‘He’s selfish, he just thinks of himself!’ says Judas to himself, and off he goes to blow him in (vs 10). So it is today when the earthly organization heeds revelation at Galatians 6:10 to do good “especially toward those related to us in the faith,” rather than try to fix the world in general. Apostates spin that as selfish.

Recent statements that God and his son trusts the faithful and discreet slave prompts malcontents to pull their hair out trying to assert that he doesn’t. The statement comes from ‘knowledge through revelation.’ Not only does the Word say it of current responsible ones, called the faithful and discreet slave—it says it of ones in the first century. Peter was trusted—and then went weak-kneed at a critical moment. Furthermore, it was just as challenging looking into the future then as it is today. “The saying went out among the brothers that [John] would not die,” we’re told. (John 21:23) How wrong was that one? Maybe John thought it himself. Often the trick is not to sanitize the present. It is to desanitize the past. First century persons taking the lead betrayed abundant human foibles. God and Christ trusted them nonetheless.

Even the general revulsion over apostasy comes from ‘knowledge through revelation.’ “Taste and see that Jehovah is good,” says Psalm 34:8. They have tasted and seen he is bad—not a promising start for bridge building, even though I tried—a little. After several persons were put off by the imagery of ‘Vomidog’ in Tom Irregardless and Me, I softened the house apostate’s name to Vic Vomodog, even though the original is a play on scripture: “What the true proverb says has happened to them: “The dog has returned to its own vomit . . .” I’m glad for it. Vomodog suggests the original but doesn’t rub your nose in it. It is a quirky and quizzical name in it’s own right.

Alas, it is human nature that the best way to get someone to do something is to tell them they shouldn’t. It is especially true with young people. There’s danger in this, and danger in that, they’re told. There may be, but the spirt of young people is bold. They don’t want to hear it—not about things that others face routinely. The Lord’s chariot may be lighting quick, but so is that of the world. Overnight it moves persons to despise discipline. It’s particularly strong with the youth who—I mean, this goes back to the very origin of young people—delight in getting a rise out of their parents.

‘Obedience’ is fine. I like that stuff. But it might be more effective if coupled with empirical evidence of just what apostates are up to. Appeal to empirical ‘social scientists,’ David Bromley, for example, who “explained how individuals who elect to leave a chosen faith must then become critical of their religion in order to justify their departure…Others may ask, if the group is as transparently evil as he now contends, why did he espouse its cause in the first place? In the process of trying to explain his own seduction and to confirm the worst fears about the group, the apostate is likely to paint a caricature of the group that is shaped more by his current role as apostate than by his actual experience in the group.”

Point out what’s wrong with what they say. Not a lot, necessarily, because you do want to avoid hanging out with toxic people—the empirical psychologists will tell you that. But a little—so that it is not such a great forbidden mystery all but demanding the curious cat to investigate. Or read a book like (‘Oh, c’mon, Tommy. you are not going to be so crass as to plug your book here, say it ain’t so….it is!—‘TrueTom vs the Apostates.’) Notice the one star review. Read it and discern it is from one of ‘those people.’ The promo material alone makes clear it will be a good read. It needs other reviews to balance it out. But even unfavorable reviews put it on the radar screen, so they are not as bad as initially appears.

Read this book only if you have been stumbled at what apostates say. I don’t allow anyone else. Look, don’t try to bluff me on this. I’ll know.

To be continued…

******  The bookstore

Some of the brothers were helping another move, loading and unloading a rented truck. Talk turned to Update 7, which has now itself been updated with #8. One bro was confused. ‘Get behind the Governing Body, he repeated the expression, but get behind them in what?’

I think they want you to get vaccinated, I said, and it was as though someone had finally mentioned the elephant in the room. Subsequently, everyone seemed to agree that had indeed been the thrust of it.

They’re going to have to say it if that’s what they want. The trouble with hoping people will read between the lines (if that is what is being done) is that to some “reading between the lines” is near synonymous with “going beyond what it written.” One bro said he would get vaccinated if they said he should, but only if they said it. Meanwhile, he was inclined to “trust his immune system.” They won’t be saying it, I don’t think. It consistently will remain a personal decision—and then are presented some Bible principles so you can make your personal decision, and the Bible principles cited lean pretty heavily toward taking the shot.

To be sure, what follows is an oversimplification, but a prime “religious objection” that some religious people have cited essentially boils down to “God don’t make no junk.” Isn’t the flip side of that argument to say that he does? Back in my day, if you got a vaccine, that meant you didn’t get the disease. That’s why we’ve long heard about how such-and-such a scourge has been eradicated by vaccines. Now they don’t eradicate them. Apparently, nobody any longer expects them to. They just tamp them down some and hopefully keep you out of the hospital. So many goalposts are being moved that one barely knows how to adapt. 

Medical definitions have adapted to accommodate these new realities. Mercola gives several examples of this in his heavily endnoted book, The Truth About Covid-19. Now, Mercola found himself kicked off social media platforms and harassed to such a degree that he removed much of his own content from his own website. Nonetheless, he has been a trusted name in our family for decades. He takes anything to the nth degree and you sometimes you say, “Well, I wouldn’t go that far,” but you usually say it for reasons of practicality, not because he is wrong. He does weigh in on matters in which the jury is still out, and sometimes you wonder whether that jury is being hogtied in the back room.

He points out that as late as June 2020, the WHO’s definition of ‘herd immunity’ was “the indirect protection from an infectious disease that happens when a population is immune either through vaccination or immunity developed through previous infection.” In mid-November “they updated their website, erasing any notion that humans have immune systems that protect them against disease naturally.” (bolding mine) The revised understanding of herd immunity is “a concept used for vaccination, in which a population can be protected from a certain virus if a threshold of vaccination is reached.” No mention of previous infection here, as in the original definition.

Further, he quotes WHO that: “Herd immunity is achieved by protecting people from a virus, not by exposing them to it.” This is followed by a commentary from the American Institute for Economic Research that “this change at WHO ignores and even wipes out 100 years of medical advances in virology, immunology, and epidemiology. It is throughly unscientific….What’s even stronger is the claim that a vaccine protects people from a virus rather than exposing them to it. What’s amazing about this claim is that a vaccine works precisely by firing up the immune system through exposure. There is simply no way for medical science completely to replace the human immune system.” (my bolds again)

I wouldn’t be surprised if [my opinion, not Mercola’s—though he probably says it somewhere] if the intent is revealed in that last statement: “replace the human immune system.” The natural one is not financially profitable. The replacement one will be. For this reason it becomes very important to discredit existing means of treating Covid-10 and advance the illusion that there is no treatment. Only if there is no treatment can emergency funding at taxpayer expense be allocated to the development and subsequent mandating of vaccines. Let the cat out of the bag that you can treat Covid effectively with existing and mostly cheap drugs and that impetus is gone.

So effective substances like ivermectin are relentlessly discredited. As a result, they are denied by pharmacies who won’t fill a prescription in many states even if you have one from your doctor. This, despite doctors testifying before Congress (which I have seen) as to how when they employed the drug in treatment, people got better. When they used it themselves as a preventative, they didn’t get sick in the course of treating thousands of patients. It being so hard to get now, people buy the animal variety, prompting the FDA to talk down (as agencies so frequently do) to people with “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously y’all, stop it.” It’s a little like mocking people for drinking polluted water because fresh water is not available.

The new vaccines are not like the old ones, which exposed you to the pathogen, sometimes deadened and sometime not. The new ones seek to train the body (through modification in the messenger RNA) to manufacture a defense against a virus it has never seen. It is an entirely new technology.

How is it working? Not all that well, it appears, at least not when compared to the shots that people have taken for the last 100 years. Israel is near 90% vaccinated and yet is still experiencing an epidemic of outbreaks. The old-tech shots, when you took them, meant that you didn’t get the disease. In this new model, people may still get the disease, they still pass it on, just hopefully not as severely. It takes awhile to adjust to this new normal.

Profits are an obvious reason that the pharmaceutical industry should seek to supplement (if not replace) the immune system. Doesn’t hubris also come into play? Those who “praise [God] because in an awe-inspiring way I am wonderfully made” are not so inclined to think human science can improve on his design. One the other hand, if you don’t believe in God at all, but put all your trust in human science—well, how hard can it be to improve on what is a haphazard evolutionary process to begin with? Beliefs have practical consequences.

The new vaccines even mess with an observation I’ve made about the “little bit of poison” analogy that we are so fond of with regard to apostates. Though the brothers reason this way, they actually do accept just a little bit of poison each time they take a vaccine—the idea is that it protects them should they later encounter the scourge full-grown in the wild. Avoiding such apostate exposure altogether is difficult in these times, and without a “vaccine” to it in the form of just a tiny bit of investigatory exposure for those so inclined, some of our people are shellacked when they unexpectedly encounter it.

Now it turns out that the above observation is invalid. The new vaccines are analogous to avoiding “even a little bit of the poison.” They do indeed seek to “protect people from the virus rather than exposing them to it.” That’s why medical dictionaries and WHO guidelines are being rewritten.

It’s also worth noting that they don’t work very well. And, as evidenced by the number of people we lose to apostasy, our present counsel to protect doesn’t work very well either. In theory it works great. In practice not so much.

Be that as it may, Jehovah’s earthly organization has a job to do, and they’re chomping at the bit to resume doing it. “The coronavirus is not the worst trial to strike out at all mankind and it wont be the last. We can expect things to deteriorate even further as these last days march on till their end,” says Bro Lett.

See: To Jab or Not to Jab: Part 2

“Anyone reading the Bible would see that the people whom God led w/an organization tacked this way and that. …I don't see that there ever has been universal agreement among members of the groups of God's people. Not in Bible times and not today either.”

Of course. “You can’t always get what you want,” as someone recently drummed to. Nobody gets everything his way. There are things about the earthly organization that are not as I would prefer. 

But the choice is not now, nor has ever been, between the people who are tacking this way and that and the people who are sailing straight and true without deviation. The choice is between the people who are tacking this way and that and the people who have sailed off the edge of the earth. The key tenets: no immortal soul, no trinity, use God’s name, kingdom a real government, everlasting life on earth, why God permits evil, exactly how the ransom works, what happens to the dead, preserved nowhere except in the realm where the GB presides—that has to make an impression with anyone in whom love of truth resides. 

I’m struck with how when people leave Jehovah’s organized worship, they never ever mention these tenets again. Answers to the very burning questions that drew them into the faith are now dismissed as though of no importance. It certainly is true of outside detractors who would draw people away. The blemishes of humans taking the lead are drawn out, exaggerated, or even make up, as though they did not all find their counterparts among the first century apostles and presbyrs. Press the detractors for where they would have you go instead and they clam up. They have nothing to offer.

In the case of those who still believe in God, it is back to the land of churches, where in time, the bland junk food will reassert itself: All roads lead to heaven, God works in mysterious ways, Death of a child is because God needs another flower in heaven. How is that not like the dog returning to his own vomit?

in the case of those who have gone the atheist route, it is like a market crash where millions are transformed into hundreds. “Ah, well, they were only paper gains anyway,” says the spiritual dullard, giving up on everlasting life to go celebrate the hundreds he still has left. 

It is no good harping on the blemishes of others, real, imagined, or enhanced. The enemy in the West wants exactly what the enemy in the East wants—to separate Witnesses from their support organization, with the confidence that they can be more easily assimilated that way. The only difference between them is the difference between the good cop who would coo sympathy at you and the bad cop who would pummel you. They want the same. Even should you decide to hone in on the blemishes of fellow believers it does not change the overall picture. It fits right in with how things were in the first century, where they also had blemishes. It’s how imperfect people are.

Pray to God that he fix your personal woes and beefs and he will respond that he has underlings who can handle the job—it is enough that he will listen to you and provide nourishment night and day. Complain to him that the underlings are imperfect and he will observe that you are no great shakes yourself—you will just have to learn to make do. In the final analysis, does not this verse carry the day? “If anyone makes the statement: ‘I love God,’ and yet is hating his brother, he is a liar. For he who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot be loving God, whom he has not seen.” (1 John 4:20) 

******

I wrote the book TrueTom vs the Apostates to assist anyone who has been stumbled at charges apostates make and thereafter no one is able to help them because they don’t know what is there themselves. It’s for them. Nobody else is allowed to read it. Look, don’t try to bluff me on this. I’ll know.

Also available in Amazon print.

Out of nowhere a scholar has appeared who talks dispassionate sense on the subject of child sexual abuse as it relates to Jehovah’s Witnesses and is unswayed by secular jingoism. Are/were you a Jehovah’s Witness who was abused as a child? That is very bad, Holly Folk agrees, but she cautions such ones that they must be on guard not to be abused a second time. It may happen at the hands of those who mostly feign interest in their trauma so as to enlist them in their greater goal of taking down a religion they hate. “All I ask is that you consider, for a moment, that you might be being used again, by people who care little about achieving justice for victims,” she says.

“Both official reports and media often confuse ‘institutional’ abuse in religious settings and abuse happening in families that happen to be religious.” It is a statement as pithy yet complete as anything I have written in several chapters of TrueTom vs the Apostates! She instantly cuts to the chase of the matter, whereas I pussyfoot around forever before arriving at an echo not quite so well put.

She pinpoints the flaw of the ARC’s Case Study 29, which I also attempted, but did not put it so concisely. Every other case was an investigation of institutional abuse within an agency, sometimes religious, sometimes secular. Case Study 29 was the only investigation of a religion itself. It is unique. It was rammed into the ARC agenda mostly at the behest of ex-Witnesses who hounded them relentlessly until they overrode their normal sound judgment. It plainly doesn’t fit into the overall program. JWs have no institutional settings, as did all the other agencies on the hot seat. Next move will be to hold Walmart responsible for abuse that has occurred among their shoppers.

It’s why you don’t sign on to a redress scheme tailor made for situations of institutional abuse that you don’t have. You wait for a redress scheme tailor made for situations of abuse that occur among Walmart’s customers. That you can sign on to it as a reasonable parallel.

In a second article (it is a four-part series) she criticizes the studies of the Netherlands and Belgium. I hadn’t gone there, assuming they would be no more than a rehash of the ARC. They were all that and less, she writes, so slipshod and lacking in any sound methodology of social science that it will be a scandal if they are relied upon for policy. Yet they might be, she opines, goaded on by the sheer noise that comes from Witness detractors, mostly ex-Witnesses settling the score, and given false credibility by the prestige of the Atlantic journal.

As a dispassionate outsider, not a Witness herself, she can do what is very difficult for any Witness to do, self included. She can bypass the reputation of a religion as something immaterial and focus on the greater affront to fight child sexual abuse. It is all diluted, she charges, when ex-members redirect rage against child sexual abuse to a target that is essentially a non-factor. The Witness religion overall does pretty well at fighting the perversion, she writes. I mean, who else [my contribution, not hers] gathers every member in the world (at the 2017 Regional Conventions) to consider detailed scenarios in which child sexual abuse might occur so that parents, obviously the first line of defense, can be on their guard? If there are sleepovers, if there are tickling sessions, if there are unsupervised trips to the restroom, if anyone displays unusual interest in your child—all these things were identified as potential red flags, not conclusive in themselves, but things to keep you eye on.

Witnesses will find her tack hard to copy. Their first response will be violent indignation at these patent efforts to undermine the religious organization they hold in high regard, and in the process, they are likely to come across as tone-deaf to the suffering of victims. But Ms. Folk has no skin in the game, so she can focus directly to how this vendetta of ex-JWs undermines efforts to fight child sexual abuse. She can express indignation that those with an anti-religious agenda squander resources that could be far better employed elsewhere.

Some villain on Twitter accosted me the moment I put the subject out there: “So, NO child is EVER separated from its parent(s) for ANY reason for religious purposes (or within a religious setting) by JWs... is that what you are saying?”

Well, duh—no. But NO child EVER separated is a far cry from ALL children ROUTINELY separated, which is the case with other groups Witnesses are compared to, as though apples to apples. Sunday Schools, youth camps and clubs—alas, they have proved to be breeding grounds for child sexual abuse. Witnesses do not have such settings. What! Do they chain their children at home so that no outside contact is possible? Does any balanced person? Imagine the uproar if they did.

Holly Folk also carries the “advantage” of being a survivor herself. “How would you know what it feels like to be abused?” people can (and have) said to me. I don’t. But she does. It gives her a freeness of speech that no non-victim will possess.

The closest I ever came to abuse was when I was walking up and down auto dealer row prior to my 16th birthday, anticipating the used car I might buy once I had my license. A certain slimeball approached and tried to befriend me. “They keep the really good cars in back,” he told me, eager to go there. Even as I evaded him, it was not due to my street smarts or lack of naïveté. I was as sheltered a lad as ever existed, with no specific knowledge of even what a child abuser was. (an ignorance not uncommon at the time.) I just knew that you don’t put the really good cars in the back—you put them up front where people can see them.

They are very thorough articles that Holly writes. Press on the links:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

I like it also that Holly Folk does not fear to take on the “money tree” that is lawyers. This doesn’t speak for or against victims in itself, of course, just the inherent possibility for abuse of such as system. In my community, there are so less than 7 accident injury firms that constantly advertise. Not to mention about twice that number that advertise over various carcinogens, medical treatments, devices, and of course, sexual abuse claims. Almost always the Catholic Church is targeted, and the Boy Scouts. Sometimes I hear a catch-all of any abuse in any religious setting.

I get it that injured people seek redress. Still, the sheer cacaphony of legal noise will strike most as overkill—a massive societal transfer of funds with lawyers netting a third. Don’t think the profit motive is absent with the Witness situation, Ms. Folk says, just like it is not in any other. It is no different than defense companies cooking up scenarios of peril so as to sell their goods, or pharmaceutical companies overplaying threats to our health for the same reason, or for that matter, any merchandiser doing whatever it must to expand the market for its goods or services.

”My lawyer got me 5 million dollars, 23 times what the insurance company said.” Such are the ads that I hear. What I do not hear is, “My neighbors all celebrated with me. Then they opened their insurance premium bills.” Where does anyone think the money comes from? The insurance company itself? They just pass the cost along. They have to, in order to survive. 

....

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Vic Vomodog’s face got redder and redder. His blood pressure shot to the sky—they had to call NASA.

I began to worry for him—just like I should have worried for the small-town judge Victor V Blackwell stood up to. Victor had been representing draft-age Witnesses in the volatile WWII years and the petty tyrant would barely allow him to open his mouth. “Another word out of you and I will jail you for contempt!” he roared.

“I looked around and saw lawyers, reporters, and professionals—I knew I wasn’t going to jail,” Brother Blackwell related years later at a Niagara Falls assembly. He told the judge: “Your Honor, if we have reached the place in this country where a lawyer can’t speak for his client, or present his defenses, I may as well be in jail with him.”

From his book, O’er the Ramparts They Watched: “Hot anger blazed from the “judge’s” face. His countenance flushed redder than a beet. The veins in his neck protruded like the swelling in the throat of a chameleon. Everyone in the courtroom waited for him to burst asunder....After some little time, gaining a small measure of composure, he told me and my client to stand up in front of him. We did. Then came the sentence:

“I sentence you to serve five years in a federal prison to be approved by the Attorney General. My only regret, you yellow coward, is that I cannot give your twenty-five years.”

Don’t think neutrality is an easy sell when nationalistic fever runs hot.

The judge died several days later. Townspeople said he had never cooled off from his fit of anger. When Victor next visited that town, the locals told him, “You killed our judge.” “I’m sorry,” he responded, but he later allowed at the Niagara Falls assembly that the bullying fellow had brought it on himself.

Every once in a while Vic Vomodog gets worked up like that. He fires out accusations as with a Gatling gun and I begin to worry that if I answer them it will be detrimental to his health.

Ah, well—if he dies, he dies.

“You Jehovah Witnesses are a cult!”

It used to be that if you fell under the spell of a charismatic leader, withdrew from society, dressed oddly, did strange things—you just might be a member of a cult. Nowadays just thinking outside the box is enough to trigger the C-word.

“Um, did the early Christians falsely declare the Great Day of Almighty God?”

Yes. “While they were listening to these things, he told another illustration, because he was near Jerusalem and they thought that the Kingdom of God was going to appear instantly.” (Luke 19:11)

“Did they pretend to be the ‘faithful and discreet slave’?”

Yes. “As they traveled on through the cities, they would deliver to them for observance the decrees that had been decided on by the apostles and the elders who were in Jerusalem.” (Acts 16:4)

“Ban Jehovah's Witnesses they prefer seeing people dying than receiving a blood transfusion and this is enough to ban them.”

It is controversial to be sure, but since they do not smoke, do not do illicit drugs, do not drink to excess, do not war, they on balance save far more lives than they cost. Even their stand on blood has sparked development of bloodless techniques and these have probably saved more lives than transfusion refusal has cost.

“They’ll use their ban in Russia to feed their persecution complex!”

Probably. This is because of the many verses such as Matthew 5:11‬: “Happy are you when people reproach you and persecute you and lyingly say every sort of wicked thing against you for my sake.  Rejoice and be overjoyed...for in that way they persecuted the prophets prior to you.”‬

“As an organisation they have keep silence about abuse amongst their members and the wall of silence regarding child abuse is unforgivable.”

Alas, there is no sizable group on earth, religious or not, that has successfully purged all child abuse from its midst. Still, with JWs, it is almost always members’ abuse that leaders are accused of ‘covering up.’ Not good, but better than the pattern elsewhere where leaders are the ones committing the abuse and there is not even a mechanism for discovering abuse among members.

“You didn’t sign on to the Australian redress plan. What’s wrong with you?”

When a child abuser is nabbed, unless he is a person in authority, is his religious affiliation ever even mentioned? With Jehovah’s Witnesses, abuse committed by leaders is rare. With the other signees, be they religious or not, it is the pattern. Witness cases that have come to attention are nearly always among rank and file members, something the other signees haven’t even a mechanism to track. 

Other signees have structure in which children are systemically separated from parents, such as Sunday School or youth groups. If you sponsor such a program, it stands to reason that you ought be held accountable to provide for their safety. JWs do not have such programs.

The differences are significant enough that JWs have not signe on to a “one size fits all” program, but instead handle cases that arise on an individual basis. Next thing you know, Hyundai will be supposed responsible for abuse situations that arise among its customers.

No one has apostates as dedicated to their crusade as do Jehovah's Witnesses. One could say they validate us. Since they were a huge concern in the first century—no NT writer not dealing with them—if they were not a huge concern today, would one not have to wonder why?‬

“If only the were banned here, like Russia. The only way to make sure they won't come back here is to open the door naked.”

This does not work. A friend of mine, a registered nurse, said to one such person: “You don’t have anything that I haven’t seen before.”

When the elders met with me after the meeting, I had no thought at all of putting the experience online. That occurred to me later. 

I just came to think I’d let it stand as a real time example of responding to counsel even if I don’t agree with every aspect of it. The only examples of meeting with the elders that ever appear online are those written by unruly persons already on the edge, like Dathan and those rebellious louts, who rail at the attempt at “mind control” and cry ad nauseum over their right to free speech, missing every spiritual point in the process of making their dominant fleshy one: “No one’s telling me what to do!”

I don’t resent the counsel at all. I take it for just what it is—loving oversight.  I both accept and appreciate that Jehovah leads his people via a human agency, and I am grateful that there is something that corresponds to verses such as Hebrews 13:17, to “be obedient to those who are taking the lead among you and be submissive, for they are keeping watch over you as those who will render an account, so that they may do this with joy and not with sighing, for this would be damaging to you.”

As such, I accept they have the responsibility to counsel in line with scripture, and I don’t carry on as though my toes are being stepped on or my rights infringed upon. They represent the human link in the divine/human interface, and they do not demand lockstep walking even as they give pointed counsel. I don’t consider myself above them. They are above me as regards authority.

I appreciate their efforts to check me, and as stated, I would be far worse in the absence of godly counsel to not engage with those who show by word or deed that acquiescence to Jehovah’s standards and all that is entailed is repugnant to them. It does me good to be checked by them, for I do believe that we become who we hang out with. We may not become it instantly, but we do so eventually—if not in point of argument then in forfeiting the Christlike manner—and often even in point of argument, as they are almost always based on following the trends of the day.

I would like it if there was a little more organizational pushback on some of the charges leveled against us—you know, take these guys on. I’ve said it many times before. But you can’t always get what you want. You can’t always get what you want. You can’t always get what you want. But if you try sometime, you just might find, you get what you need. 

And I have. I can’t go charging around like an enraged bull. But that kind of conduct can get a guy skewered anyway. It does me well to do what I do under the discipline of conforming to theocratic counsel. Even if in one aspect I am not a stellar example of it. I am in most other aspects.