Anna

The "Keep yourselves in God's Love" book page 223. This is from the 2008 edition.  This book was studied in the form of a question and answer at the book study, and is a book that is studied with those wishing to get baptized. Unfortunately, as you say, some chose not to go to the authorities because of worry of reproach, and host of other worries (https://1in6.org/get-information/common-questions/why-do-adults-fail-to-protect-children-from-sexual-abuse-or-exploitation/) Even as late as 2014, one of the elders testifying at the ARC expressed similar sentiments to one of the two adult survivors who wanted to testify, by asking her: "why would you want to drag the organization through the mud?".  To keep child sexual abuse from the authorities however has never been JW policy. But Tom, you can't reason with the unreasonable.
Thankfully, as we know, the ARC turned out to play a key part in what we all see as a welcomed improvement. Not so much in our policies, but in their clear transparent presentation to ALL Jehovah's Witnesses (and anybody else who is interested).

At least seven of Jehovah’s Witnesses were subjected to torture—electric shocks, suffocation, and cruel beatings—on the first floor of the Russian Investigative Committee’s building at ul. Ostrovskogo, d. 47, in Surgut. While being tortured, officers interrogated the Witnesses, demanding to know: “Where are meetings of Jehovah’s Witnesses held? Who attends the meetings? What are the elders’ last names? What is your mobile phone password?”
On February 15, 2019, mass searches in Surgut started in the early morning hours. Worshippers were taken to the Investigative Committee offices. Investigators began interrogating the Witnesses, who refused to disclose details about their fellow worshippers. After the only legal representative in the room left, victims report that the following occurred: agents put a bag over the victims’ heads, sealed it with tape, tied their hands behind their backs, and beat them. Then, after stripping the Witnesses naked and dousing them with water, the agents shocked them with stun guns. This sadistic torture lasted for about two hours.
At least three Witnesses are still behind bars.
Additionally, after the mass searches were completed, the Russian authorities initiated criminal cases against a total of 19 Witnesses for so-called “organizing an extremist organization.”
Those who have been released have had their injuries documented by medical professionals and have filed complaints with supervisory agencies.
The Witnesses will pursue all available legal remedies for this crime, since such an egregious abuse of authority is punishable under the Russian Criminal Code. Additionally, The Russian Federation is subject to several international bodies that protect individuals from torture.
https://www.jw-russia.org/en/news/19021923-622.html

Not in court

This had nothing to do with "testifying" for the organization but everything to do with being summoned under wrong assertions.
If you testify under certain statements made about about you, then you are agreeing that those statements are true. You cannot do that if those statements are false. It would be like if I was asked to testify in court under the assumption that I was a 6ft black male doctor in his 70’s, whereas the truth is I am a 5ft white female secretary in her 20's. It would be wrong to testify under those erroneous assumptions and I would have to make a declaration to quash that summons by stating that I was NOT a 6ft black male doctor in his 70’s.
Gerrit Losch was summoned by the plaintiff (his lawyer) to appear in court under wrong assumptions about him. And you can see by Losch’s declaration what those assumptions were, and they were not correct. The judge was obviously satisfied that under the correct description of Losch’s function, it was not useful to ask Losch to appear in court. Had the judge decided Losch’s participation as helpful to the case even after the declaration,  he would have not accepted Losch’s declaration as relevant.
(When spelled with an "umlaut" it's Lösch, if you do not use an "umlaut" it should be Loesch)

The declaration is legal speak and is absolutely correct from a legal point of view.
Gerrit Losch has never been a corporate officer........employee.......etc. of WT,  and as an INDIVIDUAL he has never had or has authority to make or determine any policy for WT or any other department. This can only be done collectively as the GB with all 8 members participating.

The declaration is legal speak and is absolutely correct from a legal point of view.
Gerrit Losch has never been a corporate officer........employee.......etc. of WT,  and as an INDIVIDUAL he has never had or has authority to make or determine any policy for WT or any other department. This can only be done collectively as the GB with all 8 members participating.

The declaration is legal speak and is absolutely correct from a legal point of view.
Gerrit Losch has never been a corporate officer........employee.......etc. of WT,  and as an INDIVIDUAL he has never had or has authority to make or determine any policy for WT or any other department. This can only be done collectively as the GB with all 8 members participating.

Now don't let that get to your head, because you ain't nothing until you have at least 300K followers on Instagram

True, I shouldn't have made it sound like every witness thought that, it's just practically every witness with children in the 80's that  I have known that said it. It became a "phrase".

Now don't let that get to your head, because you ain't nothing until you have at least 300K followers on Instagram

TTH is so weak minded that he has concocted a character who turns that entire troupe around and marches them back into the slime from which they came.

I ‘m not sure I would fit it in, or that I could integrate it with everything else, but there is a part of me that wants to introduce a family of dimwits, proud of the fact that with them the ‘prophecy’ has held true for over a century.

There should be no reason for you to do that, nor I. There are plenty of things wrong or misleading on both of those sites. In fact, I see that AD1914 has merely taken a lot of articles from JWFacts and Hatton, and AlanF, and just re-posted them verbatim.
That's what you should do. And you appear to have access to a lot of research materials, so that's great.
No one is asking you or anyone else to buy into anything, but at least I see that we agree on the topic of the earth's creation. The Watchtower says that the creative days were of unknown length, and that these days didn't begin counting until perhaps many millions or even billions of years after which time the earth was "formless and waste." There is nothing wrong with this perspective we learn from the Watchtower. It is perfectly fine from a Biblical view, as a "day" can have a variety of meaning. I don't remember reading anything different in R.Franz perspective, so I'm guessing that he would have agreed with us, too.
I'm sure there are always new and better ways to explain things. Certain questions come in that show a need for focusing on something that was only mentioned briefly before. New books and new quotes are available that weren't available in 1967. I'm sure you already knew all this, so I'm not even sure why you are asking.
Why? Why should I find other avenues to criticize the Org? I'm only going to question areas where prayer and study and meditation and Bible reading have led me to think that certain strongly entrenched doctrines ought to be questioned. The Watchtower has often said that it welcomes such questioning. The Bible makes it our Christian duty to make sure of all things. 
It's for the same reason that I welcome your own questions and criticisms of those areas that I have brought up. But I often wish that you would actually offer Scriptures, reasoning, or even counter-arguments. Instead, you seem to have an obsession with making false statements about things I've said. Perhaps you just have trouble understanding me. But if that's the case, don't just jump to conclusions about what I said, or what I think Russell said, or the Watchtower said, etc. Just ask! I'd be happy to discuss any of these things.
But instead you seem bent on making claims like the one above that says that I think the Org is wrong and only I am right. It's completely false, of course, and I'm sure you know that. But why waste your time on such things even if it were true. If a person says something you disagree with, it's better to discuss the thing, not whether the person always thinks he is right. 
Here again, why be so obsessed with persons who have agreed with something I've said, here and there? I think a lot of people have noticed this absurd obsession you appear to have with up-votes, down-votes, and such things. I'm not here for any of their up-votes or to get anyone to hang on every fiber of my words. There have been people here in the past, Alan [Allen] Smith for one, who was so obsessed with up-votes and down-votes that he created multiple accounts just to practice vote-spamming, where he targeted a few people with literally hundreds of down-votes and employed those same multiple accounts to create hundreds of up-votes for himself. It was a funny quirk of his, and the Librarian or admin pointed it out publicly. But I'm not concerned about it myself. I'd point out the exact same scriptural concerns even if I never got an upvote. And there are others who probably would point out some of the exact same concerns if I weren't even here.
The thing I would appreciate is having someone respond to the reasons my "false demonstrations" are false rather than going after me for bringing them up.

Sometimes you make me think you have been living under a rock. I don't know what you mean by unfavorable messages, but it is clear that every Witness generation has been living with the thought that "our children won't make it to high school", it doesn't matter whether this is the 20's 30's 40's..............80's 90's.... you get my drift. Perhaps this is a good thing as it keeps everyone on their toes, but it can also backfire, like crying wolf one too many times. 
Being ready at all times doesn't equal putting a date or time period on it.

Sometimes you make me think you have been living under a rock. I don't know what you mean by unfavorable messages, but it is clear that every Witness generation has been living with the thought that "our children won't make it to high school", it doesn't matter whether this is the 20's 30's 40's..............80's 90's.... you get my drift. Perhaps this is a good thing as it keeps everyone on their toes, but it can also backfire, like crying wolf one too many times. 
Being ready at all times doesn't equal putting a date or time period on it.

Sometimes you make me think you have been living under a rock. I don't know what you mean by unfavorable messages, but it is clear that every Witness generation has been living with the thought that "our children won't make it to high school", it doesn't matter whether this is the 20's 30's 40's..............80's 90's.... you get my drift. Perhaps this is a good thing as it keeps everyone on their toes, but it can also backfire, like crying wolf one too many times. 
Being ready at all times doesn't equal putting a date or time period on it.

Sometimes you make me think you have been living under a rock. I don't know what you mean by unfavorable messages, but it is clear that every Witness generation has been living with the thought that "our children won't make it to high school", it doesn't matter whether this is the 20's 30's 40's..............80's 90's.... you get my drift. Perhaps this is a good thing as it keeps everyone on their toes, but it can also backfire, like crying wolf one too many times. 
Being ready at all times doesn't equal putting a date or time period on it.

What bothers me is that every year, I am looking more and more like a fat Dr. Emmett Brown who lost his DeLorean.

NOW you’ve got it.

Top Cat O’Malihan said that I didn’t do dates. That is only partly true. I don’t do them, true, but it is only because I have already pronounced the final word:
A post of years ago:
............
From our readers:
 
Dear Tom Sheepandgoats:
How can I figure when the world will end?
Sincere Person
 
Dear Sincere Person:
The only thing you're sincere about is saving your skin! Nevertheless, here's how you do it.
You start with the well-known verse in Mathew:
Concerning that day and hour nobody knows, neither the angels of the heavens nor the Son, but only the Father.     Matt 24:36
Got it? Nobody knows the day and the hour. While, at first glance, that might seem unhelpful for your calculation, in reality it is the key to success! The method is straightforward. Since no one knows the day and the hour, that means if anyone claims a certain date for the end of the world, that's not it. To visualize how the method works, start with a calendar. 
 
 
Now, let's consider an example. May 21st. Say someone declares this day to be the end of the world. Since he knows it to be true, that's not it. On your calendar, you cross out May 21. Cross it out, not in pencil, but with a permanent marker. That way, no atheist can later erase it, trying to confuse you or your pets.
 
 
Repeat the process. Whenever you come upon a day someone just knows is the day and the hour, cross out that day. With a bit of research, you ought to eventually have a calendar looking like this.
 
 

There! That's all there is to it. You'll cross out all days except one. That's the day! Be ready.
  
I can hear the cynics, already. “Hold on a minute, Sheepandgoats!  You can't tell me that every day of the calendar is taken. There may be a lot of nutcakes, but surely not so many as to fill up every day on the calendar!” 
On the surface, it seems a valid objection, but in reality, it just reveals laziness on your part. I admit, if you just count nutcakes predicting the day and hour, you'll fall short. You must count more than just the nutcakes. You must also count the screwballs, the cranks, the fruitcakes, the starry-eyed lunatics, the wolflike false prophets, the round-the-bend idiots, the maniacal crackpots, the self-aggrandizing demented, the certifiable crazies, the raving beserk, the unhinged wackos, and the moonstruck schizos. It's a little work, I admit, but it's not rocket science. If you count all these characters, you easily eliminate the wrong days, leaving only the truth to assert itself!

Now, since I do nothing but think about God all day long, I've worked through all this, and I know the date. But, if I really knew the date, that wouldn't be the date, would it? So I don't know. I've only been able to narrow it down to three possibilities. There are only three days throughout time that no one else has claimed. Thus we can see the breathtaking splendor of the heavenly plan. Three things are proven:
1. God is a trinity.
2. He works in mysterious ways.
3. Matt 24:36 holds. You can't tell the day and the hour; your best shot is a 33% chance.
 
Now, should we give Mr Camping some credit? It's not easy to do. I agonize over it. His formula, seven 1000-year days after the flood, seems awfully simplistic. He's throwing everyone in a tizzy over that? Haven't I said before I don't do floods? If I met him, I'm not at all sure I would like him. Besides, he buys into all the typical hash of trinity and hellfire, doesn't he? Don't get me started on this rapture stuff. And what's to say about those folk who buy into his prophesies? Why weren't they wearing ties as they announced the end? So, I suppose, not being on board, I run the risk of going to hell. Maybe if I say kind words, I will go to a softer version of hell...some place with merely an abominable climate, like here in Rochester, which I am used to. At any rate, it seems worth the effort. So....
Harold Camping, too, was aware of “Concerning that day and hour nobody knows, neither the angels of the heavens nor the Son, but only the Father.” He didn't just blow it off as if it never existed. He worked around it in a very clever way. He said that verse related only to that specific period of time in which it was written, not now! Now all the Trinitarians laugh at such a silly explanation, yet they blunder as greatly regarding the second part of the verse: "...no man knows the day and hour, nor does the Son, but the Father does!" Still, they would have me believe that the Son and the Father are the same!
Look, Camping stuck his neck out and looked ridiculous, he messed up a lot of people, but at least he is in the spirit ofJesus admonition to “keep on the watch.” I'll give him credit for that, if no more. I mean, I've heard atheists and skeptics carry on about how can people be so credulous to buy into end-time obsessions. I'll tell you how. You need look no further than Newsweek, which lists calamities on the front cover of it's “Apocalyse Now” edition, before tearing their hair out with “What the #@%!" is Next?! So at least Camping errs in furthering a Bible theme, that there will be an end of this system of things. I mean, if the ridicule of him comes from those steamed over his goofball formula, or his presumption of nailing the day and hour, well and good. But if it comes from those mocking the very notion that one day God will intervene in world affairs so that the earth does not end up totally ruined.....well....I hate to pick sides. I'm not sure which is the worse.
Years ago I called on some science person who had read the book Life – How Did it Get Here; by Evolution or by Creation. In the course of discussion, he asked what difference did it make. Who cared? Either way, evolution or creation, we're here. I answered that if God was responsible for bringing about earth and the life on it, then he just might have some purpose for it, and might not stand idly by while human mismanagement destroyed it. But if evolution was responsible for all, then if there was any hope for earth's future, it lay with humans. And they weren't doing so well, then or now. The man's wife, who up to that time had had little to say, remarked 'that's a good point.' 

Well......alright already Sheepandgoats. You say there's three possibilities? Spill. What are they? Not so fast! It'll cost ya. Look, Camping and everyone else draws a salary for what they do. What should I and Jehovah's Witnesses be the only ones not to cash in? Contact me and we'll talk. Do you want to be ready for the big day or don't you?
************************
 
 

Sorry that I added so much evidence for that assessment in my last few posts, especially. But I do take issue with the idea that "none of this really matters."
Witnesses have long moved on from being too concerned about the personalities of R.Franz and F.Franz. But for some persons, dredging it up again can immediately bring up feelings of hate and judgment. For me, everyone is imperfect and liable to mistakes, including me of course. But I'm concerned when a Biblical principle gets violated and we feel that facts no longer matter:
(Exodus 23:7) . . .“Have nothing to do with a false accusation . . .  for I will not declare the wicked one righteous. (Proverbs 17:15) . . .Anyone who acquits the wicked one and anyone who condemns the righteous one —Both of them are detestable to Jehovah.
The point is exaggerated, but the principle remains. We don't want to let our feelings get in the way of facts when it comes to how strongly we condemn or praise the lives of imperfect men. This includes R.Franz and F.Franz. Sure, it's comforting for some to see one as a devil and one as an angel; it fits a "world view" that some can use to bring a hammer down on others. This goes for ex-JWs who want to see R.Franz as a kind of "angel" and Witnesses who want to see R.Franz as a devil, for example. But there are cracks in these "world views" that anyone can see. Seeing those cracks reduces the comfort level of some and threatens to reduce the power of the hammer for others.
The Bible says to let our reasonableness become known to all, and yet reasonableness from one person will often trigger unreasonable responses. And I can see how I have been unreasonable here a few times, but it's always good to have someone else point it out too, as you have. We can't always see our own faults very well. 
But there is another way in which I think it's wrong to dismiss all of this saying, "None of this really matters does it?"
It's because our very Christianity should be focused on the sort of persons we ought to be every day, precisely because we know that the end could come at any time within our lifetimes. And precisely because we know that it might come, in effect, 1,000 years from now, after we die, for example. Jesus had a good reason for emphasizing why dates and times and seasons were not in our jurisdiction, but in the jurisdiction of the Father. The time was none of our concern. Yet, as a group, we have put so much energy into dates and chronology, and even used this "urgency" as a motivator instead of love as a motivator. To me, I "harp on it" because Jesus and the rest of the Bible made it clear that this really did matter.

He does that too

lol, no offense ever taken over it. It is actually spelled with only one i at the end. I think somehow the forum made me add them. 
 
https://glosbe.com/zun/en/shiwi
 
http://ashiwi-museum.org/
 
 

Never again will I play with the ‘i’s of Shiwiii and am a little ashamed of having done so at all. Thank you.
 

I did. 
 
I have read not all of it but enough of it to formulate my opinion and make a good comment in good conscience.
 
Tom, you have written with a passion and a poise from your true belief and heart. I cannot deny that fact. I commend you for the amount of what you put into words and can honestly say that it truly takes a writer to write as much as you have in this, and the other books you have written. You have given the reader a solid grasp of the topic you represent and that is something I struggle to see here in this forum at times. While I understand that everyone writes for different reasons, some want to provide facts while others want to present missed information and many more reasons. The only thing I can say about your book that is relevant to this topic on this forum, is that it is a  opinion piece. There is nothing wrong with that, it just is what it is. I appreciate the fact that you let me read it, it gives me more understanding of who you are and where your thoughts reside. Thank you Tom.