TrueTomHarley

The reason there is an expression “skeletons in the closet” is that throughout history, people have succeeded in keeping them there. It is only in modern times that any sin of any degree is expected to be reported to others. Some ought be, no doubt. Others not so much. But the idea that the involved parties, even the victim him/herself, has NO SAY in the matter is uniquely of our time.

That odd passage at 2 Kings 22 in today’s Watchtower sidetracked me temporarily as I began to think of mischievous modifications and uses that I could put it to. “So he said, ‘You will fool him, and what is more, you will be successful. Go out and do that.’” CC had better start behaving—that’s all I can say.

When time travel is invented, historical revisionists will give a friendly wave to American forefather slaveholders as they race past them to bring the real arch-fiends, the Ancient Greek pedophiles, on whom Western society is based, back in leg-irons.

I sincerely hope our boy has never sat in on judicial committees. On the other hand, if he has, that will make identification a snap. Look for the congregation with 2000% turnover and the job is done.

I think your beef goes well beyond this or any other discussion and it is simply that there is a shepherding mechanism among JWs. Next it will be at shepherds themselves, next congregations themselves. Will it go all the way to a beef that there is a God himself?

I don’t know what you are smoking, but what you have underscored in no way contradicts my point and in no way validates yours. On the second portion I speak a bit less confidently, for I have no idea what point you are trying to make, nor even if you are making one beyond merely laying down words.

Sigh....

This is probably true. But it is in the nature of social media. Nobody “fully understands” anything of which they speak. Maybe they should, but they rarely do. All communication is a give-and-take of trying to get a better grasp of things, searching out accuracy and evading the rocks that would rip open the boat’s bottom. For the most part, this is understood going in. It is buyer beware. A fool believes every word. The shrewd ones weighs matters carefully. Granted, few people do this. But the only solution is to become more shrewd oneself or pull the plug on social media Since the latter isn’t likely to happen, one can only aim for the former.

Doesn’t matter. If ones go straight to police with an allegation and police decide there is nothing to it, then no harm is done to anyone beyond some inconvenience & maybe false suspicion. If ones go straight to the police and an abuser is thrown into the hoosegow, no doubt elders will find out about it then. At that time, they can begin whatever spiritual role they will play. They’d have no reason to feel “left out of the loop,” and I don’t think they would.

You either don’t keep up or you deliberately misrepresent. The May 2019 made exactly that point. It doesn’t matter what the elders do or do not do. It doesn’t matter what they do or do not believe. A member has every right to go to the police and by doing so, they bring no reproach at all on the congregation. The abuser has already done that.

Case in point. (Forgive me. I admit it is a cheap shot.)

Yes. Geoffrey Jackson made that point to the ARC but they didn't want to hear it. In the Dear Mr. Putin ebook, I included: "Three times before the Australian Royal Commission, Geoffrey Jackson, of the Witness Governing Body, pleaded for universal, mandatory reporting laws, with no exceptions—if that could only be done, it would make the job of the Witness organization in policing its own without raising the ire of those outside the congregation “so much easier,” he said. "Continuing his cross-examination, Justice Angus Stewart said: “Leaving aside the question of overriding mandatory law from the civil authorities...” I almost wish that Brother Jackson would have interjected at this point, “I wish you would not leave it aside, for it would solve the problem.” The greater world cannot make a dent in preventing child sexual abuse, and so it puts the onus on those who are trying to do something about it. Alas, our best lines invariably occur to us too late—had Brother Jackson picked up my line, it probably just would have got their backs up—and then (gulp) he would have looked at me with displeasure." Alas, this passage does not survive into the rewrite, but I'll stick it somewhere. If only CC could refrain from spewing battery acid on everyone--he really does have some valuable insights here.

@JW Insider Elementary, middle, and primary school schedules are staggered so that the same bus can make three runs. The last to let out in the afternoon was the middle school. I would arrive after two runs and take my place in a line-up of 6. There usually was a 15 minute wait, during which I might read. Two buses up the driver was some long-hair of my approximate age that I had briefly chatted up once or twice. One day he disappeared. It got around that he had taken his life, he had been bummed by being “just a school bus driver.” For me, being a school bus driver was a liberation—not being a school bus driver in itself, but what it represented, a purposeful departure from the materialistic upward climbing careerist life that I wasn’t comfortable with because I had no idea where I was going. Studying the Bible with subsequent baptism brought an overwhelming sense of being where I knew I belonged. Often we hear that the truth is like that—that we have to be at just the turning-point moment of dissatisfaction, even crisis. We reach a moment of realizing life’s conventional goals don’t lead anywhere. We are not sure whether that is true in general or just for us. We tend to say it is true in general, but that may be just us putting a good face on our departure. It is not so terribly different from what undissuaded ex-JWs do themselves—they reinterpret reality to conform to their own actions. One is never quite sure just how Jesus “draws us,” nor do I think it is so crucial to find out. Suffice it that we have been somehow drawn to a life of better rewards and goals. It is the reason I think the anti-cult movement is so corrosive. Explaining himself to a too-receptive Katie Couric, the CultExpert says: “People are in vulnerable moments in their life where they’ll be more receptive to a recruitment message or recruiter. So death of a loved one, illness, dislocation, losing a job, I mean seriously, the pandemic and the economic problems are huge susceptibility factors for the public going forward. Destabilizing country groups economic status is a major technique for doing mind control on people because you want to disorient people. You want to confuse people. You want to make people search for meaning and hope outside of the existing institutional structures. So the susceptibility of people now to look to, well, who knows the solution to that problem of how to make the world a better place now.” Historically these have been turning-point moments during which a person might explore and find a deeper meaning in life. Under the anti-cult people, they are now moments of “temporary insanity” that one must brace themselves through, so as to once again acquiesce to the “reality” that is is no “meaning and hope outside of the existing institutional structures.” The stuff is a cancer.

I once worked for an inventory company—you may have seen their counters at various stores—there may be one hundred or more at large venues. Occasionally anal managers would come along to insist on no talking whatsoever!!! among the workers. (It does marginally improve the count) Comraderie was the only thing that job had going for it. “Why can’t we get good people?!” one of the managers complained. “Because we don’t offer anything,” my favorite manager would answer back. As such times as enforced silence I would make it my life mission to break down that discipline, and more often than not I succeeded. One might think I would be out on my ear for conduct like this, but I was a peacemaker, a force for cohesion, I wasn’t competitive, I would freely help others, particularly newbies, and for this a multitude of sins were overlooked. I once was assigned a shift under Gladys, a legendary dragon, whom I almost never worked under—she covered a different time period. “Don’t worry about Gladys,” I told a newbie. “Yes, she is a dragon, and she is mean as the day is long, but if you just do your job you will not have any trouble.” She was right behind me!! I didn’t back down when she took offense. “Well, come on,Gladys! You know how you are!” She dismissed me later from the job for talking. But I refused to leave. “You can not request me for an additional job, but no way can you send me home from this one after I’ve gone to all the trouble to show up!” So I stayed. She did win a victory of sorts, though, for I talked no more during that night. You think so, do you?

It depends upon what you define as “doing the right thing.” In the eyes of are determined critics, we still are not “doing the right thing” and will not until any so much as a hint of CSA allegation is immediately forwarded by elders to the police—effectively making them an arm of the state. It is not for elders to make any judgment as to credibility or severity. Send any allegation to police. We may think we have settled matters by making clear there is no stigma in affected or knowledgeable parties going to police with CSA allegations “unproven” or not. But they will not think so. Sometimes I think these matters of who is mandated to report and who is not would be best settled by extending it across the board. At present, clergy, or in our case those who parallel them in some respects, are called upon to “do the right thing.” Doctors also are called upon to “do the right thing.” Extend it to lawyers that they also must “do the right thing”—send any admission or suspicion of CSA straight to police—and the entire mandated structure of other parties might reverse. So desperate is the world to stop CSA, so ineffectual are they at doing it, that the idea has been floated of make any person a mandated reporter. Of course, in the eyes of our really determined critics, we will not be “doing the right thing” until we cease to exist. It is why I was so taken with Holly Folk’s frank caution: “If you are a past or present JW victim of CSA, be careful that you are not victimized anew by those who feign interest in your trauma so as to use you in their quest to take down a religion they dislike.

Oh, come come. You wouldn’t be able to think your way out of a paper bag. You display it with almost every remark.

Yes. You were the catalyst. Thank you. Not to worry. We can expect a True Anointed to come along any minute and fix it.

I have several chapters about it in TrueTom vs the Apostates. Then along comes Holly Frank to better say in far fewer words the broader portion of what I have said

There were no religions investigated as religions. What was investigated was institutional abuse of schools, clubs, and daycamps within those religions, not the religion itself. Only Jehovah’s Witnesses were investigated as a religion —for abuse that happened to occur among the families of the rank and file, something the other groups have no mechanism even of tracking. The reason is above. It is indeed a scheme tailor made for institutional abuse, not for abuse that occurs among families that are religious.

Not this time

“Here’s a hammer. Go build your house. See if you can get one of the brothers to show you how it works.”

I hate to say it, but I am quite comfy personally as is—though of course I realize this is not true of the greater brotherhood and may not continue to hold true for me. I have carved myself a unique little niche, partly due to a modest innate talent and partly because I am not good at anything else. Will the new system liberate me in that regard? Or will the brothers say, “Aren’t you the one who hung out on that squirrelly site to battle the ne’er-do-wells after we said you ought not? Hmm. What are your qualifications? Battling “apostates?” Too bad for you there aren’t any now.” ?

Exactly. This is the issue before all the earth; will it be rulership by man or rulership by God? Everything else is a subset of this greater frame. And yet: It is not trust. It is acquiescence. He freely admits that ‘his’ side has nothing. But it does not stop him from sabotaging those who have decided, that since that is the case with conventional paradigms, they will look outside them. He has nothing. And he wants to make sure you don’t either. It has become his mission in life, his warped “good news.” In this purely secular worldview is revealed the cancer of the burgeoning “anti-cult” movement: its “pretension to standing as the final arbiter of religious truth.” It is as though the directive is given: “Search for the meaning of life, if you want to trouble yourself with such nonsense, but do not do it outside the guardrails we have constructed for you. That side we have checked for you and declared it bogus. It is “off-limits” for you.” In Russia, this secular anti-cultism combines with other unfortunate circumstances to declare the most peaceful people on earth “extremists.” In order to validate that label, and thus not look silly themselves, police have to arrest them as they would extremists. If you arrest them as you would jaywalkers, you are proclaiming to all that you are a liar, and that you know full well they are not extremists. Thus, Jehovah’s Witnesses are arrested violently, and this is a response the anti-cultists caused but did not intend, much like the relationship of murder to manslaughter. When you release the hounds of hell you find you cannot control just who they maul. In theory, as civil libertarians warned, the vague “anti-extremism” laws of Russia are written so loosely as to threaten any non-mainstream religious denomination. In practice, they threaten primarily (sometimes solely) Jehovah’s Witnesses. In a report that deals with the anti-cult movement, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, states: The anti-cult movement continues to conduct a highly effective disinformation campaign against religious minorities with devastating consequences for their human rights.” Which religious minorities in particular? Rachel Denber of Human Rights Watch says: “Russia’s religious persecution focuses almost entirely on Jehovah’s Witnesses.” This, too, like the violent arrests, is entirely unanticipated by human standards. Nobody is specifically to blame. Even Putin says, “Jehovah’s Witnesses are Christian, too. I don’t quite understand why we persecute them.” It is a comedy of errors except it isn’t funny. Is it not permissible to look for a super-human explanation when the human ones so poorly account for the facts? Emily Baron, she of Dissent on the Margins, spends virtually no time on Twitter, and follows only a handful of people. One of those she does follow, however, has the moniker, “Please excuse me for not having a PhD in whatever b******t you have your PhD in.” I don’t know that he speaks of anti-cultism, but being that Baran chronicles (up to 2014) the Russian devastation wrought by that cancer, he might be. At any rate, if he is not he should be, so I will take it as though he does. There is b******t out there, and you can get a PhD in it. The #CultExpert got his PhD. It took all of two minutes for him to append ‘Dr.’ to his name, and update his profile. He now interjects himself in any situation involving non-traditional religions, up to and including half the country for being “manipulated” into the “cult of Trump.” (now we will see if Alan is still lurking here) The USCIRF, with regard to religious connotations, blows the cover off this nonsense. “I was hoping someone would say it other than me,” says Hercule Poirot (not Suchet, but Finney). So was I. And my hope was answered—more than richly answered, for the agency says it more concisely, more powerfully, than what I have said in ten times the words. (It is the same thing with Holly Folk and CSA.) The field is rife with “pseudo-science.” its proponents (Dvorkin in Russia, though he received his training in the U.S. and France) generally lack qualifications in what they expound and for which they recommend policy. “Dvorkin has long provided the anti-cult movement with a veneer of intellectual credibility. Since 1999, he has taught Sectarian Studies at the ROC’s University of St. Tikhon; yet, his degree in Medieval Studies provides no academic grounding in religious studies or the sociological and psychological concepts on which he so frequently relies.” He has “effectively merged Western anti-cult ideas with the post-Soviet context, where anxiety about the return to the Stalinist past competed with fears about an unstable present.” It is a Western import, like Communism itself! Is Russia forever to be victimized by outside forces? The “growing anti-cult movement informed by pseudo- scientific concepts like “brainwashing” and “mind control” . . . portray[s] individual members [mostly Jehovah’s Witnesses, per Denber] as helpless victims without their own free will or ability to save themselves. This rhetoric enabled groups to justify the forced removal of friends and relatives from the religions of their choice, and even advocated for “deprogramming” regimens that used coercive (and highly questionable) psychological techniques.” The USCIRF specifically recommends that Dvorkin be censured at the prime instigator of this hate campaign in Russia. And yet, he is not necessarily a hater. He simply has bought into a patronizing “protector” philosophy, as has Srecko, that “I know better than you.” He examines the “cramped and narrow road” and has determined that since it is cramped and narrow Witnesses must not walk on it. As patronizing people everywhere, he presents himself as their benefactor. He views them as flying monkeys, and after he douses the Wicked Witch, they will no doubt thank him, just like they did Dorothy in the movie. Why didn’t the USCIRF release their report (it is July 2020) before I wrote Dear Mr. Putin—Jehovah’s Witnesses Write Russia? Why didn’t they tell me about it before I completed the rewrite in 40% fewer words—partly offset by some new chapters detailing the dark turn events have taken? What is wrong with them? What I should do is rewrite the rewrite to thoroughly incorporate this expose of anti-cult fanaticism. But I am tired of rewriting this book. I am going to slap it on at the end where is will serve as a coup de grace tying together multiple points I have made within. It is better for the ego if I provide the coup de grace to them, rather than they to me, but give credit where it is due. I am so glad to see a prominent government agency say Enough! to this destructive nonsense. Not that I expect it to prevail, primarily because of the identity of the one with which Christians wage war. But I do have a heads-up on they. They can dissect the material. They can do it better, and Lord knows more scholarly, than I can. But I can present the spiritual context. Perhaps they believe “all roads lead to heaven.” Perhaps they believe none of them do. You never know with scholars. In another report from that same body, even more recent, entitled “The Global Persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses,” it is acknowledged such persecution “has increased dramatically in recent years.” It is a situation that is “particularly illustrative” and deserves “wider attention,” though not primarily for the reasons they say: “for global efforts on behalf of freedom of religion or belief.” If it happens, it happens. We’ll gladly take it and say ‘thank you very much’, but the primary instruction lies elsewhere. The primary instruction lies in matching Jesus words of how his followers would be objects of hated by all the nations on account of his name, (Matthew 24:9) with the people who actually are those objects of hatred, as validated by Human Rights Watch and by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. I will say no more than this, for I do not want to be guilty of proclaiming the superiority of one’s beliefs, an extremist offense in Russia. Though perhaps the above verse indicates, with its obvious application to present reality, that it is the Bible itself that must be banned in that land—not just the NWT, but any translation of the “sacred scriptures.” Under manipulation of the anti-cultists, that country has trashed what is sacred. Be sure to click on the links. For once (@The Librarian will scarcely believe it) they do not lead to my blog.

What could be more humble than this? Asking for help. Asking for counsel. Asking for strengthening. Abasing oneself as a child. Surely a true Christian would be softened at this. Surely a true Christian would offer a mild response. His response? Nothing! Not a bit of help, though he was entreated in the kindest way! Just boasting about his own brilliance, and denouncing anyone who has given him the slightest offense! I tell you, I have pretty well come around to an idea @JW Insideronce floated, that he is not a Witness at all, and his primary M.O. is to make JWs look as nasty and intolerant as possible by pretending he is one. Nor have I ever actually seen him give a witness, in the way Arauna just did a few comments above, or relate an upbuilding experience, or strive to upbuild anyone. I have not seen Christian kindness, Does he “continue to show mercy to those who have doubts,” as in Jude 23, “snatching them from the fire?” Or does he turn up the flames on them? Arauna’s “experiment” (though she be quite sincere in asking for help) just about clinches it for me. The guy is a fraud. As such, the ruse is cleverly done, because he does have command of certain legalistic points, which he “fortifies” with picayune ones (that fall apart upon scrutiny—or at the very least, reveal astounding tone-deafness). If he really is a brother, some serious self-examination is called for.

It is probably one of those things that, If you know what is right and do not do it, it is a sin for you.