The Author
of this blog as recently received some comments from a user named Kyle. I could
simply let them show up in the comments section, but that wouldn’t really do
them any justice, and so instead they will get their own entire post dedicated
to responding. One of the comments is as follows:
“Here
you're painting all apostates with the same brush, a common logical fallacy.
You've commented on Ad hominem before, look up Guilty By Association:
After
speaking with hundreds of ex-witnesses, I have yet to come across anyone who
has advocated violence against witnesses. All I speak to have friends and
family still in and hate the organization, not the individuals. Most would be
happy to see the organization peter out and die, but no harm come to actual
individual witnesses.
But
instead you've cherry picked an example that asserts all apostates want to
physically exterminate Jehovah's Witnesses, which simply isn't true.” --Kyle
In reference
to this 2011 post here: http://tearsofoberon.blogspot.com/2011/11/examples-of-apostate-love.html
And this
actual quote from a news article dealing with Russian persecution of Witnesses:
“Ha ha! Russia had the right idea: rid the world of Jehovah's Witnesses by ANY
MEANS NECESSARY!”
With that
background in mind, let’s begin:
“After
speaking with hundreds of ex-witnesses, I have yet to come across
anyone who has advocated violence against witnesses.” Haven’t ever found “anyone”? Not a single
person? You are either a liar or you just aren't looking very hard, or both. I
saw it almost constantly when I wrote more often.
Number one,
you make no distinction between ex-Witnesses and apostate Witnesses in the
psychological sense. I agree with you that the vast majority of ex-Witnesses
faded quietly and without much fanfare. But those types are not the problem.
You rarely see or hear from those unless you actively seek them out. The
problem, however, is the small minority
of highly vocal apostate Witnesses that more or less dedicate their entire
lives to “fighting against the organization” and “bringing it down at all
costs.” These are the more ruthless, more violent, more obsessed, and more apathetic
kind of ex’s.
These are
the ones who applaud governments separating Witness parents from their
children. These are the ones who cheer for nations that throw conscientious
objectors in jail and say that they deserve it. These are the ones who find no
fault with schools that beat and humiliate and expel Witness children for not
displaying nationalistic pride and loyalty to the ruling political party. These
are the ones who use the comments of articles reporting on the tragic deaths of
Witnesses to stir up hatred and intolerance of the same group. These are the
ones who track down the real identities of online Witnesses and then send fake accusations
of crime and domestic abuse and pedophilia to their employers and neighbors.
These are the ones who view forced deprogrammings and kidnappings of Witnesses
as justified. These are the ones that, as in the original quote, support, ignore, play down or even help to incite the violent persecution of Witnesses around the world. These are the ones who lie and deceive and manipulate so much
that they make their own accusations of “Theocratic Warfare” look like children
playing with squirt guns.
I saw all
these things coming from the online apostate community for years. Every group
and every site and every community I looked at was exactly the same. All were
overflowing with negativity and vitriol and intolerance and hate, very poorly masked as love and concern. It made me sick to the
point that I finally just had to walk away from it all and stop sifting through
such trash entirely. Those are the ones I refer to when I speak of “the other
side.”
“All
I speak to have friends and family still in and hate the organization, not the
individuals.” And yet that is a giant fallacy in of itself. It is a
completely meaningless phrase, like trying to argue that you hate “Society” but
not any of the individuals that make up “Society.” “Society,” “Nation,” “Community,”
“Organization,” all these words are just different ways of referring to groups
of individual people. You cannot separate
the people from the collective noun because the people ARE the collection noun.
An “organization” cannot act or think or recruit or expel or teach or reprove –
only INDIVIDUAL PEOPLE can do these things. An organization is nothing but a group
of like-minded, individual PEOPLE. So to say that you hate an “organization” IS
to say that you hate the people that make up the organization, because they are
one and the same thing.
Now, in defense
of both you and your ‘friends,’ I’ll admit that they probably don’t mean what
they literally say they mean, because it is obvious they don’t even understand
what it is they are saying. Perhaps we could rephrase it to
“I
love my family and friends and consider them merely victims even if voluntarily
baptized, but I hate the Witnesses who they hang around with because those
Witnesses keep my family and friends away from me.”
This is a
much more honest statement in my opinion, even if the factualness of it is debatable.
Moving from feelings of abandonment and betrayal by friends and family to anger at the voluntary
choices of friends and family to hatred of the individuals that the friends and
family choose to associate with to hatred of an abstract, boogeyman “organization”
is nothing but progressive scapegoating by those are not honest with themselves
and who cannot accept the true nature of their pain.
