Response to Marvin Shilmer: Responsiblity of Organizations

The blog Author has very recently received a reply to the post “Response to Kyle: Apostates and Violence,” found over here: http://tearsofoberon.blogspot.com/2013/03/response-to-kyle-apostates-and-violence.html

While I normally do not waste a great deal of time sorting through comments, again, as in Kyle’s case, I will make an exception due to both the quality of the comment and the man who made it. The comment is as follows:

“You’re correct that a viable organization is made of people.

But it’s not all the people inside an organization that are responsible for misdeeds. It’s top leadership in an organization that’s responsible for any misdeeds.

When top leadership of any organization acts contrary to the best interests of its membership that leadership deserves exposure for the misdeed.

Watchtower leadership invites members into its company with the lure of answers to questions. Yet once inside the same leadership vilifies members for insisting on answers for important details it imposes under pain of its harsh shunning program. This is evil, and it deserves exposure.

Watchtower leadership is evil enough to convince youth among its membership that transfusions accepted by Jehovah’s Witnesses are safe compared to those forbidden. This is evil, and it deserves exposure.

Watchtower leadership is evil enough to sit idly by while young children suffer persecution refusing to pledge allegiance to the United States when Watchtower presidents all pledged allegiance to the United States. This is evil, and it deserves exposure.

Jesus was disfellowshipped the old fashioned way by evil leaders among God’s chosen nation of Israel. Today Watchtower’s Governing Body claims itself ‘the faithful slave.’ Who’s going to warn Jehovah’s Witnesses when a self-proclaimed ‘faithful slave’ beats its fellows and associates with drunkards as Watchtower does?

Who?

Marvin Shilmer”

Since it does seem that Mr. Shilmer put at least some thought into his words, I will grace him with a point by point response.

Shilmer: “You’re correct that a viable organization is made of people.

Teary: Well I am glad that we can at least agree on something. Organizations are made up entirely of people, and not monsters, dreams, ham sandwiches, etc. Sadly, some people never do quite grasp that idea…

Shilmer: But it’s not all the people inside an organization that are responsible for misdeeds

Teary: All men are born sinners, and all men, whether high or low in status, commit misdeeds no matter how saintly or noble others perceive them to be. We are all susceptible to the same wants and the same vices – it is the human condition.

Shilmer: It’s top leadership in an organization that’s responsible for any misdeeds.

Teary: All men are responsible for their own actions alone, whether a leader or a recruit. The backdrop of an organization does not change this truth. One should not attempt to shift the blame for the actions of A onto B and then hold A as guiltless, merely because you like A and hate B. If B is the leader of A, C & D through voluntary agreement and not force, then the responsibility for any actions that B takes through A, C & D as agents are shared by all four. And that responsibility many carry down even below A, C & D to the very bottom of the chain of informed, voluntary action.

Shilmer: When top leadership of any organization acts contrary to the best interests of its membership…

Teary: this is a somewhat confusing statement to me at least. Who exactly gets to determine what the “best interests” are? Is it not logical that the “best interests” of the “membership” of a voluntary organization should naturally be determined by the “leadership” of said organization? Who else is going to do it? Those outside the organization who have nothing to do with it? And if the “membership” does not agree with the “leadership’s” determination of “interests,” then the membership is free to find other leaders. In fact, most of the membership would likely have not become members in the first place if their own perceived “best interests” did not align with the expressed interests of the “leadership.”

Shilmer: …that leadership deserves exposure for the misdeed.

Oh, “deserves?” That is a strong word isn’t it? Honestly, who really “deserves” anything? Thank God above that we all don’t get what we really deserve or the human race would be in deep trouble…But back to the statement: you make implicit assumptions in your employment of the word “exposure.” The word assumes that something is hidden or out of sight before being exposed. But taking action on behalf of others, whether Shilmer thinks that said action is contrary to the best interests of others or not, is after all rather difficult to do secretly, especially in a public leadership position. That action which is taken on behalf of the membership openly does not need “exposure” because it is not hidden. The individual affected membership may look upon the action and judge for themselves whether said action is in harmony with or contrary to their own best interest. They do not need a Marvin Shilmer to judge for them.

Shilmer: Watchtower leadership invites members into its company with the lure of answers to questions.

Teary: Such is the nature of voluntary association. One side makes an offer and the other side is free to accept or reject it according to their own best judgment. P.S., “lure” is a weasel word and implies deception, that answers are never given. But the Witnesses always answer the questions that they themselves pose and that the recruit may pose to the best of their ability, in all sincerity. Mr. Shilmer should be more precise with his choice of diction.

Shilmer: Yet once inside the same leadership vilifies members for insisting on answers for important details

Teary: And there Shilmer goes right off the edge of the sanity cliff. 1) What does Shilmer mean by “same leadership”? What leadership? Who? The Governing Body? Congregational leadership? Bible Study leaders? Field Service leaders? Family leadership? 2) Who gets to decide what details are important and what details are not important? 3) “Insisting”? What does Shilmer mean by “insisting”? “Insisting” as in being a jerk, in people faces, unrelenting and always pestering with an entitlement or a “I know better than you and I’ll prove you wrong” attitude? That is why some run into friction once in the congregation: because of their attitude and not the mere act of asking a question. Any question at all asked in humility and sincerity, no matter how out of the blue, will merit no rebuke or admonishment.  What merits rebuke and admonishment is the arrogant attitude of the “reformer” who acts and thinks his own way and feels that everybody else should act and think his way as well. The Author’s place of employment gets those types quite often: young, arrogant know-it-alls that come in and want to start changing things around on day 1. Guess what: nobody likes them, and they never last very long.

Shilmer: it imposes under pain of its harsh shunning program.

Teary: a voluntary organization cannot “impose” anything without the willing consent of the organization members. In fact, the only power that the “leadership” of an organization can have is the power conferred upon it by the voluntary consent of the individual members themselves. If the members don’t agree with what the “leadership” attempts to impose upon them then they can simply reject the imposition by either 1) throwing off the leadership or by 2) walking away from the organization entirely. Yes the leadership might say “do not speak to this person,” or “go jump off this bridge,” but if all the members consciously choose to act on the words in the absence of force, then who is really to blame? For the sake of logical consistency, if it is the act itself of not talking to another that Marvin finds abhorrent, then he must call evil all those who partake in the act of their own free will and in the absence of force, not just the leadership. This was one of the main points of the “Response to Kyle” post: you cannot call a voluntary organization “evil” without catching the lay members in net of your accusation.

Shilmer: This is evil, and it deserves exposure.

Teary: This is an unsupported personal value judgment, and deserves no reply. Furthermore, the act of disfellowshipping is very much public, and all recruits learn the rules of it prior to baptism, no exceptions. So really there is nothing to “expose,” because nothing is actually hidden and everybody already knows the rules of what they are voluntarily and non-bindingly agreeing to.

Shilmer: Watchtower leadership is evil enough to convince youth among its membership that transfusions accepted by Jehovah’s Witnesses are safe compared to those forbidden. This is evil, and it deserves exposure.

Teary: And yet bloodless medicine and blood alternatives ARE significantly safer than standard options, and are getting safer every day as technology advances. Those who elect for bloodless surgery have both significantly reduced chances of death and significantly increased recovery time. This is all scientifically proven and has been for a long time. How Shilmer can call the truth “evil” is beyond this Author’s comprehension.

Shilmer: Watchtower leadership is evil enough to sit idly by while young children suffer persecution refusing to pledge allegiance to the United States when Watchtower presidents all pledged allegiance to the United States. This is evil, and it deserves exposure.

Teary: Making apples to oranges comparisons while counting on the ignorance of the reader to not know the difference, is evil and deserves exposure. Wouldn’t Mr. Shilmer agree?

The two cases Mr. Shilmer refers to are publically reciting the pledge of allegiance in the presence of a flag and traveling outside of one’s country of origin using a passport, neither of which are exclusive to school children or Watchtower presidents. Watchtower presidents at some point in their lives, if they were Witnesses as children or if they ever attended a sporting event, had to make a moral judgment about public flag salutes and public pledges of allegiance. A school age child or young adult traveling abroad must typically sign a passport that may or may not contain pledges or promises of loyalty to the Parent country, depending on which country and which time period we are talking about. The public pledges of allegiance are fairly morally clear in the context of the normal Witness hierarchy of values. Signing a passport to travel abroad that contains a patriotic message or promise of loyalty, when said message or promise has nothing to do with the practical function or purpose of the document, is much more morally ambiguous. It would fall in the same category of using coinage with “In The President We Trust” imprinted on it. Standing and pledging allegiance to a flag in the presence of a group is a public display of one’s loyalty to country. One does not normally associate getting a passport or using a coin with any kind of patriotism or public display of loyalty. That is why a special case like a passport issue is left to the individual conscience. The Witness leadership has no position. It might be moral or it might be immoral depending on slight variations in the value hierarchy of the individual, but that is for the individual to decide.

Really we cannot even call Marvin’s claim hypocrisy, because both the President and child can go through either situation, and both will have to answer the same questions and weigh decisions against the same basic code of values. There is not a different standard for the President than there is for the child or vice versa, and so irrationally claiming “hypocrisy” makes no sense.

The rest I do not think warrants any response. It is nothing but ad-hominem and insult with no substance.

Teary

**Disclaimer**

The above article was written in one sitting, at 1:00 am in the morning, with no revision. If you want to be a grammar Nazi and point out mistakes then too bad I don't care! I am much too tired and grumpy to care right now so there! >:(

Response to Kyle: Apostates and Violence

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.

Bryan R. v. Watchtower

Often times, when discussing the Candace Conti case with pro-Witnesses and anti-Witnesses alike, the Author will be asked the reason for the confidence in his words, for the reason why he does not worry about a possible loss in appeal. The answer is simple: precedent. 

The lower court decision cannot possibly be upheld in the higher courts, because decisions of higher courts, unlike the former, create precedent; and the precedent that upholding such a decision would establish, would be nothing short of catastrophic for California's legal system**. As the Maine Supreme Court stated in a 1999 decision:

There does not exist a general obligation to protect others from harm not created by the actor.  "The fact that the actor realizes or should realize that action on his part is necessary for another's aid or protection does not of itself impose upon him a duty to take such action."  Restatement (Second) of Torts § 314 (1965).  In other words, the mere fact that one individual knows that a third party is or could be dangerous to others does not make that individual responsible for controlling the third party or protecting others from the danger...

The creation of an amorphous common law duty on the part of a church or other voluntary organization requiring it to protect its members from each other would give rise to "both unlimited liability and liability out of all proportion to culpability."  Cameron v. Pepin, 610 A.2d 279, 283 (Me. 1992)

What follows a bit farther below is the Maine Supreme Court decision that the above quote was taken from, reproduced in full for this blog. Take note that the circumstances and claims of the Plaintiff are almost an exact replica, detail for detail, of the Candace Conti case. If the names and locations were removed from both cases, a casual reader would probably have great difficulty distinguishing between them. And yet, interestingly enough, despite the striking similarities, the Maine Supreme Court came to a very different decision on the Bryan case than did the Alameda Superior Court in handling the Conti Case.

Vicki Boer Abridged

As was promised, here is an abbreviated version of the Vicky Boer court transcript, containing the sections deemed most important by the Author. He hopes that you will find it a much brisker read than the full version (coming in a little under 5,500 words compared with over 30,000 in the original, or roughly 1/6 the size); however, if you do not particularly trust the Author (of if you are simply a glutten for punishment), then the full, unabridged version of the court transcript is available here:

http://www.tearsofoberon.blogspot.com/2012/09/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-x-none.html

Moving on with the case summary:

The Whole Whole Vicki Boer Truth

Opposers of Jehovah's Witnesses are an interesting lot. They have a commanding stranglehold on history but only a limp-fish grip on facts. They are wonderful propagandists but pitiful scholars. And they are always wonderfully optimistic even in the face of crushing defeat. Take the Boer case for example.

The Things Unseen

“Sometimes the things unseen are just as important, if not more important, than the things seen.”

Words to live by. 

For example, under the Minimum Wage laws...

Methods Used to Draw Witnesses Away from their Faith Part I

This post is a spur of the moment, mainly experience based look at some of the methods that opposers of Jehovah’s Witnesses use to ‘break’ their faith and get them to leave the group. This author thought that it would be an interesting discussion, mainly because most of these methods are inherently hypocritical when used by an opposer who publicly espouses perfectly contrary principles, and because these methods almost never rely on any actual discussion of the Bible or doctrinal points and yet are effective at destroying faith anyways. In fact, most opposers will outright tell you to completely avoid discussing the Bible and its doctrine with Witnesses until after they have already destroyed the Witnesses’ trust in his friends, family and congregation, while the Witnesses themselves always begin the teaching and conversion process with Bible discussion.

Here are two things that an opposer will tell a weak or fading Witness very soon after their first encounter: