I am going to stick my neck out and postulate that the GB is not EVIL
nor is the Watchtower society as a whole. I'm sorry this got a little long but please accept the challenge and show me wrong.

Evil= 1 Morally wrong or bad, wicked; 2 Harmful, injurious.
(Random House Webster’s Dictionary)

By this dictionary definition we are all Evil at times. Are we now to try to evaluate levels of evil or duration of periods of evil to determine who is more evil than others?

I like a different definition that I got from Scott Peck in his book People of the Lie. Though I cannot quote an exact reference my recollection is that he defined an evil person as one who will harm others knowingly for what he can gain out of it.

If we accept this definition, I ask again “Is the GB Evil?”

Ray Franz in his book Crisis of Conscience on page 262 says:

I admire Ray’s candor and forbearance. He also relates evidence that N.H. Knorr too was a “victim of victims” on page 248 of C of C in regard to the 1914 controversy:

Having served at Bethel from the late 60’s to the mid 70’ Nathan Knorr was probably my least liked member of the GB (most of the time I was there he WAS the GB). Yet even his comments sound not like a man bent on harming people for what he could get out of it, but perhaps a ‘follower of followers’, ‘victim of victims’. My feeling about the other members of the GB whom I knew is the same.

We were once all ‘followers of followers’. As such we all did things that caused harm to others.

Did we not lead others to the same victimization by our sharing in the “kingdom preaching”?

Did we by word and example recommend the “truth” to co-workers, relatives, neighbors and friends? (God forbid)

Did not some of us raise our children into this same dependency as followers of followers? ( I have asked my kids to forgive me)

Some of us have been even more evil(?) as a follower. I went along with decisions of the body that I was certain would harm someone. I justified it for what I believed would be for the good overall for the individual or the congregation. I really believed it at the time. Now I see I isolated needy people from support and separated family members.

How many of you at one time shunned DF’d or DA’d friends or relatives knowing it hurt them but believing it was right and good for all concerned?

Does this make us all EVIL, or does it indicate we were victims of victims?

I have dealt with some evil people (individuals) inside the organization. Yes, I believe we have all run into those individuals who would hurt us or others intentionally to obtain their goals. In my case they were mostly Bethelites, CO’s, DO’s, Elders and several manipulative, self-righteous sisters. But these were individuals who knowingly harmed others .

Yes we will find evil people in the Christian Congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses, Inc. But if finding evil individuals inside an organization of ‘followers’ makes the entire organization and its leadership EVIL, then the WT is right in labeling all governments, religions, and commerce as evil on the same bases. I think not.

But the GB claims to speak for God! This is profound, I agree. Does this claim make them more reprehensible? Perhaps. You tell me. So far I see “followers of followers”, even those appointed and told they ‘speak for God’ as victims of previous propaganda, a terrible delusion. At that level rather than evil in these men, I see the height of delusion and stupidity.

What do you think? Now be kind!

Jst2laws

YES!!!

Ven

"Work like you don't need the money, love like you've never been hurt, and dance like no one is watching!!!"

Dear dungbeetle,

Please do not confuse my expressions above as an excuse for so much harm caused by this heartless machine.

The atrocities you cite above are unexcusable. Their stand on 'blood', 'shunning', and 'pedophiles' is difinitely HARMFUL.
I an not excusing any of this.

The question I raise is more social or phsycological than LEGAL. The GB has made decisions that has caused harm and they have refused to change policy that continues to harm.

The question is really how we define "EVIL". If we are too broad in our condemnation we may also condemn ourselves. I do not feel you or I should feel excessive guilt for our participation because we were 'followers'. I feel like a fool for following, but what can we do now?

Ray Franz did not feel the men he sat with across the GB table were Evil! They were defending a system they thought was God's arrangement. We agree they were wrong but does that make them evil?

Jst2laws

Path,

On my anniversary post in early March I noticed you were one of the most influential respondents to my original post last year. I just wanted to say first that you have often impressed me yet I have failed to express this to you and others appropriately.

You said:
That is very logical. We all feel compelled to hold someone at the top responsible. They led us wrong and we were harmed by that lead.

But my question is not whether or not they mislead us, but whether or not they knowingly mislead us. My personal opinion is that there must have been some there either on the GB or in the writing or service dept. that knew enough to object. It seems some did and got thrown out. I suspect there are others who kept quiet and supported a harmful system to protect themselves from exposure.

That I believe would be 'Evil'.

This may be the case of some on the GB. But my experience was that most of the GB were appointed not because of their reputation as researchers and independent thinkers. They stuck it out at Bethel long enough to get appointed by seniority or default. Later they started to bring big shots in from outside Brooklyn Bethel who proved themselves not by their intellect or history of intense Bible research but incontestable support of the system, dependable 'followers'.

So, yes, they "accepted a position of responsibility" and perhaps "they should be held accountable for their actions and those directly influenced by them." But if they were still followers of a harmful system already set in motion, whatever level they served, are they that much more reprehensible before God. Most of us to different degrees 'followed' and 'harmed' others during our involvement in the organization.

So we may be talking of degrees of accountability. Does that translate to degrees of "Evil"? If so, we were all evil to some degree.

I am not so hard on myself or others on this board. I do not believe we have many evil people here. We were 'victims'.

Is Ray F. wrong that the GB too were 'victims of victims.'?

Jst2laws

I think comparing the GB to the Taliban is quite a stretch. I also think we all should consider that although they have great influence over many peoples lives, those people influenced, in the vast majority, accept that influence. Wether they claim to be God's sole channel on earth or not, those who believe theyn are, ultimately make that choice to believe for themselves. I know many would say, "Well, what about the children who suffer through no choice of their own?" To that question I answer "Well, what about those children's parents who foolishly followed a dogma that would harm their own children?" I know, for me, I decided shortly after my first kid was born, that there would be no way that I would deny my children a blood transfusion if I thought it was the best chance they had to save their life. This was 8 years before I stopped believing in "The Truth". I just decided that I was not convinced enough, about the blood issue, to risk my child's life. Everybody wants to dehumanize those men on the GB. But really we were all right there with them. Yes, to a much smaller degree, but still. The sad truth is people suffer and even die for their religion. That is not unique to JW's. But if we are pissed off at the lives that we lived in the past, we really only have one place to look. The Mirror. If we were a minor child when we had a miserable JW life, then look in the mirror, then look at Mom and Dad.

I think the difference is that the rank and file are innocent followers. We thought we were serving God and so while we might have practiced evil, as in shunning, we did it because we truly thought we were serving Jehovah by doing so.

The GB on the other hands is not acting out of innocence and so their evil is something we do not have to share. Their actions are made fully conscious of the fact that some of the things JW's are required to do are not bible based.

Welcome ChiChi and lastcall,

Good to hear from new ones.

ChiChi,

You may have overlooked that the scandal that took place in Bethel that ultimately resulted in Ray Franz’s dismissal from the GB and Bethel started while he and his wife were on a three month leave of absence. They were looking for a place to go as Ray had already decided to resign the GB and leave Bethel. I personally did not detect a sense of “loss of position” but did sense an intense loss of friends and forsaking the fantasy that we have all given up (most of us anyway)

Lastcall,
Interesting.

Jst2laws

Jst2laws, your comments are entirely reasonable and to a large extent I agree. But I think that you're giving the Governing Body, and by extension, the men who follow their commands and therefore give them power, too much slack.

If being evil involves being morally wrong or bad, wicked, harmful or injurious, then the Governing Body and its agents certainly fit the bill. Your recollection may be that M. Scott Peck may have defined an evil person as "one who will harm others knowingly for what he can gain out of it", but if so, that's only part of the definition, in my view. I think that most people would define an evil person as someone who would harm others knowingly, period. It doesn't matter if someone has something to gain from harming others, either personally or in a larger sense -- harming others knowingly is still evil.

You're perfectly right that all of us will sometimes fit the definition of evil, But the question of really being "evil" boils down to how often and how intensely someone commits acts of evil. Someone who knows the truth about something that hurts people but lets it slide for awhile has betrayed right principles of conduct and has shown himself to accept the commission of evil by others, even if he does not directly act in an evil way. This is a sin of omission, because the person could have acted to correct matters and do the right thing. If that involves personal loss of position or prestige or whatever, that's the breaks. A person who ignores his conscience in this way is certainly an evil person, because he had it in his power to stop the commission of evil, or to separate himself from it, but did not -- for selfish reasons.

Ray Franz made some great observations in his books, but as regards responsibility among GB and other top Society leaders, I think his comments have become outdated in the nearly two decades since he first wrote. His ouster from the GB marked a turning point in Society history. After that, WTS leaders became much more hardheaded and unforgiving. They were jealous of their positions and power, and they did everything they could to preserve their authority even at the cost of stomping on the rights and heads of individual JWs. Ray didn't know it at the time he first wrote, but other GB members actually conspired against him to get him out, and over the next year and a half they conspired to find a way to "legally" disfellowship him. These are the acts of evil men, and those who passively went along with it are equally evil.

Nathan Knorr may well have been a victim of a victim, but there comes a point in a responsible person's life when "the buck stops here". Do you not agree? Knorr was instrumental in setting the grossly hypocritical and self-serving policies in Mexico and Malawi that Ray Franz so nicely describes. He had to know that these policies were hypocritical because they were applying two sets of standards. Knorr was under no coercion during his administration to act hypocritically. He may have been influenced to be that way by his Bethel experience under Rutherford, but he also retained a measure of personal responsibility, especially in view of the written objections that various people raised to the contradictory policies in Mexico and Malawi.

There are probably hardly any JWs, whether rank & file members or top leaders, who have not wondered at some point if they were doing the right thing by giving allegiance to the JW organization. Because we ex-JWs know very clearly that somewhere along the line we had to suppress our natural inclinations and defile our consciences in order to become JWs at all, or at least, to continue being JWs after learning of any number of atrocities, we also know that it takes a certain amount of mental effort to consider the matter and to decide one way or another, even if the process of deciding is not explicitly put into words. In other words, somewhere in our careers as JWs, whether during the initial process of "studying" or during childhood or reinstatement or whatever, we made a conscious or semi-conscious decision to put aside our misgivings and go with the Watchtower. That making of a decision means that we specifically committed ourselves to a course of upholding Watchtower dogma at virtually any cost.

You finally touched on the responsibility of those who claim to speak for God. In my view this is far and away the most condemnatory of Watchtower lunacies. I'll leave further comments for another time because I'm beat from a long day at work.

AlanF

Alan and Farkel comments have it dead on right:

Alan: jst2laws, Ray Franz feelings toward HIS Governing Body are irrelevant, since HIS was 1983 and YOUR comment is directed at today's. My comments were directed at today, 2002 governing body as well. So I think is most everyone's in this thread.

Farkel: jst2laws, you made your feelings clear in an earlier post concerning elder culpability--that elders were no more culpable than any other JW. That's what you basically said. I assume that's what you basically feel.

Why on earth would YOU think the GB is any more culpable than the elders? Why on earth would I think the GB is any less culpable than the elders? Duuuhhhhh...

If JW elders and ex-elders and overseers and ex-overseers want and need expiation for their crimes against humanity, they aren't going to get it from this board. Certainly no more so than the rest of us. Perhaps you should consider support groups for ex-elders/ministerials/overseers if you think they have such special needs.

I feel the urge for another 'elders and culpability' thread coming on....

UADNA-US (Unseen Apostate Directorate of North America-United States)

Edited for form, spelling, content, punctuation, spelling, relevance, grammar and language...

jst2laws:

You make reference to M. Scott Peck's book The People of the Lie in your assessment of the Governing Body as NOT being evil.

However, Peck defines evil individuals and groups as having several distinct characteristics.

Narcissism - the belief that everything that happens is for their particular benefit or use, a kind of egocentric belief that the universe revolves around them. Does the GB/WTS/JWs do this? Yes, they do. Just look at how they fit world events into their history and say that because they were persecuted during WWII in Nazi concentration camps, etc., that this PROVES they are "God's chosen people". Look at how current events are viewed breathlessly as being part of the "composite sign" of the "last days" by JWs in general. They have self-identified as being the only ones "smart enough" and "spiritual enough" and "blessed" and "special" to be the ones "God chooses out of the nations" to be His own. If that's not narcissism, I don't know what is.

Along with narcissism comes the belief that because we are God's chosen people, we are above reproach. This is the same kind of attitude that was fostered during the Middle Ages by the notion of the "Divine Right" of monarchs. It is this mentality that puts the GB/WTS/JWs in a position of being able to treat people the way they do. It allows them to look with disdain on "the goats" they call on in the door-to-door work. It allows them to shun disfellowshipped people and treat them as though they were dead. It allows them to insinuate themselves into private, personal matters such as whether or not it is proper for married persons to explore their sexuality together to their hearts' content.

At the same time, the narcissistic attitude makes it necessary to "demonize" everyone on the outside of their select group. Look at how loudly they cry in outrage at the Catholic Church's pedophile priests, yet completely ignore the same problem within their own circle, and in fact, force victims to keep silent while the offenders remain in good standing, without being punished for their crimes.

The Governing Body makes all the rules. They may not write all the books, but they allow the books to reach every JW, so it's a safe bet that the material in the books have their implicit approval, if not their explicit approval. They are the ones whose attitudes filter down to the rank and file.

The Nuremburg trials did not absolve high ranking Nazis from responsibility and accountability for the actions of lower ranking Nazis who actually carried out the atrocities during WWII. Why should the GB be absolved of accountability for the evil things that are done by their underlings? They are, after all, following orders.

Love, Scully