The recent news articles about JWs giving birth to premature twins in Quebec last week and premature sextuplets in BC back in January 2007, it occurred to me that these children ARE NOT JEHOVAH'S WITNESSES. The PARENTS ARE.
The parents, as JWs, do not believe in infant baptism such as practiced by the Catholic Church or any other church. There are no naming ceremonies as is commonplace in Jewish tradition that welcome a newborn into the culture and into the spiritual family. The WTS makes it quite clear that children cannot become members, they can only accompany their JW parents as they practice their beliefs and carry out the form of worship of their own choosing. See also: http://www.ajwrb.org/bulgaria/report.shtml
The book Family Care and Medical Management for Jehovah's Witnesses also makes a very interesting distinction in the Ethics/Legal section (p 3 of that section) which features the following text as its header, in large bold lettering:
WHEN PHYSICIANS APPEAL TO SOCIAL SERVICES AND JUDGES FOR ORDERS TO TRANSFUSE CHILDREN OF JEHOVAH'S WITNESSES
That's right: the WTS, by this wording, reveals that it does not consider unbaptized minor "children of Jehovah's Witnesses" to actually be Jehovah's Witnesses. So why on earth shouldn't these children have the RIGHT to grow up and make up their own minds as to whether they want to be Jehovah's Witnesses, rather than have a belief system imposed upon them when they cannot even speak or formulate an opinion on the matter one way or the other?
This is actually quite an interesting semantic fluke that the WTS has made here. This wording, oddly enough, is in harmony with the atheist convictions of Richard Dawkins, who wrote in The God Delusion:
I do not deny that humanity's powerful tendencies towards in-group loyalties and out-group hostilities would exist even in the absence of religion. Fans of rival football teams are an example of the phenomenon writ small. Even football supporters sometimes divide along religious lines, as in the case of Glasgow Rangers and Glasgow Celtic. Languages (as in Belgium), races and tribes (especially in Africa) can be important divisive tokens. But religion amplifies and exacerbates the damage in at least three ways:
- Labelling of children. Children are described as 'Catholic children' or 'Protestant children' etc. from an early age, and certainly far too early for them to have made up their own minds on what they think about religion (I return to this abuse of childhood in Chapter 9).
~ The God Delusion, pages 260 and 261
He further writes:
Our society, including the non-religious sector, has accepted the preposterous idea that it is normal and right to indoctrinate tiny children in the religion of their parents, and to slap religious labels on them - 'Catholic child', 'Protestant child', 'Jewish child', 'Muslim child', etc. -- although no other comparable labels: no conservative children, no liberal children, no Republican children, no Democrat children. Please, please raise your consciousness about this, and raise the roof whenever you hear it happening. A child is not a Christian child, not a Muslim child, but a child of Christian parents or a child of Muslim parents. The latter nomenclature, by the way, would be an excellent piece of consciousness-raising for the children themselves. A child who is told she is a 'child of Muslim parents' will immediately realize that religion is something for her to choose - or reject - when she becomes old enough to do so.
~ The God Delusion, pages 339 and 340