Some information I just received solidly nails the Watchtower Society's coffin shut in the intellectual honesty department.
Since the Society published the brochure Should You Believe in the Trinity? in English in 1989, a number of people have complained that many of the citations were misrepresentations of the intent of the authors, or simply did not show what the Society's writer claimed. This is in keeping with many other WTS publications, such as the infamous 1985 Creation book, which I have demonstrated contains at least a hundred misrepresentations, misinterpretations and assorted scholastic inaccuracies.
The Society, as usual, gives incomplete citations for its source references in the Trinity brochure. For example, it might say, "The Catholic Encyclopedia comments: ...", but it gives no volume or page number. This makes it much more difficult for anyone -- whether JWs or critics -- to check the references. Many have complained that this policy of failing to give full references for quoted material is deliberate, and is done so as to make it not worth the time of individual JWs to check them. I also claim that the Society does this to make it that much harder for critics to find their deliberate misrepresentations.
I just received the Italian version of the Trinity brochure, and it fully justifies complaints of Watchtower intellectual dishonesty.
It appears that Italy has some kind of regulation that requires published material to contain full source references for quoted material. Thus, the Italian Trinity brochure contains full references, including page numbers -- something that the English version leaves out. Since the Society has the references, and is demonstrably able to include them -- even making sure that the English and Italian versions of this brochure are each 32 pages long -- it follows that omission of source references is deliberate. The only reasonable explanation is that the Society wants to make it difficult for readers to check the references.
This hesitancy to include source references goes back a long way in Watchtower history. I remember as a child reading The Watchtower and wondering why there were so few full references, especially when I wanted to look up the context in the library. One of the few exceptions was the 1985 Creation book. But the Society got burned pretty badly on this, with many people writing in to complain about the misrepresentations. The 1998 Creator book goes back to standard WTS policy and gives few full citations. Obviously, they don't want a repeat of the Creation book fiasco.
It would be interesting for anyone who has any Italian WTS literature to compare it with the English counterparts. I wonder how many of the Italian versions contain full source references? It would make an interesting study to do this comparison.
AlanF
Edited by - AlanF on 8 March 2001 20:47:28