Hi, Folks,
Hmmm. I’ve bitten myself off a pretty good chunk here, so bear with me as I try to figure out where to start.
Two things I’d better say up front, though: None of this is meant to be in any way, a devaluing of the phenomenal work that’s been done by anyone here on the board. That includes the crew who put in so much time and work on the UN scandal, Silentlambs and the Dateline program, The Liberal Elder and the Blood issue, or anyone else. Rather, my endeavor is to paint an overall picture of our circumstances and possibilities with a view towards the use of these tools that they have provided us, as well as fill in a few of the chinks.
Secondly, I’m a bit under the gun, as on the third of December, I’ll be needing to leave for about three weeks. One of the trucking companies that I’ve worked for before has a contract hauling mail for the upcoming holiday season, and I’m not in any position to turn down the $22.00 an hour that they pay. I’ll be making three round trips a week from here (Cottage Grove, Oregon) to the Bay area. That’s approximately 550 miles each way. Therefore, I’m going to try to post as much of this matter as possible before that time.
We are, in short, at war. This is not a war of our making or desire. It is a war that has been imposed upon us by the simple expedient of demanding that we submit our integrity and consciences to other people’s will, or face the consequences. We chose to face the consequences for many reasons depending on the individual, however, the prime ones revolve around scriptural principle and/or the fact that we had to be able to live with ourselves.
Our greatest weakness right now is that we are fragmented, and that is for good reason too. We’ve been taught all our lives that thinking for ourselves is a sin, and that unquestioning obedience is of paramount importance. When the crunch came, we were scorned and ridiculed, publicly held up as wicked and unworthy and shunned as though we had the plague. This makes any unifying extremely difficult, for the psychological effects of such treatment are profound. It is hard to trust after that. When we come on forums such as this one, we tend to lash out at one another, forgetting that the others too have reasons for mistrust. Our enemies use this to keep us fragmented and impotent. A mechanism needs to be set up to counteract that influence. I’ll have some suggestions on that in a later post.
Perhaps foremost in my mind right now is that I don’t want you to be getting the idea that I have the desire to set myself up as some sort of guru or religious leader. That is the furthest thing from my mind for many reasons that I won’t go into now, except for this one: Life is uncertain, especially for truckers. It becomes even more so when the doctors find a small patch of melanoma on one’s temple, as happened about a month ago. (We think they got it all.) My prime concern is that what knowledge I may possess may be publicized in such a way that others may benefit from it regardless of whether I am around or not.
It is in that spirit then, that I offer the ensuing posts.
But again, where to start? For lack of a better idea, I’d like to start with my own situation here in this congregation, both because it is interesting and it is possible that it may be of some use. A few of you are aware of some of the details, so this will be an update for you.
About a year ago over on the old H2O board, I posted some extremely blunt challenges to the WTBTS. I did this openly, using my real name and address. (I still have copies of a few of them, if anyone wishes to read them.)
Shortly after that, I noticed an influx of some very high octane elders coming into this congregation, which surprised me as this is somewhat of a backwater. These are men who would stand out in any crowd of elders. What especially distinguished them was the way they handled the congregation. If you or I had been treated this way, we would probably still be in. I was intrigued, but not yet interested to the point of looking closer at the situation.
It wasn’t too long until my immediate family was being given the same treatment. After my wife had some gallstones taken out, one of them brought supper over one night. Then when my 15 year-old son gave a talk in the School, another one of them, acting as school servant, had us all dying with laughter when he said that he was giving him a “W” on the counsel slip. He explained with a big grin that it wasn’t that he needed to work on anything, but that he’d done such a beautiful job, he wanted to see if he could do it again.
Needless to say, these things caught my attention. I don’t need to explain to you how families with DFed heads are usually treated. I figured it was time to do some homework.
Contacting some of our mutual friends here on the board, I sent out feelers as to their backgrounds and connections. The result was highly intriguing. Most of the information that came back was about the obvious leader of this bunch, one Earnest Garrett. Scuttlebutt had it that he did a considerable amount of research for the Awake! magazine and had deep roots in Brooklyn Bethel. One of his acquaintances was Ciro Aulicino, and he had even contributed a few articles for the magazine itself. (Two of them are “We Do Not Blame God” in the 7-22-89 issue concerning the death of his son who was a steward on board the jet that went down at Lockerbie, and “Removing Misconceptions About Jehovah’s Witnesses” in the 11-22-96 issue. His picture is on page 18.)
Other sources brought in that he was a friend of the mayor of San Francisco, Willie Brown. It seems that one of the ways the problem was solved in Moscow, Russia when an assembly was cancelled by the authorities at the last minute, was that he asked Willie to call the Moscow mayor and question the situation. As San Francisco is Moscow’s sister city, that carried the day. There’s more, but these are some highlights.
I’ll simplify the ensuing events. I was then contacted. It was through a third party and the message consisted primarily of an invitation to submit a request for reinstatement. In this manner they would feel free to speak to me at length on any subject. As I’ve had a long history of teaching the local elders the error of their ways when they got out of line, and made no bone of my attitude towards my disfellowshipping, etc., I found that startling.
After considerable thought, I wrote a letter to them, declining the invitation. I’m posting it under a separate thread, “Letter to Garrett.” If you read it, you will see why I was and am astonished to find that no change whatsoever has been noticed in the way that they treat my family. In fact, in the middle of the investigation of the WTBTS affiliation with the UN, I drew up a brief synopsis of it and delivered it to Garrett, asking respectfully for an explanation of the matter so that I and my family could understand.
My request was taken very seriously and with considerable astonishment on his part. Nothing was even hinted at concerning the “unreliability” of the Internet or that the whole thing could be concocted by “apostates”. As he said very bluntly, “We’re going to get to the bottom of this!”
Meanwhile, I’d shown the material to my cousin, a man in his 60’s and a retired police officer. He’d been around the organization all of his life, and his mother was harassing him about getting on the stick and coming into the flock. He showed her the proof of the WT being an NGO affiliated with the UN, and she promptly laid a whole truckload of concrete blocks edgewise. Going to Garrett, she asked him to correct such an impression.
He’d looked into it some by this time and told them both that it was true, using the explanation that later became the official line. Some weeks later, they arranged a short meeting with my wife and son after the sessions and explained things the same way. Again, all through this I have detected no change whatsoever in their attitudes towards my family or me.
During all this time, there were a series of officials from Bethel that came in to give talks here in this congregation. Usually they would give a “service talk” on Saturday night, and then a special talk on Sunday. There were three of them, as follows, in order.
1. Greg Olds, Legal Department. Highlights: details of some of the legal cases they’ve handled and the victories, especially the child custody cases. Assured the congregation that should they ever find themselves in need of a lawyer due to their faith, that they had a free lawyer available to them.
2. Abrahamson, Secretary-Treasurer. Which corporation I forget, but it’s one of the prime ones. Highlights: This was just after my letter to Garrett. You will note I hit the business about the brothers being “inspired” pretty hard in that letter. The title of his Sunday talk was “How Can We Claim to be Guided by God’s Holy Spirit if We Are Not Inspired?” The talk was an hour and a half long, and somewhere in the center was this statement: “We can claim to be guided by God’s holy spirit because the Bible was inspired by holy spirit and we follow the Bible.” (That’s as my memory recreates it.)
3. On this third one I must apologize to all, for I’ve forgotten his name. He’s the head of the Society’s Hospital Liaison Committee though, so it should be easy enough to come up with it. Plus, I waited until the last minute to look for my little pocket tape recorder, and couldn’t find it. Wouldn’t you know it, this one was the most interesting of the three.
He expounded at length on the new blood policies. He was personable, low-key and persuasive, but in watching the faces in the congregation around me, the puzzlement mixed with astonishment was obvious. One particular passage stood out for me. He was lamenting the death of a sister in California (as I recollect) due to refusing blood. He was saying that the death was totally unnecessary, as with the new technology using blood fractions, etc., there was a lot that could have been done to avoid it. He was practically begging the congregation to contact his department in such circumstances so that such loss of life can be avoided. Even I had my mouth open.
Now, I am by no means claiming that all of this was for my benefit. I’m not that conceited. However, these and other details leave me wondering, for if it’s all coincidence, it is a phenomenal one. Regardless, I see no reason that I can’t utilize it wherever possible.
There is one amusing sidelight. It seems that the surrounding congregations are getting wind of the special talks being given here in this congregation. The second speaker had two congregations show up. The third had three. What happens next I don’t have the foggiest, as we were in there like sardines this last time. I guess jealousy is alive and well, LOL.
Enough for this time. Next: An unusual form of warfare.
LoneWolf