I questioned an elder on this, reasoning with him that the whole ministry of Christ was about compassion. There are so many examples of Christ making exceptions to the law in the interest of compassion, why shouldn't it apply in the case of blood transfusions? His response was that, while my reasoning was understandable, I was being prideful. That's it. No attempt to rebuff me with scripture, just prideful and wrong for wanting to be compassionate. This is the problem with WT mentality. It's by definition completely Pharisaical.
JW Science Quote (2-5)
by TD 29 Replies latest jw friends
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leavingwt
I questioned an elder on this, reasoning with him that the whole ministry of Christ was about compassion.
If Jesus Christ himself walked into a Kingdom Hall tomorrow morning, they would disfellowship him for having a beard.
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agonus
I think Jesus might have a little divine wrath up his sleeve... I doubt he would let the punks even get that far...
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agonus
" TD, I appreciate your trying to reason with me. I'm being sincere when I say that I really can't see the point the way you're explaining it to me. To me it just seems like a technicality that ignores the principle of the law. In my mind it's like saying that the scripture that condemns 'men who lie with men' wouldn't apply if they had sex standing up.
I have changed my mind on this issue, however, because of the point Agonus made:
Throwing away a human life in deference to the "sancticty of blood" is making the symbol of life (blood) more important than the gift of life itself.
It's like a lightbulb went off in my head. Maybe that's the same point you were making but I just couldn't get it from the way you explained it."
Sounds like you're feelin' me, bro. I agree that it's not unreasonable to think that we should abstain from blood in general as the scriptures imply, but like everything else in the org, it's the degree to which it's enforced that's the problem. WAY beyond conscience and straight into the steel jaws of legalism.
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TD
The direction this thread took got me thinking (Not for the first time) what a curious and disastrous fusion the JW religion is between Christianity and Judaism.
Have you ever wondered how a Rabbi decides a medical issue today? How is a body of law originally given to a primitive Bronze Age culture applied today? They use a two step process:
1. Through inductive reasoning, a hypothesis if formulated that explains a specific law or ruling by reference to a more general principle.
2. Through deductive reasoning this principle is applied to a new situation that is not explicitly covered by the original law, but is believed to be subsumed by the principle that explains it.
Does that sound vaguely familiar to you? If you have ever had any contact at all with the JW's it should. That is the exact same methodology behind the current JW teaching on blood.
1. The reason why God forbade the eating of blood is inductively hypothesized. All blood is sacred, not just blood spilled in death. Blood has therefore been withheld from Man's prerogative.
2. It is deduced from this hypothesis that transfusion is a misuse of blood morally analogous to eating it. Transfusion is therefore forbidden.
Consciously or unconsciously, this is the JW thought process. I would lean towards the latter, because JW's do not come up with this on their own and few of them stop and think about the nuts and bolts of what they're being taught.
The problem here is that a Rabbi knows how to properly use this process. JW's do not.
Judaism recognizes that God is the final and highest authority. Commands from God are therefore only contravened by other commands from God. The rabbinical approach to the Law doesn’t just take this fact into account; this is its very reason for existence. Its sole purpose is to resolve conflicts between God’s commands created by unique situations. For example, if an occupied building collapses on the Sabbath, is God’s requirement to keep the Sabbath contravened by God’s requirement to preserve life? Which command should take precedence and why?
Even once a general principle has been hypothesized from the Torah, Judaism recognizes that neither moral nor legal questions can be resolved by a purely mechanical application of this principle. Therefore although Rabbis may use a collection of specific rulings to reason backwards towards a more general principle, this does not obviate the need for a case by case analysis of each and every unique situation. Judaism also does not lose sight of the fact that when all is said and done, the end result of this process is still the product of a human mind and all that this implies. It is therefore recognized that these decisions may sometimes generate machlokat. (Disagreement) and may sometimes even be in error. Within limits, pluralism and mutual respect are allowed for.
In contrast, although the JW's have co-opted the rabbinical approach to deciding medical issues, they have cast its moral anchor overboard. Their freedom from this restraint is manifest in various ways throughout all their argumentation. For example, the Bible continuously emphasizes the sanctity of the gift of life and the severe penalty associated with responsibility in depriving an innocent human being from this gift. Accordingly, both Christianity and Judaism alike recognize that allowing someone to die if it lies in our power to prevent it is a sin against God. Yet adherence to the transfusion medicine taboo can make JW parents of minor children directly responsible before God for the loss of innocent life. This can only be one of two things: Either it is an exception to this rule, or it is a violation of this rule.
If we take the very specific, very pointed commands in the Law which prohibit causing the death of innocents and put them on one side of the scales, what do we have of equal weight to place on the other side?
When it comes to withholding a blood-based therapy when death is a likely alternative the JW approach does not balance the scales. The JW's do not use the inductive/deductive approach to resolve a conflict, they use this process to create a conflict where none existed by hypothesizing into existence a principle contrary to one of God’s existing requirements. The resultant conflict asks in effect, “Which should take precedence, God’s requirement to preserve life or this hypothesis we have come up with?” There is a huge, huge difference at work here. In their resolution of this contrived dilemma, God’s requirement to preserve life is contravened not by another command God has given but by the hypothesis itself on nothing beyond its own merit alone. What is the moral justification for this?
Another manifestation lies in the willingness of the JW's to simply assume that a life-saving medical procedure should be judged under the same rubric as the purely mundane uses of blood known to the ancient world. Ambiguous terms implying some vague sort of moral equivalency between the respective acts of consumption and transfusion such as ‘taking blood’, ‘taking in blood’, ‘taking blood into one’s system’ are often openly stated in official JW literature,
This is remarkable given the fact that the validity of this assumption is a crucial facet in the logical integrity of their inductive hypothesis. It is only through a practical demonstration that transfusion medicine is morally equivalent in some way to those uses of blood known to the ancient world that the JW's may legitimately correlate the two under a general principle. On the other hand, if transfusion medicine were both fundamentally different and morally distinguishable from those uses of blood known to the ancient world, then their hypothesis generalizes well beyond what the facts will support. Consequently, apart from serving as a good example of how the inductive fallacy of hasty generalization can be coupled with the deductive fallacy of argumentum ad ignorantiam, their hypothesis would be worthless. The ancient Israelites would never have been faced with this distinction and if it were even possible to explain it to a people without an inkling of the true nature of blood, it would have served no purpose for God to do so.
Their core assumption therefore requires a prior defense. While it could perhaps be argued that blood has been misused when it is either consumed as food or employed as an ink, dye, stain, paint, gelling agent, etc., on what basis should this be considered applicable to the basic set of functions for which God originally designed blood in the first place? Given that both life and blood are sacred, the organic function for which God designed blood cannot casually be relegated to the realm of the mundane as it is not only the tie which binds the two together, it is arguably the very reason why God chose blood as the symbol for life in the first place.
Another side of basically the same coin lies in the reticence of the JW's to actually explain God’s alleged objection to transfusion medicine in concrete terms. Specifically, how is blood profaned or desecrated by transfusion medicine? At what point in the process does this occur? What is it that makes pouring blood out on the ground more pleasing to God? How would this apply to autologous transfusion? Here again the JW's typically respond with a prior assumption of the correctness of their hypothesis through a repetition of the formula “Blood is sacred, blood belongs to God, blood may not be used.” However while it may freely be acknowledged as nominative statements of fact that blood is sacred and belongs to God, the significance the JWs assign to these facts does a disservice both to man and to God and again exposes the moral shallowness of the hypothesis. The former reduces man to little more than a receptacle for this sacred fluid while the latter reduces God to the status of a petulant five year old who can provide no more substantive an explanation as to why a thing may not be used beyond a shrill, “It’s mine!”
Even if the JW's were able to address these gaps in their hypothesis, they would be far from being home free as they would still be faced with the task of justifying a deductive application so mechanical as to impute a moral commonality between acts as disparate as drinking blood as part of a satanic ritual and administering whole plasma to combat a factor V bleeding disorder.
Denying the exception is the accident form of the deductive fallacy, dicto simpliciter. This fallacy is often committed by moralists and legalists who try to decide every moral and legal question by mechanically applying general rules. To take a simple example, let’s assume that a backpacker is stranded in a remote area by an unexpected blizzard. He breaks into an unoccupied cabin and waits for three days until the storm abates and he may safely leave. During this time, he consumes his unknown benefactor’s food, burns his wood to keep warm, and even sleeps in his bed. While we would recognize that this individual would be obligated to monetarily compensate the owner of the cabin, he would not automatically be adjudged as a thief. American law, through such rulings as Vincent v. Lake Erie Transportation Co. and Ploof v. Putnam has long recognized that laws whose purpose is to protect property are not intended to do so at the expense of life. A particularly extreme example of what may occur from a purely mechanical application of the law occurs in Les Miserables when Jean Valjeans, the principal protagonist takes a loaf of bread to save the life of a starving child and for this, receives a lengthy prison sentence and is stigmatized for life.
To illustrate this point using a different law and a biblical perspective, the Israelites were explicitly forbidden from performing all manner of work on the Sabbath. A purely mechanical application of Sabbath law leads to the conclusion that this injunction would apply just as much to a Jewish midwife in the performance of her duties as it would to a Jewish tailor. However this conclusion would be incorrect and this further illustrates the important difference that sometimes exists between what the law says versus what the law means. In the case of Sabbatical law, Jesus summed it up when he said, “The Sabbath came into existence for the sake of man and not man for the sake of the Sabbath.”
In saying this, Jesus pointed out that even pikuach nephesh did not always adequately explain the spirit of the Law. In Jesus’ alleged disagreement with the Pharisees for example a withered hand was not considered to be a life threatening condition and therefore did not make the Sabbath hutra. Saving the life of an animal, which was permitted on the Sabbath thereby became more important than healing the affliction of a man. This was unacceptable to Jesus, who succinctly pointed out that when Sabbatical prohibitions became detrimental to man’s welfare they become contrary to God’s very purpose in creating the Sabbath in the first place.
Like the Sabbath, human blood was created for the sake of man, not man for the sake of blood and man is therefore not simply a receptacle for this sacred fluid. Mechanical applications of a hypothesized principle pertaining to blood that are detrimental to the welfare of man and contrary to God’s very purpose in creating blood in the first place should rightly be regarded with a great deal of skepticism. When the application of this hypothesis contravenes other requirements God has enjoined on mankind on nothing beyond its own merit alone, it should be rejected out of hand
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Marvin Shilmer
It is beyond shameful how Watchtower is willing to distort information. Watchtower quoted a book by Dr. Crile to support its view that blood transfusion nourishes like eating food. Others have point out that Crile was, in the instance Watchtower quotes, talking about a view from the 17th Century.
Here is what others have to my knowledge never pointed out: Crile actually said just the opposite of blood transfusion in terms of it nourishing the body like eating food.
Here: http://marvinshilmer.blogspot.com/2010/02/watchtower-quotes-crile.html
Marvin Shilmer
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agonus
"what a curious and disastrous fusion the JW religion is between Christianity and Judaism."
Sounds like another religion I'm thinking of... starts with an "M", ends with an "m", and in the middle there's a big fat "ormonis".
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paul from cleveland
TD, What I gather from your post is that, to God, the sacredness of life is more important than the sacredness of blood so when it comes down to an issue between the two, we should choose life. We know this because of all the other laws God has made regarding life and how important it is to him. It is taking the blood issue in the context of the whole bible. Like was mentioned before, the life itself is more important than the symbol of it.
However, some of your post is too hard to understand:
Consequently, apart from serving as a good example of how the inductive fallacy of hasty generalization can be coupled with the deductive fallacy of argumentum ad ignorantiam, their hypothesis would be worthless.
Would you please explain the first part of your post, about the reasoning methods JW's use, in simpler language?
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TD
Hi Paul,
Modern JW reasoning against transfusion goes like this:
"The Creator chose to view blood as having an elevated significance, reserving it for one special use that could save many lives. It was to play a vital role in covering sins (atonement). So under the Law, the only God-authorized use of blood was on the altar to make atonement for the lives of the Israelites, who were seeking Jehovah’s forgiveness" (The Watchtower June 14, 2004 p. 15)
There is nothing wrong with this statement as a simple obervation of life under the Law. But trying to apply this observation to modern medicine involves two logical fallacies. That's what I was referring to.
1. Hasty generalization
This is an inductive fallacy where what is true of the sample is assumed to be true of the whole.
Example:
"A man with red hair stole my truck. Therefore all people with red hair are theives."
The first half of the JW argument claims that since blood spilled in sacrifice prefigured the blood of Christ, and was therefore sacred, this must be true of all blood. What is true of the sample is assumed to be true of the whole. However for Christians, the Law is no longer in force. When Christ came, that symbolism was transferred by Jesus' own command to the sacraments of Communion. (JW's call these the Memorial emblems) Animal sacrifices no longer had any sin atoning value whatsoever and no longer symbolized the blood of Christ. Wine and unleavened bread were the new symbols and they are not in any way physically analogous to Christ’s actual blood and flesh. Without that physical dependency, it is a compositional fallacy to assert that all blood is somehow connected to the blood of Christ simply because they are both physically the same type of substance.Even if we ignore that fact, there is still no reason to conclude that the symbolism under the Law was true of all blood. Did blood spilled in sacrifice to the Canannite pantheon of gods prefigure the blood of Christ? Did blood spilled on the battlefield prefigure the blood of Christ? Did a woman's menstrual flow prefigure the blood of Christ? These questions could go on to the point of ridiculousness, but that's the point.
2. Argument from ignorance.
This a deductive fallacy where something is assumed to be true (or false) based on what we don't know or can't prove.
Example:
"The Bible never mentions anyone ever singing to the accompaniment of musical instruments. Therefore a capella singing is the only singing approved by God."
The second half of the JW argument holds that since atonement on the altar is the only use of blood explicitly sanctioned in the Bible, all other uses should be understood as forbidden. But blood did have a purpose and therefore a use long before the fall of Man and the need for a Redeemer ever arose. When blood and its respective components are used to ferry oxygen to and carbon dioxide from the tissues, to immunize and fight infection, to regulate osmotic pressure and to achieve and maintain hemostasis in the event of injury, these are nothing if not legitimate uses of blood and it would be pointless for creatures of flesh and blood to argue otherwise. Transfusion is a use of blood in accordance with this Divine purpose. It is not a use of blood as food. It is a use of blood as blood.
The Bible does not openly state this, but then what purpose could it possibly have served for God to explain all these things to people at that particular point in history? Would they have understood what oxygen is? Conclusions have to be based on what we do know, not on what we don't know. Ignorance never justifies a conclusion. -
paul from cleveland
TD, Thank you for that explanation. That was much more clear to me.