by Londo111 10 Replies latest jw friends
http://time.com/3583781/jonestown-massacre/
It was 36 years ago today.
The Watchtower has caused far more deaths due to the blood transfusion ban and the suicides from disfellowshipping. Unfortunately, these deaths are mostly invisible to the public, since they didn’t occur at once and in one location.
It had a major impact on me and my family. Our daughter was born on the eleventh of Novemeber 1978 and a few days later the Jonestown tragedy occurred.
It was about this time that I was starting to privately question the entire JW scheme. Being a born-in and an elder who was supposed to enforce all the strange, obnoxious sex rules coming from the big publishing company in NY.
As the Jonestown event came to light more and more I began to draw parallels with the raw control of Jim Jones and the same level of control by the WTB&TS.
My son was born on the seventh of November 1978, Gregor. I remember there was a photo on the front page of Time magazine. My daughter, then three, saw it and I had a lot of explaining to do, she was very observant and had a strong bs detector, she got the whole story out of me. I remember thinking I was glad I wasn't in a cult.
I have never thought about it that way, but yes, they have killed more people than Jonestown.
Sad.
Medicine in 1945 to the mid 1985's depended on blood transfusions to get patients through serious operations for accidents, cancer, blood disease's, open heart surgery etc.
There's virtually no way to tell how many JW's died in those years and continue to die . While medicine has improved there is often no other way to pull someone through serious operations and treatments.
Since there is no real reason to believe that god doesn't want us to get a blood transfusion I have always felt that it was very risky behavior demanded by the WTBTS. That a blood card was a suicide note you carried around with you at all times.
That minors are not in a position to resist the mind control that goes on in the JW world.
My best guess would be that the JW's lose at least as many people needlessly as Jonestown did accept they lose them each and every year since 1945. I can't prove it and it might be a much higher number but that would be, say 1000 people a year for the last 69 years...... Thats what I call a reckless and dangerous belief.
Powerful thought: "a blood card was a suicide note you carried around with you at all times".
That calls to mind the Heaven's Gate cult. The leader redefined suicide, so that in the end, those not killing themselves to reach the next level and get swooped up by the UFO following the comet were the ones who were deemed as committing suicide. Only by killing themselves could they avoid suicide...as they defined it.
For anyone out there who still might be troubled by the theological aspects of accepting blood transfusions:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWNlyyM32ts&list=PLyNx0oM_bmgBuDVZWWiInBRGoovkUj95B&index=0
Good thread, Londo.
The Watchtower's Death Doctrine has been in place since 1945 - almost 70 years of people being convinced to give their life to the Blood God.
70 years next year. Maybe we should plan a memorial event of some kind - a day of mourning for all those who have died needlessly over the past 7 decades, all over the world. A day of remembrance on the same day that the Death Doctrine was introduced in the Watchtower.
I personally knew and/or was related to 4 people who refused blood for themselves or dependants who might die without blood. My wife was one of them during her first childbirth. Her doctor made no bones about it. He felt she needed at least 2 units of blood to get her out of danger. My Grandmother was another with a bleeding ulcer that had not been treated for too long. Her Doctor pleaded with my Aunt and Uncle but they flatly refused to allow it.
Yes, they survived. (Which my Aunt and Uncle smugly knew was because of Jah. wink wink)
Fortunately, I was not a direct party to any deaths resulting from the doctrine. But I was just lucky.
I thought about this very seriously when the horror of the Jonestown mass murder by suicide happened 36 yeras ago.
What if we were told to drink a cup of cyanide laced fruit punch?
Gregor, I’m glad it worked out. A bullet dodged...more than once.
I was just two years married and had an 8 month old baby when Jonestown happened. I sometimes kick myself that I didn't take my thoughts at the time further down the road. I read the defining aspects of a cult and lokked at my husband and said "by that definition WE are in a cult...Christianity itself is a cult going back to following a man, Jesus"
But I didn't follow through to the next steps. I shoved it all into that box in my mind along with other things over the ensuing years until I guess the box became quite overstuffed and exploded. It took another 20 years however for that to happen 😒
I truly feel that the essence of the WTB&TS boils down to the same kind of control that Jones had.
