however you must remember that the information that you are dealing with is somewhat different from the situation outside the USA,
Well, sure. I have no familiarity with the laws of any other countries, so anything I say is predicated on American law. I believe that is the context within which Alan wrote the original article under discussion, too. To consider the possible ramifications of the situation under the laws of every other country would be a massive study.
Also the argument is based on every cong doing the same thing and every baptisimal canidate having a complete knowledge, or the cong ensuring the canidate has a complete knowledge.
Again, I'm talking US laws here, but a person entering into a contract is presumed to have considered whatever information is available to him/her about the transaction. As a salesman, I am not required to act as my customer's lawyer, and point out every facet of the contract that he might find objectionable. It is his responsibility to read the entire contract and to know what he is signing. He can't go into court later and claim that a certain part of the contract isn't applicable because he didn't know about it when he signed. In a similar way, under our questionable premise, the congregation might argue that all of the information about what the baptismal candidate was getting into was available in the various publications made available to him/her prior to baptism. Additionally, he or she also likely attended meetings for a time, and participated in the field service prior to baptism, so there was ample opportunity to observe first hand how the congregation functions. Are there really that many of us who didn't know what disfellowshipping was and how it worked before we got baptized?
Now all of us out there realises that to be bound to a contract, i diosyncrasies of the contract, especially conditions of termination need to be brought to the attention of the joining party.
Not true, at least in the USA. As I pointed out above, it is the responsibility of the person entering into the contract to familiarize himself with its terms. Really, that only makes common sense. Without such a provision, we'd have no contract law at all. How could any contract ever be legally binding if all a person had to do to escape conforming to a certain term of the contract was to claim that he didn't read that part before he signed it? Now, as far as Pleasuredome's point:
is there a case for misrepresentation (not knowing that you was entering into a legally binding contract/through deception and without explanation not making it known it is a contract).
If fraud is provable, that's a different matter. If it can be shown definitively that I, as a salesman, deliberately misrepresented the nature of the transaction and led the buyer to believe that the terms of the agreement were something other than what they were, OR if I asked the buyer to sign a contract while claiming that it was not a contract, then the contract could likely be broken on the basis of fraud. The trick is proving it, since in most courts, the terms of the written contract will usually take precedence over alleged conversations between the salesman and the customer. In our hypothetical situation with the JW's, of course, there is no written contract, but the public demonstration of baptism before witnesses would be just about as legally binding as agreement to the "terms". The people who witnessed the baptism could always be brought into court to testify that the "agreement" had been made. I guess if you could demonstrate that the nature of the organization was actually, deliberately misrepresented to you (for example, if you were told that people who are disfellowshipped are not shunned), then you might have a basis for breaking the agreement based on fraud.
And we are getting WAY off into speculation here...but it's fun, isn't it?
