Atlantis. The Watchtower doesn't have to explain the difference. One would assume people are smart enough to know the difference.
Doesn't the watchtower talk about ASKING GB members to sign their books? Asking, is to request somebody to do or give something. Go look it up in a dictionary.
The GB members were giving these books as gifts. Nowhere does it say the government officials asked "can you sign that bible"? People inscribe books. Maybe you're in a social group where people don't give a lot of books on paper, so you might be unfamiliar with the practice. Sometimes when people give a book as a gift, they write something in it and sign it. Something like, "To my darling niece, this was one of my favorite books when I was your age, I think you will find the lessons useful. Love, uncle John". Or to a friend, you might sign your full name.
One is somebody ASKING for the signature itself. As if that in and of itself is the thing of value. And it often is. Go into a sports memorabilia store and compare the cost of those tiny NFL helmets to the cost of one signed by a player. This is a form of hero worship. That you want some connection to that person, be it their signature, an article of clothing, whatever. And sometimes that signature is proof to others that you were in the presence of this person you deify.
And inscription is somebody writing a note. We don't know that these Cuban government officials wanted their bibles signed. We don't know that they gave any significance whatsoever to the GB members that they'd WANT the signature of one of those. That is NOT hero worship.
If you and morpheus only want to look at the fact that both contained signatures and make it equivalent, that's on you. Black or white, context never matters. That's on you. I can't force your mind to see the difference.
Same with vidiot. Who says the GB members were asked? Maybe they were asked and they did sign them anyway. But we don't know that. If it's their own advice that people shouldn't ask for GB members to sign books, then maybe, just maybe, that IS their stance. So it's possible they weren't asked. Only that they signed the gift. Perhaps with well wishes. Perhaps quoting or citing a scripture. The government officials ASKING is the key. ASKING is the offense of hero worship. And we simply do not know whether there was any ASKING. I do not see any evidence of that.
The fact that you see them signing books, does not mean there was any asking. Or that the Cuban officials were even there when they did this. For all we know, they were inscribing the gift bibles to give to them later.
Don't most people who give a gift often let people know who's giving it to them? Every birthday party I've ever gone to, most of the gifts have either a card or something attached to the gift that say who it's from. It might be a sticker on the wrapping that gets thrown away. Nobody's saving the to/from sticker because it's an "autograph". Because books are paper, people often write that stuff inside the book.
We don't know. All we see is them signing books. We don't know if any hero worship went on. Which is what the OP is about.
This is the logic part of it. What do we do know and what don't we know? And try not to assume. We see that the watchtower says (paraphrasing) don't ask GB members to sign your books. We see gb members signing books that it says are gifts for Cuban officials. Noplace does it say a GB should never sign a book. The ONLY thing it's saying is that people shouldn't ask. Were the GB members in the photo asked to sign the books? Maybe. Maybe not. We don't know if any asking went on.
It's like those logic puzzles they sell with little factoids and you have to use them all to build a solution. You need to know what facts you know. There is not enough evidence to say the GB was responding to requests to sign bibles. There just isn't. Maybe they were. But, as they say, this evidence wouldn't hold up in a court of law.
