Hi ye all,
I am in the process of writing a letter to the editor of Moscow Times in reference to a letter to the editor I found at His letter states the following at http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2004/04/08/009.html
In June, the European Court of Human Rights will hopefully review actual facts regarding the case of Jehovah's Witnesses in Moscow, as opposed to popular misconceptions of the kind masquerading as impartiality in Uzzell's commentary.In response to "Witnessing Religious Repression," a comment by Lawrence Uzzell on April 5.
Editor,
I marvel at Lawrence Uzzell's misrepresentations of Jehovah's Witnesses in his otherwise sympathetic article regarding the Moscow court decision banning their activities.The Trinity is not a "core" Christian doctrine. It is not in the Bible, and many people besides Jehovah's Witnesses get along just fine without it. As for "repeatedly" predicting the end of the world, I am aware of only one period of unfulfilled expectation in my lifetime (I am 53), and Jehovah's Witnesses have not speculated about this matter since 1975.
The notion that we are "discouraged from reading even nonreligious writings" is absurd.
Uzzell's calculation of average time spent in missionary activity at 216 hours per person per year, works out at 18 hours per month. I spend only about 10 hours a month in such activity, so his math must include the full-time work of thousands of individuals, which is comparable to that of the Orthodox clergy.
As for "selective commitment to religious freedom," Jehovah's Witnesses have no part in denying freedom to Old Believers or other religions in the "extreme case of Irkutsk," or anywhere else.
The original article at http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2004/04/05/006.html stated:
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Some religions are widely admired even by people who do not share their doctrines. The Jehovah's Witnesses are not among them. For precisely this reason they provide an excellent test of a country's commitment to religious freedom. The March 26 Moscow court decision banning the Witnesses' activities in the capital is a long-term threat to every religion in Russia that takes its own beliefs seriously.
The Jehovah's Witnesses call themselves "Christian" but deny core Christian doctrines such as the Trinity. They have repeatedly predicted that the world is about to end. They discourage their members from reading religious or even nonreligious writings other than those of their own faith and put them under extreme pressure to engage in personal missionary work. A few years ago, using the Witnesses' own figures, I calculated that each of their active members in Russia was contributing an average of 216 hours of missionary service per year. I also concluded that it took the denomination 1,878 hours of missionary work to achieve just one conversion, contrary to their opponents' hysterical image of "zombies" cloning themselves via mass brainwashing.
Nevertheless, the Jehovah's Witnesses are perfectly legal in every country that meets minimal standards of religious freedom. Even France, at the height of its "cult scare" four years ago, produced a court ruling that the Witnesses are not a "menace to public order" and may therefore enjoy tax exemptions.
The recent Moscow court decision is significant for three reasons. First, it goes beyond previous repressive steps such as denying official registration to a religious organization. Without registration a religious body has no corporate right to rent buildings or to publish religious literature, but it can still conduct regular, publicly announced worship services in its members' homes. The Jehovah's Witnesses, however, will probably soon become the first national religious organization to have one of its local branches explicitly "banned" under the terms of the 1997 law that re-established state control over religious life. The court decision will not take legal effect until the Witnesses' appeal is decided, but their chances of winning on appeal do not look good.
That ban will deny the Witnesses' right to any form of collective religious activity, such as open worship services even in private homes. It may also breathe new life into the 1997 law, which despite its harsh provisions has been largely moribund in practice. If that law were strictly enforced, any religious organization founded later than the mid-1980s -- when Russia was still under totalitarian atheist rule -- would lose most of its legal rights. That would be the equivalent of suppressing every newspaper or political party founded since the dawn of glasnost.
The court ruling's second key feature is that the prosecution's reasoning could be used against almost any religion. While the judge's detailed opinion is not expected until mid-April, the public prosecutors' office for Moscow's northern administrative district argued in seeking the ban that the Jehovah's Witnesses incite inter-religious conflict. As evidence, municipal prosecutors noted that the Witnesses' publications claim that their religion is true and that others are false and argued that the Witnesses require their members to take part in so many activities "that no time is left for fulfilling family obligations, useful labor, family communication, recreation together and self-improvement."
You can easily imagine how atheist authorities might use this precedent against other believers. Any Christian body claiming to be the sole true heir of the early Church -- as nearly all used to and as the Orthodox Church still does -- could be convicted of inciting religious hatred. Truth claims by religious believers, unlike those by adherents of secular ideologies, would be illegal. Similarly, Orthodox monastic life would not long survive the Soviet-style assumption that religious activities are irrelevant to "useful labor" or "self-improvement."
Such reasoning will not soon be used against the Orthodox because the great majority of ethnic Russians still identify themselves as Orthodox -- but majorities are fickle. Only 3 to 4 percent of Russians seriously practice Orthodoxy; within a few generations they may find themselves as isolated as are serious Lutherans in Sweden, but without legal guarantees of religious freedom.
Thirdly, the case illustrates the secular authorities' tactics of "divide and rule." The prominent rabbi Berl Lazar made a carefully hedged comment that, "as regards confession of faith proper, that is, the relationship of a person with the Almighty, there cannot and should not be any restrictions of freedom. But as regards relationships among people, the law has the right to say its piece." Most other leaders of mainstream religions in Russia also failed to speak up for the Jehovah's Witnesses, making it more likely that when they in turn face repression, nobody will speak up for them.
Ironically, the Witnesses have also been guilty of selective commitment to religious freedom. Some years ago I visited Irkutsk, which has an artificially high concentration of Witnesses because Stalin exiled so many to Siberia. In Irkutsk the Witnesses are beneficiaries rather than victims of religious discrimination, enjoying free grants of land and other privileges denied Old Believers and many Protestants. They told me that church-state relations there are excellent.
Irkutsk is an extreme case. Several other regions have found the golden mean between that extreme and the one now triumphant in Moscow. John Burns, the Witnesses' lawyer, told me in a March 31 interview that until now "we have actually won most of our local court cases": Tatarstan, Lipetsk, Chelyabinsk, Nizhny Novgorod. But he warned that "Moscow sets the tone for the whole country." He is not optimistic about the future.
Lawrence Uzzell is president of International Religious Freedom Watch. He contributed this comment to The Moscow Times
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I was going to send the following e-mail to [email protected] <[email protected]> stating my opinion about this matter, but I am so upset at them that I don't want to make an "s" of myself. I'd like your comments and help. I do not like cults. I don't believe they should be classified as religion.
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The letter to the editor of Wes Gordon Matthews, North Carolina Thursday, Apr. 8, 2004. Page 10 distorts the idea of the true implications of being a Jehovah's Witness and their effect on the individual and the community.
Their lies cannot be silenced any longer. All you have to do is to look in a search engine and write the words "jehovah's witness" followed by any theme, and you will find out about the destructiveness that this cult leaves on its wake. A site that will give you an idea how they mistreat their members, exmembers, and their families is http://www.jehovahs-witness.com/default.ashx The site http://quotes.watchtower.ca will show you how their doctrines have changed through the years. This they will do without comments and by only showing you their literature. They have even forbidden vaccinations, organ transplants, and even ridiculed doctors. Any disobedience of their rules will bring disfellowshipping. Even if you decide to quit their religion, all members, including parents, sons, and daughters are forbidden to talk to you unless they live in their household. Housewifes are forbidden to say "amen" after a prayer by their husband if he has been disfellowshipped. Even a cousin of mine, whom I helped with her sons for a year, told me in no uncertain terms she would not talk to me unless I became an active JW again.
For years they said that the UN was under the control of Satan. At the same time they were members of their Non Governing organizations. They quit it only after their cover was blown.
Watchtower November 15, 2001 p.19 says "and we are not infected by such spiritually deadly plagues as its immorality, materialism, false religion and worship of the 'wild beast' and it's 'image', the United Nations."
You can read many other quotes here http://quotes.watchtower.ca/united_nations.htm but you can also see here http://www.un.org/dpi/ngosection/watchtower.pdf that while they were hate-mongering against the United Nations, they were members from 1991 to 2001.
They have changed their stance in vaccines, but I suspect it was only after they were not allowed to leave the country if they did not have the smallpox vaccines. Many people were hurt because of this policy. They first allowed organ transplants, then they forbade them calling it cannibalism, and finally they allowed it again. Although they now allow certain fractions of blood, which are hard to get in third world countries, still cause many deaths by not allowing the consciences of their members take prevalence. How ridiculous this is, you can find at http://www.ajwrb.org which examines the whole blood issue.
They have a way of intimidating their members into not reporting child abuse as you can see from many of the ex Jehovah?s Witnesses. The result has been a gigantic number of sexually molested children because their policy of not doing anything about child molestation unless it is required by the law in some American states. The number given by the Silent Lambs site is 23,720. http://www.silentlambs.org They've gotten away with this horrible policy for a long time because when it is time to get sued, they claim that their elders are "unpaid trained volunteers", which in a sense is true, but they yield the power to disfellowship their members, under the power of the WTBTS.
Probably the most damaging of their policies is their shunning of even close blood relatives. This divides not only close friend?s relationships but breaks the very fabric of society: The family circle. They become the absolute rulers of the individual. Their techniques of mental control break down the individual?s mind to the point that he or she does not any longer believe in God but instead follows the arbitrary dictates of a Publishing Empire whose base of operations resides in Brooklyn NY. Their adherents must change their minds and conscience the minute they change their doctrines and come to believe they will be destroyed forever if they are kicked out of their organization. The sites that I have provided you will amply corroborate what I have said. A good site to find out about the psychological aspects of becoming a Jehovah?s Witness is http://www.freeminds.org/psych/psych.htm . There you may find a shadow of their destructive practices, but I think that it will be enough.
Although I am an agnostic, I am not against most established religions. What I am against is the abuse of cults that obtain basic human and religious freedoms while at the same time deny those same rights to their members. I suggest that they only be allowed to practice their religion if they stop their shunning policies, report to the police all cases of pedophilia, and not penalize their members for following the medical advice of their own choosing. That goes not only for Jehovah?s Witnesses, but for any ?religion? that denies its citizens any human rights.
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I was going to debunk Mr.Wes Gordon Matthew?s statements about the hours they do door to door in Russia, but I cannot recall the name of a site that was sent from Japan showing the growth in a statistical form. I seem to remember they put in more than the normal 120 hours per year average in the US, but I do not remember it.
Does anyone know it, or at least the stats for Russia? I don?t want to send any false information that will blow up in my face.
Any suggestions will be welcomed.
Faraon.