Hi Nicolaou,
My point was that JWs are a religion and their religious beliefs are based on their interpretation of the Bible.
The Watchtower is already well on its way to making the blood issue a conscience matter, if this new law speeds that up I am certainly in favor of that.
I just think that too many times on this board we view the Watchtower only as a corporate entity, forgetting it is very much a religious entity as well and will under the law defend itself both on religious and corporate grounds. They are fighting what they consider is a religious war against the world and Satan, they use the legal tools they have and here in the U.S. freedom of religion is something which is almost sacrosanct, a great tool indeed!
In addition:
Jehovah's Witnesses who refuse blood for themselves or for relatives are not silent bystanders in all this. They almost always take direct action themselves to avoid a transfusion. Most do not want transfusions and will do whatever they can to avoid them. They are active participants. This is an important point here, imo. We believed, we acted. How this can be translated into corporate responsibility, Watchtower corporate neglect etc., is hard for me to understand. It is the religious overseeing body, the GB, that is responsible for the blood doctrine not the corporation. Individual Jehovah's Witnesses follow the lead of their religious governing body not a corporation.
If we raised our children to refuse blood at all costs and if they follow through on what we taught them, we are to an extent responsible. Not responsible for their death but for acting in ignorance, for believing what others believed and taught us to believe as well. I truly believed. I would not have signed the blood cards and taught my children to refuse blood if I had not truly believed. I would have refused a blood transfusion for any of my children, I would have let them die. I truly believed.
Refusing blood is a religious belief, one in which the believer is an active participant and facilitator. The Bible said not to eat blood and we believed that transfusion was the same as eating the blood of a dead animal. There are many flaws with their blood doctrine but it was swallowed hook, line and sinker by almost all of us including the powers that be at Bethel. We acted on our beliefs.
The deaths of children due to the blood doctine are on the heads of all of us who believed, all of us who went to meetings and accepted the blood cards, all of us who gave talks or comments at the meetings citing the Biblical support the blood doctrine has, all of us who passively went along or worse disagreed but remained silent etc. I say this because the children and their parents saw a great crowd of people both locally and around the world who were, or seemed to be, in full agreement with the Jehovah's Witness blood doctrine, surely in their minds this added strong support for their own beliefs.
We were wrong. The Watchtower was wrong and so were we.
IW