-
“Exactly, I'm trying to come up with the likely number of JW deaths and causes of death based on standard rates for the entire population.
“While there may be some reasons why some figures would vary (e.g. JWs not smoking, less likely to take drugs etc...) I doubt the figures would be massively different.
“Taking the percentages for the whole population (350m) and applying it to a 7.5m segment of that is a lot sounder than taking 19 and applying it to 7.5m”
Simon,
Your approach does only one thing: It gives us an estimated number of JWs who died of various causes based on an assumption that JWs suffer death at the same rate and for the same reasons as the general population.
That’s fine for estimating general mortality among JWs. I have no beef with that.
What’s wrongheaded about your approach is that it tells us nothing whatsoever about deaths due to refusal of blood, and it gives us no benchmark to compare these known number of deaths against because these deaths from blood refusal are contained within the very statistic you’ve created. To compare deaths due to blood refusal to other causes of death you must first find a method to extract deaths due to blood refusal.
My article using Beliaev’s data set showing 19 deaths due to blood refusal is designed to help ansewr that question, and it’s performed in a service area that allows us to build a ratio of deaths per capita of JWs for refusing blood.
When I initially performed this extrapolation I did make comparison with other causes of death and asked myself the question of whether this number of deaths (due to refusing blood) could possibly be hidden within these general causes of death. The answer was yes. Easily! Another question I asked myself was what this number of deaths would look like to the average JW in any given congregation or circuit. When I built statistics around congregation and circuit communities of JWs it became apparent that this number of deaths would hardly be perceptible. This was only made worse by the sociological practice among JWs to downplay instances where blood refusal was big news and the JW patient died.
I looked at this whole thing from many perspectives before publishing my findings. One thing I made sure of was to maintain conservative factors each time I had to include a factor for the mathematics of the whole thing.
It’s apparent that some here disagree with me, and I’m perfectly fine with that. But I remain convinced that at least 50,000 JWs have died over blood refusal since year 1961.
Not too much attention has been given to why I chose 1961. Primarily this decision stems from reading hundreds of legal cases filed in relation to JWs refusing blood. There is a hug database out there of legal cases filed in criminal and civil courts. Properly filtered a picture emerged that prior to 1961 when JWs were not disfellowshipped for accepting blood the response of JWs to Watchtower’s blood doctrine was very different than at and after 1961. In 1961 JWs began refusing blood like never before. Hence my focus on 1961 onward.
Marvin Shilmer