First of all, my apologies... I goofed in my first attempt to comment on this.
The recent thread by Bibleexaminer prompted me to comment on how the WTS sometimes seeks to disseminate something ``through the Back Door,'' i.e. verbally via its Circuit or Disttict Overseers rather than face the embarassment or other negative consequences of mitigating or altering an official position in print.
Usually, step one in this process is to cease any reference to the obsolescent teaching, counting the rank and file's short memory span. Step two, of course, is to quietly marshall the army of visiting overseers to support the retraction verbally, in talks and informally in conversation with individual dubs and with the bodies of elders.
One prominent example of this is have adroitly they've scuttled the 7,000-year Creative Day teaching, which in many ways was the lynchpin of thie 1975 fiasco. Never matter that it all seemed to fit so beautifully with the ``antitypical Jubilee'' and the expiration of man's 6,000 years, etc..... ``just stop talking about it and it will go away,'' seems to have been the approach.
Rarely when they print an article that amounts to a major shift in doctrine or policy, will they make a forthright ``heads up'' statement to the effect that ``take note of this, friends, for it changes our previously held view.''
The onus is on the dubs to alertly ``pick up'' on such changes. Their transparent cynicism and contempt for the average dub's intelligence is palpable.
Where such duplicity slips in one silly interprettion of prophecy to replace another, it's innocuous and even laughabl.
Ominously, it becomes deadly, even criminal, when it governs their treatment of life-and-death matters.
Blood is one such example. Because of the Society's refusal to date to publish a straight-talking official statement update unambigiously summarizing all the details of its current blood policy,I bet that not one JW in a hundred knows what's permissible and what ain't.