Posted by AF [AF] on November 12, 1999 at 08:45:59 {CkRQXOxAaIDjRmAxB/kMdaOt1gg/Zk}:
In Reply to: ****I knew it... posted by Friend on November 12, 1999 at 06:15:50:
Methinks thou dost protest too much.
Are you saying that the informed choice made by an adult member of the Jim Jones cult to kill his children with cyanide-laced Kool-Aid should be respected? You stated:
There are other perspectives from which people may find redeeming features that you may not see. There are other perspectives still that lessen negatives altogether requiring less offsetting from positives. Yet there are more perspectives that may enhance the positives that even you see.
Describe for me, please, what sort of perspective it would take to see redeeming features in a mindset that allows killing your children on command. What sort of perspective would lessen the negatives? What perspective would enhance the positives?
Apply this to the JW blood situation where JW parents sometimes kill their children by withholding a lifesaving transfusion.
What about the recent situation making national news, where a drunk driver's idiot actions smashed up a JW family? The JW woman refused blood and died. It's not clear whether the woman would have died with or without blood. The drunk should be severely punished. But should he be charged with murder when the woman's ill-chosen but, according to JWs, informed choice is very likely to have contributed to her death?
This case may not be clear cut, but suppose there were a clear cut case where a JW was injured such that he or she was bleeding profusely but was otherwise not badly injured? In such a case the JW unarguably bled to death by choice. Should the man who caused the injury be charged with murder when it was the injured's decision to die? I think the answer is obvious, and it blows away your notions of spiritual and moral relativism where all claimed spiritual and moral perspectives ought to be respected as equally valid choices.
Your notions of spiritual and moral relativism are diametrically opposed to JW teaching. JWs reject your notions entirely, claiming that one cannot be a Christian or serve God unless you're a member in good standing of the JW organization. Your perspective on this makes you an apostate from the JW point of view because you reject their teaching on this important-from-their-viewpoint subject. You appear to take the odd position that their condemnation of your views is ok because you reject their teaching on it. You seem to be strangely comfortable with the fact that according to official JW teaching, your rejection of JW leaders as God's exclusive spokesmen makes you worthy of death at God's hands.
As for people showing disrespect for JWs by labelling them graduates of WWU etc., please note that this is usually hyperbole designed to make an obvious point. It's poking fun at a stereotype. Stereotypes usually have a basis in fact, and this particular stereotype certainly has such.
AF