by "Zen" M. Shawn Dean
2/1/2012
When you call the Society in an emergency situation they take great care to not get involved if they can help it. This I learned from calling them and posing as a JW in just such a blood emergency. That being said:
Since I have had my number up on the site I have received calls from JWs in crisis situations. I talk about one or two of them in my video on the AJWRB site that some of you perhaps haven't viewed. So far, none of the people who have taken blood and are JWs were even questioned by elders, let alone disassociated. They didn't tell, and the elders didn't ask. You'd think that if the Society was really interested in making sure that every last person who breaks the blood law gets what's coming to them, then they would at least ask when they know a brother or sister is in a medical crisis or has suffered severe trauma in an accident.
Up until last week, when I was checking on what Randy reported to me, the Society would never say on the phone that they would not DISFELLOWSHIP (not NOT disassociate) someone who had taken a blood transfusion. No, I am not getting mixed up here. They would not even say that I would not get disfellowshipped, when I called in posing as a man with young children and a sick wife and asked that if I could please take the blood and live and not get disfellowshipped. The young man in the legal department, thinking I was in my last few minutes of life, would not say that I would not get disfellowshipped, even if it meant that his response could end my life immediately. (Sick, right?) Yes, I realize what the elder book says and all the letters, but what the Society actually says when faced with what they think is a real emergency (the brother prayed with me, that proves to me he really thought I was about to die) they would simply not say that I wouldn't get disfellowshipped, again, even if it meant I would die right there on the spot, and this brother, again, did believe I was dying. The idea of getting automatically disassociated never came up.
Last week I called the Service Dept. to check up on the claim of new procedures
or whatever, even though strangely enough Randy's source proved to be in error,
much to my surprise, the man on the line said, and I quote precisely, "Taking
blood is no longer a disfellowshipping offence." Before this past week, all I
could get out of them was that there had been, not a change in doctrine, but
merely a change in how they "handled matters." But now, and I believe the man
was reading from a script, they actually said that it is the "offence" itself,
the SIN that is not worthy of, or not bad enough, to get a person
disfellowshipped.
I think it is really a serendipitous event that occurred. Randy called me with information that turned out to be false, and I checked up on it by calling the Society, and sure enough, the language had changed in a very significant way, on the phone to the Service Dept.. And I asked the man to repeat it because I couldn't believe my ears. He told me the same line over again and emphasized the word "offence." So now it is not so much just that the sin of taking blood is being "handled differently" (as Fred Rusk has told me in conversation) but that the sin itself is not worthy of a disfellowshipping, now truly downgraded as a sin, just as I have suspected all along.
One of the first subjects that Randy and I ever talked about when I started working on AJWRB, was that if you look at the entire history of JWs you notice some patterns. Randy has already commented extensively about the factor VIII scandal in the 1970s. Look at vaccinations. Look at organ transplants. Look at "blood transfusions" of every ingredient of blood except for the skin of the red blood cell that JWs now accept openly.
I'll mention briefly here, that it is not out of ignorance, but out of being especially informed on the matter that I can state with confidence and without footnote that Jehovah's Witnesses now accept blood transfusions. And they have for a while. But nobody ever properly announced that fact unfortunately because they were not perceptive enough and didn't see what was happening right in front of their eyes. The Society is changing the blood doctrine. It is going away. I am stating it now. Believe me or don't believe me, I don't care, but when it happens I just may say "Told you so." It's all there in the Society's writing if you look hard enough and if you can notice patterns. Then you can make predictions and state with relative authority what the Society is doing now and what they will do next.
Can't you see it happening? Think about it.
First, they did away with the ban on vaccinations.
Then in 1978 they openly allowed factor VIII (platelets) after allowing them in secret for some years to callers.
Then they allowed organ transplants.
As soon as they allowed factor VII, actually, let me put it this way, in what sense is a factor VIII transfusion NOT a blood transfusion?
It is a
blood transfusion. Period. Call it one. Don't call it one. But it involves:
1. Taking blood from a person.
2. Doing stuff to the blood.
3. Putting the blood into your veins (but leaving out some stuff that you
skimmed off the top or spun out with a centrifuge.)
That is the reality of nearly ALL "bloodless" products actually. Most of them
are just manipulations of someone’s donated blood, or a cow’s blood perhaps.
Then in 1980 or so, organ transplants were allowed. So:
1. You take an organ saturated with blood, sometimes carrying up to a pint of
blood in the tissue let’s say, depending on which organ it is and the size of
the organ.
2. Rinse it off in the sink (This is literally what they do, and ALL they do to organs to get the blood out of them. They rinse it off in the sink.)
3. They put the bloody organ into your body. You have officially taken blood into your body for the purpose of sustaining life! You ate blood! Period!