Media and Jehovah Witnesses

OhDear · 05-22-2007, 03:12 PM

Hard to say if anyone will opt out of the Jordin and Blake show tonight, but if you want to view something other than Idol, there is a PBS docu-film on the Jehovah Witnesses.

Click Here: The Film.

Since a little before Easter, there are ladies that are wanting to convert me to be Jehovah Witnesses, and all I wanted to do was have them in for a social cuppa coffee.

Well these folk are really dedicated to their fundamental and pulpit/hierarchy doctrinal stance. Here is an article about the very very fundamental sect:

Quote:

Fundamentalism and Freedom
The Jehovah's Witnesses are more than a knock-knock joke.
by David Neff | posted 05/22/07

Jehovah's Witnesses are America's favorite punch line, says Joel P. Engardio, co-producer of Knocking, a documentary on the 7 million-member sect, which, he says, spends 1.3 billion hours per year knocking on doors.
The film, which airs tonight on PBS's Independent Lens, begins with the sound of knocking, followed by a deep sigh. Is it the sound of apprehension? The dullness of routine? Weariness of the present evil age?
And then come the jokes—clips from The Simpsons and Letterman.
But Engardio is not joking. His mother converted when he was a child, and he has observed the Witnesses at close range, although he himself never became a member—he chose journalism over fundamentalism, he says.
Engardio helps viewers to get past the joke by following the stories of two men: one an aged survivor of the Holocaust and one a 20-something with a rare disease.

Seth and his father canvas the neighborhood

The young man, named Seth, has a rare genetic disorder that is attacking his liver. Eventually, he will need a liver transplant, and that is nearly impossible because Witnesses refuse blood transfusions. Baylor University Medical Center and Texas Medical Center both turn him down. Indeed, he can't get a donor organ through the usual channels. The committees that allocate organs for transplant won't assign him one because of the extremely low chances for a successful surgery.
Eventually, his father decides to become a live donor, and University of Southern California Hospital agrees to let him be the subject for an unproven and highly experimental "bloodless" surgical technique.
The old man is a Jew named Joseph. After surviving six concentration camps, he converted to the Witnesses, in part because he saw how their faith held up under the Nazis.
'Kind of like' a cult
Both men's stories illustrate the difficulty and family tensions being a Witness can cause. Seth's grandmother doesn't want to call the Witnesses a cult, she says, but "it's kind of like that." Because celebrating birthdays and holidays like Easter and Christmas are banned in Witness circles, she feels excluded from the family.

Joseph survived six concentration camps

Joseph begins the story alienated from his daughter. He was married briefly after World War II to a Jewish woman who bore him a baby girl and died shortly afterward. In his grief, Joseph gave his daughter to his sister, who raised her as a Jew. His becoming a Witness estranged him from the family. Now, years later, he seeks an on-camera reunion. It goes well, but the tensions are palpable.
And yet, both Seth and Joseph experience much affection, love, and support in the context of their present immediate families. The bonds of affection are intensified among religious minorities and invested with an extra layer of meaning precisely because of their separation from the world.
Knocking reveals this paradoxical emotional reality—being both isolated from family outside the group and intensely bonded to those within.
Good extremists
But Engardio's Knocking is not just about Jehovah's Witnesses. It is also about fundamentalism and the fear of religious "extremism" abroad in our land.
There is the fundamentalism that everybody's so afraid of in this post-9/11 world—the kind that wants to destroy "the other." But then there's the kind of fundamentalism that works to ensure tolerance and civil liberties for itself and others. Knocking is a not-too-subtle argument that the Witnesses represent the "right kind" of fundamentalism.
The brief slices of history Engardio reports help to make that point: Founded in 1879, Jehovah's Witnesses have always played an outsider role in society. Part of that outsider status is a commitment to shun all civic involvement—everything from the violence of military service to the seemingly innocuous Pledge of Allegiance. Because they resisted the sweeping nationalism of the 1940s, their kids were kicked out of school and Jehovah's Witness teachers were fired. They sued the government and the Supreme Court voted 8 to 1 in favor of the right of the state to require acts of allegiance from its citizens. Three years later the Court reversed itself, but not before mobs in 44 states beat Jehovah's Witnesses, and Kingdom Halls were vandalized and burned.

Filmmakers Joel P. Engardio and Tom Shepard

According to an ACLU spokesman in the film, Witnesses were in the Supreme Court 45 times between 1935 and 1958 fighting for their rights of freedom of religion, freedom of expression, and (because of their conscientious opposition to blood transfusions) patients' rights. Long before the founding of Christian public interest law firms, such as the Liberty Fund, The Becket Fund, and the ACLJ, the Jehovah's Witnesses were using the courts to establish liberties.
And, claims Engardio, Witnesses were among the first to report and condemn Hitler's persecution of the Jews. Because of their anti-military stand, the Nazis bundled off to concentration camps about 10,000 of the 25,000 Witnesses in Germany. (The rest went underground.) Witness prisoners smuggled out accounts of the brutality and slaughter as well as detailed diagrams of the camps' layout. Their leadership in America publicized the atrocities.
This film offers a one-sided portrait, and I would welcome a careful assessment by a knowledgeable historian. Nevertheless, Engardio's point is powerful. Religious minorities—as exasperating as they can be—serve to test our capacity for freedom. And those who suffer in order to secure our civil liberties deserve our gratitude.
Knocking premieres on PBS, Tuesday, May 22; check local listings. Visit the Independent Lens website for more information on Knocking. The film is also available on DVD here.

© Gary Robinson 2007, subject to licensing agreement with Christianity Today International. All rights reserved. Click for reprint information.

CrazyFlamingos · 05-22-2007, 03:24 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by OhDear

Hard to say if anyone will opt out of the Jordin and Blake show tonight, but if you want to view something other than Idol, there is a PBS docu-film on the Jehovah Witnesses.

Click Here: The Film.

Since a little before Easter, there are ladies that are wanting to convert me to be Jehovah Witnesses, and all I wanted to do was have them in for a social cuppa coffee.

Well these folk are really dedicated to their fundamental and pulpit/hierarchy doctrinal stance. Here is an article about the very very fundamental sect:

Quote:

"Knocking is a not-too-subtle argument that the Witnesses represent the "right kind" of fundamentalism." (from the article)

I attended Bible Studies with Witnesses for a couple of years. (about 25 years ago) And I still count several of their number among my friends despite the fact that they never managed to convert me.

My experience leads me to agree with the above quote. Witnesses will talk your ear off but they do not want to force anyone to live by their rules.

And they judge all sinners the same; they seem to truly believe the doctrine that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of god. If they are harsher on any one sinner, I would say it is each of them on his or her self.

OhDear · 05-22-2007, 03:34 PM

Yes Crazy, I too find them to be very sweet people. They are very strict within their own church though I would say, and it seems you bear that out.

I think that the reason that though they are very fundamentally living by what they believe, but they are not obnoxious as are other sects of Christianity is because they do not ascribe to the belief in a place of eternal torment for those who do not convert.

Still I could not ever become one myself, cos I cannot allow a book and only a few interpreting it, to be my guide for life.

OD

highway80west · 05-22-2007, 04:08 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by OhDear

Hard to say if anyone will opt out of the Jordin and Blake show tonight, but if you want to view something other than Idol, there is a PBS docu-film on the Jehovah Witnesses.

Click Here: The Film.

Since a little before Easter, there are ladies that are wanting to convert me to be Jehovah Witnesses, and all I wanted to do was have them in for a social cuppa coffee.

Well these folk are really dedicated to their fundamental and pulpit/hierarchy doctrinal stance. Here is an article about the very very fundamental sect:

Oh Dear,

My aunt and uncle are members of Jehovah's Witnesses, of which I am not (I'm Episcopalian). I love them dearly.

My aunt and uncle are not of the extreme type of JW's. When one of their daughters needed some serious surgery many years ago, she got it.

I don't know if other members of Jehovah's Witnesses would have allowed her to have surgery if she was a relative of theirs.

CrazyFlamingos · 05-22-2007, 04:21 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by highway80west

Oh Dear,

My aunt and uncle are members of Jehovah's Witnesses, of which I am not (I'm Episcopalian). I love them dearly.

My aunt and uncle are not of the extreme type of JW's. When one of their daughters needed some serious surgery many years ago, she got it.

I don't know if other members of Jehovah's Witnesses would have allowed her to have surgery if she was a relative of theirs.

They are allowed to have surgery just not transfusions or blood plasma.

Actually some of the new artificial blood substitutes and surgerical procedures that are performed without so much loss of blood have been developed by physicians who were inspired by their work with patients who were Witnesses.

silentlambs · 05-22-2007, 11:12 PM

This is a propaganda film, financed, directed, supported, researched, and promoted by Jehovah's Witnesses while pretending to be an "independent" documentary. A simple fact that escapes mention is that JWs require members that molest children to "knock" on your door without informing you the public. It is another freedom that they exercise that you can basically do nothing about. In May 2002 after Dateline exposed this to the public they made a new rule that their child molesters must be accompanied when they go knocking. So remember if two JWs show up at your door then there is a strong possibility that one of them may be a pedophile. Do not allow them to interact with your children or study with them. IF you think checking the sex offender database in your area will help then you are wrong again. As "Knocking" fails to mention in their propaganda JWs are also exercising the freedoms they established by not reporting child molesters to police and keeping them in their secret database. If you would like to see if a JW child molester has been reported in your town check the silentlambs website for a listing of over 500 cities where they have been reported by their victims but in most cases not reported to police. silentlambs.org - Welcome

The lack of fact checking with this film carries over to the JW persecution in Nazi Germany. JWs are meticulous record keepers. Their records plainly show that only 2,000 JWs went into the camps with 635 dying in the camps. The person featured on the film was a JEW that later converted to the JWs . When a film maker ignores simple documentation provided by the religion it seriously undermines his credibility. Of course this seems par for the course for an openly practicing gay man to promote a religion that condemns his lifestyle as worthy of death. For more factual information on Knocking check out these links,

A Common Bond - Why We Are "Knocking" Knocking
Bowen, William: "Jehovah's Witnesses Lose Court Battle to Suppress Freedom of Speech"

OhDear · 05-23-2007, 12:03 AM

Silent Lambs, you are new here, welcome!

However, it is too late for me to check out what you say for certain, but I will say unequivocably that simply because two Jehovah Witnesses come to your door, there is doubtful any big chance that one is a sex offender. They always go out in twos. As do the missionaries in the Latter Day Saints and so do many other Christians. There was some such mandate in the Bible to go in pairs.

I did not watch the film tonight. But I do not believe it is right to discount the validity of any production simply cos the people that are being portrayed in the film also are the ones producing it.

OD

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