Month: October 2026

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Few Witnesses will buy that Acts 15:29 has no conceivable connection to blood transfusion therapy. They won’t buy that it is merely an OT dietary law imposed upon Christians. The counsel of apostles and older men preserved only four out of over 600 OT laws. Why would “abstain from blood” make the cut? Other dietary laws were not preserved. Something else is involved. What can that something else be other than the Leviticus 17:11 stipulation that blood carries symbolic meaning, and not just dietary?

Even fewer Witnesses will buy the shallow argument of people controlling people. “Those in charge used to not allow transfusion simply as a means asserting supremacy, but now they do?” No. According to evolutionary psychologists, the very concept of God originates as a mechanism of control. Threaten the ne’er-do-wells with hell if they misbehave, reward them with heaven if they toe in line, and you have solved the problem of keeping order in the clan—without which that clan will surely lose out in the evolutionary struggle to survive to other clans that have evolved that Superhuman Cop. Once you buy into one cockeyed notion, it readily extends to other superficial applications. Few Witnesses will buy into it.

Instead, most Witnesses will take quite readily to the adjustment that avoidance of blood is a personal responsibility, not to be monitored by anyone else. It will make sense to them. Break blood down into an ever-expanding list of components, as medical technology has done, and the principle that comes into play is, “You shouldn’t have to be a microbiologist to serve God.” Frankly, I didn’t know that two of the four “basic components of blood” make up less of a percentage than some components that already some Witnesses (including me) were willing to accept.

It just becomes too complicated. Does the tiniest percentage make it blood or should the baker’s criteria prevail: “It’s not a cake until you mix the ingredients?” Each will have to figure it out on his/her own. Like with any matter of preparation, some will be quite exacting and others not so much. Some will work quite hard to find cooperative physicians. It’s been stated that liaison committees will continue to facilitate this. Others will put it off, thinking the need not likely to arise or more inclined to trust in the moment even if it should. Red cells and plasma looming large percentage-wise, my guess it that they will continue to loom large as items of conscience, with white cells and platelets demoted to the status of other fractions. How tenacious Witnesses will be in times of crisis will no doubt vary by the person.

Will any Witnesses be as stumbled over this adjustment as those who oppose them seem to think? If so, I’ve heard no undercurrents of it. I would never claim to pick up every nuance of the grapevine but I’m as connected as anyone. If any do have a hard time over this, it will probably be those used to seeing Witness life as a collection of rules, and now some of those rules are changing. This is not just so with the update on blood transfusion, a truly significant change. It is also true with changes that are trivial, such as how Witnesses once counted their time in their ministry and now no longer do.*

“Well, we shouldn’t think in terms of laws and rules,” will be the party line. We should think principles, not laws and rules. Principles are greater than laws and rules. Let your conscience be trained by Bible principles and you can derive laws and rules on the spot for unexpected situations. Many are the Watchtower articles elevating Bible principles over the laws derived from them. Principles are timeless. Rules are time or situationally sensitive. What applies in one time or place may not apply in another.

Trouble is, having provided specific examples of what one with a Bible trained conscience might do in given situations, some of those examples snuck over Into the category of being rules. Not that they were rules, of course, but they so closely resembled rules that one might not be able to tell the difference. Lately, these situations are being looked at anew. Some are being unwound. If playing the cottage industry game of ‘What will come next?’ look for parallel situations where outcomes of Bible-trained consciences may have been too precisely defined.

What are some of the items that may change? Already there are Witness opponents creating databases of potential last straws so that, should any of them arise, they can catcall, “Now are you ready to leave? Now are you ready to join me on the road to nowhere?” As for me, overhauling anything above the fold (to use the newspapaper metaphor) would make me do a double-take. Anything below the fold I could adapt to with minimal fuss. Above the fold includes the core components Witnesses are known for: Name of God, Jesus not himself God,, Kingdom is a real government, need to preach, no immortal soul, resurrection to paradise earth, explanation for why God allows evil and suffering, and so forth. Below the fold are items in which “a godly trained conscience” is defined. Were it reevaluated that it had been defined too narrowly, I could roll with that. That has been the tenor of recent changes.

Even if some above the fold items were to undergo minor tweaks, I would adapt. For example, say, the 144K being a literal number. It’s not all THAT firmly established from scripture, methinks, it is just a reasonable conclusion. Not that I expect it to change, but if it did, I wouldn’t lose my cookies.

Don’t make your dream list too long. Don’t expect more unwinding than was done in the first century. There must be enough impact on a person’s life to trigger Psalm 2 perceptions of the Kingdom. There, “high officials gather together as one against Jehovah and against his anointed one [to] say: ‘Let us tear off their shackles And throw off their ropes!’” (verse 3) There must always be ways that can be mischaracterized as intolerable “shackles” and “ropes.” The Psalm could never fit an “anything goes” religion.

Similarly, consider the plea of Paul: “Make room for us in your hearts. We have wronged no one, we have corrupted no one, we have taken advantage of no one.” (2 Corinthians 7:2) Why would he have written this other than to counter accusations that he had? There is nothing new under the sun. Accusations of shackles, ropes, wrongs, corruption, and unfair advantage made by enemies of the faith today find their full counterpart in the first century. Christians were well-known for refusing to burn just a pinch of incense to the Emperor, bringing intense persecution upon themselves. You don’t think there weren’t opponents trying to redefine the gesture simply as one of respect, posing as reformers devoted to preserving the lives of believers?

Is Witness headship today petrified at being thought fallible, lest that undermine their authority to lead? That charge, too, has been made. I doubt it. They have previously acknowledged they can err. Perhaps they do not announce it with trumpets. However, there is a publicly available chronological list titled “Beliefs Clarified,” searchable on the Witness website, which documents changes and adjustments in understanding by year. So it is hardly top secret.

The situation is probably more akin to how the airline pilot does not display a list of prior missteps on the cabin door for passengers to read. The contention that revealing they are human should threaten their authority is made by persons who once believed in Santa Claus and no longer do. They haven’t really grown up, though. They have just transferred the role of Santa Claus to God. Let there be any coal in their stockings and they begin to question the entire festive scenario. “He sees you when you’re sleeping. He knows when you’re awake. He knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for heaven’s sake.” It fits Santa Claus, but also God for many people.

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Immanuel Kant was a philosopher from the 1700s, and is a driving force behind today’s higher criticism method of evaluating scripture. He called questions such as ‘How do we know one is led by Holy Spirit?’ “antimonies.” That is, they were questions that could not be answered by reason, which he regarded as his sole tool of evaluating religious matters.

Specifically, said Charles B. Jones: (Great Courses: Introduction to the Study of Religion): “Immanuel Kant . . . pointed out that there were philosophical problems that he called antinomies. Antinomies were problems that were important but which could not be solved by the pure application of logic. such questions might be Is there an immortal soul or is there not? Are there rewards and punishments in life after death or are there not? Purely abstract scholastic reasoning could lead you to both affirmative and negative answers to those questions and both the affirmation and the negation could be equally well defended with equally good logical arguments.”

Thus, he pretty much regarded ALL religious tenets that way—undecidable through reason, and thereby off the table as something that could be established. But the EFFECTS of believing any given tenet was not. The effects were things he thought reason could evaluate, even if if the tenets themselves were inaccessible to reason. With this viewpoint as a backdrop, and it is now the mainstay of theological seminaries, religion almost cannot be anything else but a discipline for advancing (or infringing upon) human rights.

Nonetheless, I’ve long viewed headship in the worldwide congregation the way Kant did. It’s not something you can prove to others. It is only something one can prove to oneself, per Romans 12:2. I don’t obsess over it. However, one CAN regard the question in terms that every project needs leadership and that Witness headship is overall doing a good job. They are doing at least as well as the early Christians following the death of the apostles in keeping essential spiritual understandings unsullied. Such matters as name of God upheld, Jesus not himself God,, Kingdom is a real government, need to preach, no immortal soul, resurrection to paradise earth, the reason God permits suffering, obedience to headship be it family or congregation, “keeping the marriage bed undefiled,” and so forth. They’ve kept those concerns intact, whereas most others long ago integrated teachings that Witnesses would consider non-scriptural—such as immortal soul, and bending to the changing sexual norms of overall society.

Of course, on this subreddit, open to anyone, people can and will challenge any of those essential spiritual truths associated with Witnesses. But such teachings are not new. They all go back over 100 years. None have ever been hidden. Quite the contrary, they are relentlessly announced. If you don’t identify with those teachings, you do not become a Witness to begin with.

Not only has Witness headship kept essential truths (per the Witnesses) uncontaminated, they are the descendants of those who aided spiritual understanding to me in the first place, and for this they deserve loyalty and respect. Let others haggle it out what ‘led by holy spirit’ means. Their overall record is good enough for me. Otherwise, one can begin bickering internally and easily lose sight of just who the real enemy is. They can be and are accused of being “insular” (generally bad connotation). Alas, “no part of the world” (generally good connotation from a biblical standpoint) is the other side of the same coin. What IS insulation if not a stratagem for keeping two incompatible things separate? It does have a way of making Witness headship slow to respond to concerns of the greater world.

Questions of accountability toward God over the latest update, I considered in Part 1, speculating both ways, with greater emphasis on how most Witnesses are likely to view it. One can do no more, as gauging God’s judgment is another one of Kant’s antimonies. Time will tell. Perhaps, weight will be given to how people have often lost their lives for causes that were later reevaluated. War and politics offer a steady torrent of examples, with lives lost often in the millions. Losing life for science that turns out to be wrong is also common. In medicine, people are routinely coerced through advertising into taking drugs that may kill them—the voiceover plainly states it on those ubiquitous pharma ads of the United States. People even lose their lives over such trivial matters as sports, particularly extreme sports, coerced by coaches and societal pressure into pushing the boundaries.

All people in the above roles are lionized. It is only when lives are lost in a religious context that the perception of noble sacrifice changes. Somewhere in the equation perhaps it will be accounted that Witness insistence on avoiding transfusion spurred the development and advancement of bloodless surgery and curtailed widespread but inappropriate use of blood transfusion (once as common as “topping off the tank” after surgery), a developement saving many times more lives among the general population than have been lost among Witnesses. Somewhere, too, it might be taken into account that Witness beliefs in aggregate make it by far the safest religion out there. As a result of their beliefs, they don’t do illicit drugs, tobacco, don’t abuse alcohol, don’t do war, and shy from unnecessary overly risky activity on all fronts.

Questions as to how God leads his people (or if he does) surely must to answered by those who have acquiesced to such leadership—headship, the Bible calls it. Thing is, Kant’s insistence that spiritual considerations are unknowable via his tool of logic changes the very nature of religion into something unrecognizable to those who practice it—again, it can become nothing more than a forum for human rights. The core tenets discussed above, though important to Witnesses, are dismissed once atheism or agnosticism comes to rule the roost. When one negates the upside, all that there is left to focus on is the downside. The apostle Paul freely acknowledged that “If in this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are to be pitied more than anyone.” (1 Corinthians 15:19) As a starting position, Witnesses maintain that it is not “in this life only” that they believe in the Christ. They cannot be properly assessed by atheists or agnostics who suppose it is.

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Part 5)

Several serious adjustments to the Witnesses have come following intense criticism from those opposed. I have several times acknowledged this. For example, regarding the change in congregation discipline, I wrote: “Look, if disfellowshipped ones accumulate to the point where even Norway starts to complain, maybe it is time for a reexamination. The leaven must still be removed, and is, but the new norm—is is overdue?—is to go back from time to time and reexamine specific policies of discipline. Some have been refashioned.”

Same thing with revised policies on child sexual abuse. It came about largely in response to opponents of the faith. I acknowledged that, too: “Well, it only took a landslide of legal threats around the world to force their hand on this,” opposers grumbled, as they went on to claim credit. Why not give them the credit? Likely there is something to it. Everything in life is action/reaction and it would be foolish to deny the substance of this.”

Is the recent adjustment on blood transfusion also in response to accumulating legal obstacles? Likely it is so, at least to a degree. For my money, I’m willing to give those critics gratitude. Their challenges have resulted in better policies on several fronts.

Why have the Witnesses themselves not acknowledged these outside forces? It may be because those outside forces instigating actions against them are not interested in reform, but only in destruction of the faith. This has become quite clear in recent months. They demand “reform.” They gain it on various fronts. They’re not happy about it. They’re furious that the Witnesses have “dodged a bullet.” They prepare another one. There is no easing of hostility whatsoever from the ex community.

It’s hard not to conclude that most have simply become the “fighters against God,” that Gamaliel cautioned about in the first century. (Acts 5:39) They may not have started out that way, but immersion in the hypercritical, unforgiving, finger-pointing environment inevitably rubs off on them. This conclusion might be different were there some alternative highlighting the essential teachings that Witnesses are known for: Name of God, Jesus not himself God,, Kingdom is a real government, need to preach, no immortal soul, resurrection to paradise earth, explanation for why God allows evil and suffering, and so forth.

Were that the case, one might simply switch to that alternative source and abandon the “repressive” one. That there is no such alternative source suggests that maybe overshooting the mark from time to time is part of the package. After all, recognition that Acts 15:29 should include transfusion, even if that inclusion might result in death on occasion, was first made in the 1940s. At that time, ending one’s life so that one’s country might prevail was deemed the highest honor—nobody was ever criticized for that—and many millions of people did it. Times change. Today, large swaths of the world manage to avoid the wholesale sacrifice of life towards one’s country. The backdrop changes. Witness policies change too. Call it reform if one wishes.

With no alternative source existing for furthering essential teachings, how can one not think that calls for reform on the ex critics part are but a sham? Reforms happen and their ferocity only increases. You would think at least some would be placated, even come around. Maybe that will happen in time, but there is little sign of it thus far.

To the extent recent changes are a response to critics, does this not make the faith purely a human thing? I don’t know that holy spirit requires one to be unresponsive to outside circumstances. Hopefully, it would equip you to navigate them adroitly. If you’re going to be opposed, you want it to be for the same reason Christians were opposed in the first century. If you’re being opposed on the basis of something else, maybe it’s time to look at that something else. Even if that something else involves keeping God’s requirements, you may be able to adjust it so it cannot be framed as others telling you what to do. If that can be done, what’s not to like?

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