Sheep and Goats

Tag: Russian Orthodox Church

  • Is the Russian Orthodox Church behind the Perscution of Jehovah’s Witnesses?

    The Russian Orthodox Church is delighted with the ban, but insists it was not behind it. I’m inclined to believe them. Both it and the Kremlin are manipulated by a voracious anti-cult movement.

    Putin says: “I don’t understand why Jehovah’s Witnesses are persecuted” in response to a question, and then, unbidden, later in the meeting he returns to the topic. It seems to genuinely confuse him. since he observes that they “are Christians, too,”

    I did a lot of research on this for the book. I think the driving factor is the anti-cult movement. Indirectly, of course, it is all the fault of Babylon the Great, for if it had represented God appropriately, there wouldn’t be such strong irreligious movements. So, indirectly, yes. Directly, no.

    Q: What about this woman, who created the policies—Irina Yarovaya – Wikipedia" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irina_Yarovaya, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yarovaya_law

    She is a “reactionary” political figure, as stated, but few of her proposals involve religion. They are a reaction to genuine terrorism, extending into at-home ways to prevent the masses from plotting to do mischief, assuming that most mischief comes from abroad. The intention is also to quell political unrest. Note the wiki artical says nothing of religion. 

    “Sects” of any sort have never been popular in Russia, so she does not exclude them, but it is not the main thrust of legislation she sponsored. It is the  anti-cultists who have engineered the idea that non-mainstream religion in general, and Jehovah’s Witnesses in particular, can also be “extremist.” There is one government minister in particular, Alexander Dvorkin, who is also VP of a large French anti-cult organization [FECRIS], who pushed hard for the ban. Recall that it was France that tried to eliminate Jehovah’s Witnesses years ago by imposing a 60% tax on their activity. Anti-cultists thrives in France. The country might even be considered its birthplace. 

    Dvorkin’s plan is to separate Jehovah’s Witnesses from their “controlling” organization, after which he thinks they will be assimilated into regular society. (“Strike the shepherd, and the sheep will scatter” is how the Bible would put it.) The idea that the Jehovah’s Witness organization can be banned but not the religion itself is so duplicitous that ordinary people cannot get their heads around it and just figure it is open hunting season on the people themselves.

    Accordingly, a certain court thinks it a fine idea to ban the JW Bible, the New World Translation, and rules to that effect. The court employs a group of mercenary experts who will issue whatever findings are desired—they are well known for this, and not just in the field of religion. The NWT doesn’t say ‘Bible’ on the cover, and the “experts” persuade the court that is significant. It also suffers from the Jehovah factor, the court frets, ignoring that the Russian synodal translation also uses the name. Genesis 19:25, the verse that God destroyed everything alive in Sodom and Gomorrah, was seized upon as evidence to the NWT’s extremism, even after it was pointed out that all Bible translations say the same thing!

    This is farther than Dvorkin intended to go. The NWT is a Bible. He doesn’t like it, but it plainly is one. He thinks it a mistake to ban the NWT, for it makes his country look like a squad of ignoramuses. I say ban it for exactly that reason. See if Russians will thank him for how his policies have trashed the reputation of their country.

    He is also against the SWAT team style tactics employed against our brothers. But again, it is a natural consequence of his ideas. If you declare people “extremist” and then arrest them as you would a jaywalker, you declare to all the world that they are not extremist and that you know it very well. So the violent arrests are consistently necessary.. 

    Cops also come to see it as an easy path to promotion. What can look better on one’s resume that cracking down on a group of “extremists?” Older cops still remember the “good old days” when all “sects” were a proper target of wrath, even as was the ROC itself. 

    A common theme in most news reports is that nobody quite knows what is behind the excessive war on Jehovah’s Witnesses & how it got so out of hand. Journalists don’t know, human rights people don’t know,  Putin doesn’t know, the ROC doesn’t know, Dvorkin himself claims not to know, nor do the Witnesses themselves. Unfortunately, when you release the hounds of hell, you find you cannot control just how or who they maul. It is why I consider the subtitle of my book well chosen: “Searching for the Why.” I end up floating the notion—I don’t dwell on in, for my intended audience is mostly secular—that when people cannot identify a human reason, they can be forgiven for thinking there may be a superhuman one.

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    See: I Don’t Know Why We Persecute Jehovah’s Witnesses—Searching for the Why

  • If You Occupy Yourself with Spreading the Gospel You Just Might be a Christian

    When Vladimir Putin said Jehovah’s Witnesses are Christians too, “I don’t know why we persecute them,” Russian Witnesses were cautiously optimistic. They weren’t naive. They didn’t forget where they were. But when Darth Vader says, “I don’t know why we’re so mean to the Light Side,” you sort of think that maybe he will stop.

    Did the top brass of the Russian Orthodox Church pull him aside to say, “What is wrong with you, Vladimir? Get with it! They are not Christian at all!” It is pure speculation, but for whatever reason, nothing came of Putin’s words. In fact, it has been just the opposite; persecution of JWs has only increased.

    Would they dare talk back to him that way? They might. Countries that nurture a “house church” and suppress everyone else expect that church to be the spiritual equivalent of the military, a force to bind together the nation. The military top brass no doubt speaks freely before Putin, so why not the Church top brass?

    At any rate, a senior cleric, Metropolitan Hilarian, is adamant that no way are Jehovah’s Witnesses Christian. Crowing at the aftermath of the 2017 ban on the Witness organization, he said: “It's hard to deny that these cultists will remain and continue their activity… but at least they'll stop openly claiming to be a Christian faith, in other words, in the market place of existing Christian confessions this product will no longer be on display.”

    The reason that Putin did think Jehovah’s Witnesses were Christian, most likely, is that at the annual Kremlin picnic, his third cousin, with an interest in the Bible, bended his ear on things that Christians do. “Go, therefore, and make disciples,” Jesus said, as well as, “This good news of the kingdom will be declared in all the inhabited earth” at which point Putin reflected on who most visibly does this, openly approaching people, Bible in hand, right in their homes. It means Witnesses are Christian, he would have told himself.

    But this is plebeian thinking, the Church clerics convince him. He must not be such a donkey in this regard. He is one of the ruling elite and he must act it. He must not be taken in by the fact that JWs alone, as a lifelong course, take the Christian message directly to people wherever they happen to be. It’s a ruse. They’re really not Christian.

    They’ll have to correct BusinessInsider.com, too. Lamenting that Jehovah’s Witnesses do not vote, it nevertheless describes them as a “Christian denomination.” This identification as a Christian denomination is picked up by most secular sources.

    Maybe religionnews.com can straighten them out. “Scholars call out Putin and the ‘escalation’ of persecution against Jehovah’s Witnesses in Russia,” it announces on October 2, 2020. It is a thorough article. It included the assessment of the scholars, that they “are left with the impression that Jehovah’s Witnesses in Russia are being punished for their success in gaining new adherents, and because they are perceived as a ‘foreign’ religion.”

    Still, it cannot close the article without stating: “They are not recognized as Christian by Orthodox and other Christian traditions, primarily because they do not believe in the Trinity.”

    Ah—there is the sticking point! It is the Trinity. Lack of it is a deal-breaker. This is very strange because virtually all scholars will concede that the Trinity doctrine was 300 years in development and was cemented into place first only at the 325 CE council of Nicaea. It is not explicitly taught in the Bible. Nearly all verses said to support it, were they to be seen in any other context, would be instantly dismissed as figure-of-speech. When the impaled Jesus cries out, “My God, my God—why have you forsaken me?—What! has he forsaken himself? It makes no sense. Nonetheless, it has become the steamroller that flattens all before it.

    Again and again you get the sense that the ordinary people of common sense, barring only some indoctrinated religionists, accept in a heartbeat that Jehovah’s Witnesses are Christian because they most notably approach people with the Bible. Too, their stand of non-involvement in wars most notably dovetails with Jesus’ words that “by this all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another,” and that “all who live by the sword will die by the sword.” People of common sense instantly recognize this.

    But the higher you climb in the religion food chain, the more you find ones who have educated themselves beyond this common sense. I wrote previously of how the aforementioned religionnews.com doesn’t even seem to have a category for Jehovah’s Witnesses, and furthermore opined that such a circumstance might be perfectly agreeable to the JW headquarters—on a list of “religions of the world,” they do not appear.

    It is reminiscent of Victor V Blackwell, a lawyer representing our people during the tumultuous World War II years. He writes of how he would point out for this or that small town judge that, per the scriptural definition, Witnesses enrolled in full time service of preaching and teach the Word were plainly ministers. However, those judges recognized as ministers only persons who “had a church” and “got paid.”

     

    See: I Don’t Know Why We Persecute Jehovah’s Witnesses—Searching for the Why