Now for this to be a classic religion/atheism smackdown I should have invited them in and sought to get them to articulate why they believe what they claim to believe, and suggest applying a bit of critical thinking, as well as teasing out whence they derive their notions of morality, particularly with regard to things like blood transfusions.
Just to give you a sample of some of the stuff that can be found on the website, the science pages reveal what you might call a slightly à la carte approach, with regard to cosmology and evolution in particular. They seem to have hitched themselves firmly to the Intelligent Design bandwagon (Behe and Dembski are prominently mentioned), and make much of the "some scientists are also Christians" argument, although given that the JWs view other more orthodox Christians as heretics and most religious scientists are (at best) more orthodox Christians rather than JWs I'm not sure I completely follow the argument.
They also throw in some references to cosmological "fine tuning", which is pretty silly (as Douglas Adams famously pointed out) but not embarrassingly so, but then they stray into lunacy by recycling the argument which goes, broadly, like this: let's assume for the sake of argument that a first lady giraffe (or whatever, you choose) evolved, by whatever mechanism - however improbable that might be, imagine the chances of a first male giraffe evolving in exactly the same way, and the two happening to meet, as they would have to have done for the newly-formed species to survive. It's absurd! Therefore, presumably, evolution is refuted and everything in the Bible is true, those being the only two possible options.
The first place I saw this offered up was by banana-enthusiast Ray Comfort a couple of years ago, and he's spent the last couple of years re-hashing the same argument (under the guise of "just asking questions") despite having it explained to him in some detail again and again and again and again and again. If I was overseeing the JWs website I might consider quietly dropping that paragraph, to be honest.
But anyway, I was busy (working, in theory at least) and they seemed like a couple of nice fresh-faced young lads, and I didn't really have the heart, not to mention the time or the patience. In any case I'm not sure their hearts were really in it, as one of them volunteered "you're probably busy" before I had a chance to say it. So I accepted a leaflet (reproduced above) in lieu of the full-scale preaching, and it turns out that their local HQ is just a few roads away in Alway. It's not as impressive as the enormous US JW HQ which can be seen from the Brooklyn Bridge, but it is a lot nearer. There's another one in Pillgwenlly as well. They're everywhere!
6 comments:
as well as teasing out whence they derive their notions of morality, particularly with regard to things like blood transfusions.
On the other hand....
To respond to the challenge posed in treating JWs, some in the medical field have pioneered bloodless techniques. By eliminating the risk of foreign tissue, human error, and blood-borne diseases, these new techniques offer a safety margin that conventional blood transfusions do not. The film Knocking states there are over 140 medical centers in North America that offer some form of bloodless surgical techniques. Might the day come, or is it even here already, when the number of lives saved through such medicine will outnumber those lost by a few members of a relatively tiny religious group that stuck to its principles amidst much opposition?
Saving lives is generally thought to be highly moral.
New Scientist magazine covered the subject in a 2008 article entitled An Act of Faith in the Operating Room. The act of faith was not withholding a transfusion. It was giving one.
The "whence they derive" bit is your problem here, though, isn't it? It's not as if the goat-herders who cooked up Leviticus were sitting around stroking their beards and saying: look, I'm not convinced about the safety and efficacy of this procedure that hasn't been invented yet, so we'll stick a blanket ban on it in here along with the stuff about shrimps and ossifrages. You either derive your ban from the infallible authority of the Bible, or from an evaluation of evidence; pick one.
Even if it were true that that passage (or the stuff in Acts or wherever else) was a sober evaluation of the evidence, how do you know the Bible is a reliable source on these matters? How would you know if you were wrong?
In any case, if you were really serious about your objection being just the result of a risk/benefit analysis, you'd be happy to allow transfusions in the most obviously dire emergencies, which I gather (since you skirt around the subject somewhat in the blog post you linked to) you are not.
Do you have a primary source for that New Scientist article? A Google search on the title reveals a dozen or so hits, every single one of them being either a blog post by you or a comment by you on someone else's blog.
I googled "New Scientist Blood Transfusion".
http://tinyurl.com/3lxo4rv
It was the first listing to come up. This took me all of two seconds. You could have done it, too. Perhaps even in less time.
if you were really serious about your objection being just the result of a risk/benefit analysis,
I am not really serious about it. I don't think I stated I was. My only point was that adhering to one of God's requirements, in the face of much criticism, and....do I even read ridicule here?....has worked out to the benefit of greater humanity. Moreover, the stand itself turns out to be medically sound, not reckless as everyone other than JWs have maintained for decades. A person is benefited by following God's counsel, even without waiting for a risk/benefit analysis.
how do you know the Bible is a reliable source on these matters? How would you know if you were wrong?
we trust the author. It's no more complicated than that.
Well, fair enough, the article exists, or, rather an article exists in NS on broadly the topic you describe (though the title you constantly quote seems to have been lost in the ether). And if the scientific consensus is that non-emergency use of blood transfusions is being overdone, then medical practice will no doubt evolve to reflect that. However:
the stand itself turns out to be medically sound
is pretty jaw-dropping. I would strongly advise your adhering to the "because the book says so" line if I were you, as that statement is just nonsense, unless the article argues against transfusion as the best treatment for someone who's just had their leg taken off in a motorcycle accident, and you know and I know that it does not.
And as for:
we trust the author
...whoa, there, Neddy. Major can of worms being opened there. Which author was that?
unless the article argues against transfusion as the best treatment for someone who's just had their leg taken off in a motorcycle accident, and you know and I know that it does not.
It does.
Look, for a person who makes much of evidence, you show a substantial resistance to reading the article itself. Do it. Have to pay a small fee for access? Do it. Research has to be free? Probably, with searching, you can even find it online free somewhere. Even the quotes in my post are sufficient to answer your question. But, by all means, get the article yourself. I don't want to be accused of "quote mining."
Or else, admit that you can't be bothered to research the opinions you make strong statements about.
There are two possibilities here, aren't there.
The first is that the article genuinely does say that in the event of a motorcyclist being wheeled into casualty having had his leg chewed off by a juggernaut and already lost many pints of blood, the best thing to do is tourniquet him up the best you can, give him some morphine and sacrifice a couple of goats. If it does say that, then it looks as if New Scientist has been guilty of the kind of contrarian silliness that it got into trouble for with the Darwin Was Wrong article back in 2009, since that flies in the face of the scientific consensus and accepted medical practice.
On the other hand, it may (and this seems more likely) say that, well, new advances have been made in a number of areas which open up the possibility of alternatives to the transfusion of whole blood, the limitations and risks of which are well known to everyone in the medical community, and of course this is both interesting and profoundly to be welcomed.
The thing is, though, that doesn't get you off the hook, since the sort of scenario you threw in a link to when you dropped into Orac's place a while back wouldn't be available, since all that potentially recyclable blood would have already been lost.
The short version of all that is: if you're going to claim to be all about the science (and you seem to be flip-flopping a bit) what you need to show is that in cases of massive blood loss where the choice is between whole blood or nothing, nothing is the better option.
Like I said, you will really be better advised here to just stick to the line of: well, that's what the book says, and it doesn't matter if we die because that'll just bump us up the guest list for heaven; there'll only be 144,000 of us after all. This doomed attempt to align your loony theology with the real world just makes it sound as if you don't really believe the fundamental tenets of your own religion. People get shunned that way you know.
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