Free Republic

In case you’re wondering how some religions are coping with the outbreak of COVID-19, just look to the Jehovah’s Witnesses to see how absurd reactions can get. In a recent video featuring Governing Body member Stephen Lett, he absolutely delights in the disease because he sees it as a signal that Armageddon is imminent. So the events unfolding around us are making clear, [more] than ever, that we’re living in the final part of the Last Days. Undoubtedly, the final part of the final part of the Last Days, shortly before the last day of the Last Days.

A Jehovah's Witness is alleging her religious freedom rights were violated when a California agency withdrew a job offer because she declined to sign a loyalty oath promising to defend the state and U.S. constitutions. In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Sacramento, Brianna Bolden-Hardge says her sincere religious beliefs mandate that her allegiance is to the Kingdom of God and she cannot engage in any sort of violence in support of a human government. The 31-year-old woman had accepted a position with the California State Controller's Office payroll department. Bolden-Hardge asked for a religious accommodation that would...

On a cool evening in October, Alain Malcolm, 20, walked into a vacant two-story colonial house in Bristol, Connecticut. Two members of a local internet vigilante group — who regularly try to expose and shame alleged child predators they entice online — were waiting for him. Malcolm was tall and handsome. The oldest son of Jamaican immigrants, he wholly subscribed to the idea of the American dream. In high school, Malcolm was vice president of the Future Business Leaders of America club, assistant captain of the tennis and swim teams and a member of the student council and Model United...

If you had told radical feminist and political activist Natasha Chart five years ago that she would be fired from her advocacy job for objecting to the prostitution of minors, she wouldn't have believed that anyone could be fired for that reason. Yet Chart, 43, who hails from New York and is the board chair of the radical feminist group Women's Liberation Front, was terminated in August 2015 from her political advocacy job for doing exactly that. She opted to speak with The Christian Post, she said, "because I have been hoping that someone could be bothered to care that...

With the death Thursday of Prince Rogers Nelson, you may see a strange mix on your Facebook feed of sex and religion. That’s because perhaps one of the raunchiest, steamiest pop culture figures in the past quarter-century was a conservative Christian. Religious and spiritual themes ran through a huge amount of his work, including this tiny sampling of lyrics:

The late music icon Prince rarely spoke about his personal faith, but he did open up about his religious beliefs seven years ago and why he didn't vote for President Obama. Although Prince didn't publicly share much about his religion, he was a practicing Jehovah's Witness, and confirmed such with TV host Tavis Smiley during a 2009 interview. When Prince told Smiley that he didn't vote in political elections, the singer explained saying, "The reason why is that I'm one of the Jehovah's Witnesses and we've never voted. That's not to say I don't think … President Obama is a...

The Jehovah’s Witness New Testament An ex-Jehovah’s Witness, now Catholic, who we at Catholic Answers helped to come to Christ in his Church, gave me some wonderful gifts by way of old books, many of them first edition, published by the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, the publishing arm of the Jehovah’s Witnesses run by the leaders of their sect. Of note among these great gifts is a first edition copy of The New World Translation of the Christian Greek Scriptures, the official Jehovah’s Witness translation of the New Testament, first published by the Watchtower in 1950.It is not the...

Jehovah's Witnesses, Hells Angels, Serial Killers, Dissociative Identity Disorder and a 14-year-old Run-Away is the author's response to the crippling experience she says began with the Jehovah's Witnesses in 1983 and continues to this day. The victim of a sexual assault by a complete stranger at the age of 13, she writes that she was disfellowshipped the following year for having a defiant attitude and ostracized from her entire family system--though she was not a baptized member. Her young life quickly fell into wide-spread disarray and dysfunction as depression and mental illness, addiction and abusive relationships became her tragic way...

The High Court has made an order allowing the Coombe Hospital to carry out an emergency blood transfusion on a baby girl born prematurely last week. Her parents are Jehovah’s Witnesses and object to the procedure on religious grounds. .. The baby girl does not at present a require a blood transfusion as she is not at immediate risk. The child who weighs just under 1 kilogram was born last week 3 months prematurely. Counsel Eileen Barrington for the hospital said there is a fear the girl may develop an infection. In this situation a blood transfusion could be a...

A Jehovah's Witness in Suffolk, England, Paul Wood, has been accused of sexually assaulting three girls and attempting to rape one of them. According to reports, the Jehovah's Witness attempted to rape a 14 year-old girl in his home in Sudbury. The girl, who was hit in the face while the Witness attempted to rape her, kept the trauma of the incident to herself for three years before she and another young victim told Jehovah's Witnesses elders. But the Jehovah's Witnesses elders did not intervene. They simply left it to the girls to decide for themselves whether to go to...

Detectives are investigating whether the article, published in July’s edition of The Watchtower, is in breach of Britain’s religious hatred laws. The article, published in the magazine which is distributed by Jehovah's Witnesses across the globe, reportedly warned followers to avoid "false teachers" which it condemned as being "mentally diseased". "Suppose that a doctor told you to avoid contact with someone who is infected with a contagious, deadly disease," part of the article stated. "You would know what the doctor means, and you would strictly heed his warning. Well, apostates are 'mentally diseased', and they seek to infect others with...

The Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, better known as the Jehovah’s Witnesses, are moving out of Brooklyn after over 100 years, planning to establish a mega-complex in upstate New York. . They’ve started to put their multi-million dollar properties on the market last week.The Jehovah’s Witnesses are relocating to Warwick, N.Y., where they plan to build a 250-acre complex, the World Headquarters of Jehovah’s Witnesses, on a newly acquired estate. The new headquarters will accommodate some 8,000 staff members, who will all live and work under the same roof.Even though the Society has yet to secure building permits at the...

Building on Jim Coufal’s “The Role of Fear and Guilt in Religion,” it is a simple fact that the Bible does not prohibit blood transfusions. If you are bleeding to death, it is more dangerous to refuse a blood transfusion than to take one. Bloodless surgeries are great if they can be elective. One-third of all trauma deaths are from blood loss. Jehovah’s Witnesses elders will investigate and disfellowship any Jehovah Witness who takes a blood transfusion; to say the issue is a ‘personal conscience matter’ is subterfuge to keep the Watchtower out of lawsuits. ..Estimates of the number of...

According to the teaching of the Jehovah's Witnesses, their global evangelical work is the fulfillment of Revelations 7:9...The Jehovah's Witnesses in their teaching, claim that the "Great Crowd" in Revelation refers to ordinary members of the Jehovah's Witnesses organization and that they are different from a special select group of "144000" represented in the present world by the leadership of the Jehovah's Witnesses organization referred to in affected modesty as the "discrete slave class." The special class of 144,000, according to the Governing Body of the Jehovah's Witnesses which sets the doctrines and teachings of the group, will rule as...

I used to spend a lot of time on the subject of the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society. It was the second major group I tackled and studied. I still have a huge number of their old, old books, shelves of them, actually. I also have a whole set of what are called "bound volumes," yearly compilations of all of the Watchtower and Awake! magazines. Of course, much of this is now available digitally on the Watchtower Library CD Rom (which isn't easy to get hold of, but not impossible). Anyway, I just checked the dark corner of one of...

Church membership for more than a third of the nation's largest churches took a hit last year while non-Orthodox Christian churches are on the rise, a new report on denominations finds. The Southern Baptist Convention, the nation's second largest denomination, reported a .42 percent decline in membership to 16,160,088 members, according to National Council of Churches' 2011 Yearbook of American & Canadian Churches, released Monday. Still dominating the list of the nation's top 25 mainline churches is the Catholic Church, which posted a .57 growth at 68.5 million members. But a few church bodies, regarded as cults by some Christians,...

A recent article in a Jehovah's Witnesses magazine shows a clearly slanted agenda, baldly espousing the Witnesses' "anti-holiday" doctrine. While such dogma in a Watch Tower publication doesn't come as any surprise, I feel the need to refute the arguments put forth.

This is my 16th Easter.For the first 38 years of my life I did not celebrate Easter because I was one of JehovahÂ’s Witnesses, a pseudo- Christian group with a very strange economy of salvation. It is not easy to describe life in a cult like JehovahÂ’s Witnesses. It is very dark. Even their light is darkness.JehovahÂ’s Witnesses do not believe in the Trinity, so they do not believe in the deity of Christ. They believe that Jesus was Michael the Archangel before he came to earth, and that after he was resurrected, he went back to being Michael the...

You may remember that The Star Spangled Banner, America's national anthem, was written in 1814 by Francis Scott Key, but did you know it is a religious song? Originally written as a poem, Francis Scott Key instructed others to sing the words to the tune "Anacreon in Heaven" written by John Stafford Smith. Although "heavenly" sounding in title, The Anacreotic Song was actually a bar song that got "saved" so-to-speak. Here are the patriotic words to the first stanza, which most U.S. citizens learned as children and still sing before baseball games, and every time one of our athletes win...

HARRISBURG, Pa. - The state of Pennsylvania cannot force a seriously ill prison inmate to undergo a blood transfusion , even if it could save his life, a Commonwealth Court judge said in a decision released Wednesday. Senior Judge Keith B. Quigley said inmate Anthony Lindsey's wishes must be respected under the First Amendment, whether they are based on religion or something else. Lindsey, 37, an inmate at the Laurel Highlands state prison in Somerset, refuses to allow a transfusion because it violates his religious beliefs as a Jehovah's Witness. A doctor at the prison said in court papers that...