Canadian Politics Today

I dunno. I feel like not celebrating birthdays is pretty low on the list of **** JWs do that others should care about. Maybe I'm too socially liberal, but I think if a family chooses not to celebrate birthdays that's their prerogative. This isn't something that's exclusive to JWs either. Even their bizarre views on blood transfusions. If an adult chooses to decline life-saving medical treatment, that's up to them. What gets to be a problem for me is when they refuse life-saving medical treatment for their children.

It's not just birthdays, it's all holidays, too.  No Christmas, no Mother's/Father's day, no Easter, nothing.  It causes a lot of problems for children in school.  And really, it's done as a control tactic - to sparate JW's from the mainstream and keep them from associating with people who DO celebrate those things. It's to keep them AWAY from unbelieving family.  And it does work that way.

Even as adults, my kids have expressed issues with their JW father to me - what do they talk about with him?  My daughter can't tell him how much fun it was to work the scarehouse at Halloween and show him pictures of their costumes.  My son can't ever invite him to his daughter's birthday party.  We don't go to 3X weekly religious meetings and 4X/year assemblies and conventions.  They don't have much to talk about with him because this is all bullshit to us.  It is a big deal,  not celebrating anything.

Of course, the blood transfusion issue is altogether different - actual people are dying so the government has to step in to regulate that while trying to balance "religious freedom".  Even if an adult refuses blood for themselves, (the issue often arises in conjunction with childbirth) it impacts the family - either the mother or the child or both die.  Unfortunately, JW's devised the tactic of presenting young people as "mature minors" who can make their own decision.  This is applauded.  I have attached one such article from the Awake! magazine where young people are held up as heroes for giving up their lives for the blood issue.  And another article that presents another young person and the court case that followed.

I believe the JW leadership knows their stand on blood has no biblical basis, even t hough they try to present it as such.  But they can never recant the belief now - too many people have died from following their advice and it would open them up to more lawsuits.  I know an Ex-JW who left becuase 2 weeks after his mother refused an organ transplant that was banned by the religion and died, the religion suddenly reverses its stand decided it was okay for her to have done it.  Too late for her, of course.