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The story
The Christian-derived new religious movement “Jehovah’s Witnesses” informed believers worldwide on the 18th of a policy partially allowing transfusions using “other people’s blood,” according to a report by FNN based on internal documents it obtained. The group has until now refused blood transfusions outright as a matter of doctrine, but says it will continue to prohibit whole-blood transfusions specifically. On 5ch, two theories emerged over the reason for the policy shift: speculation that it was “for the treatment of a senior official in the organization,” and the view that it was “an organized move aimed at getting the cult designation lifted in Europe.” The discussion also expanded to cover the group’s history of doctrinal changes and the legal treatment of transfusion refusal in Europe.
Sat, 9/19, 13:00 JST
FNN Prime Online
The Christian-derived new religious movement “Jehovah’s Witnesses,” which has long held to a doctrine refusing blood transfusions, informed believers worldwide on the 18th of a policy partially lifting the ban on transfusions using “other people’s blood.”
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Ah, I see.
Yeah, that's exactly what I figured too lol, same here.
That's a pretty dirty way to do it, honestly.
Changing the rules to suit yourself without any consistency, lol.
If you really believed in it, you should've just refused it.
Ah, I see.
Apparently this religion used to ban marriage entirely way back when, but once the then-president got married, marriage suddenly became OK. It's all written up in "Crisis of Conscience."
Also, they used to say the end was coming so soon that even when believers died there weren't graves for them, but in 1995 they quietly walked that back (lol) and said the end wasn't imminent after all. Around that time, apparently a cemetery for executives got built on the Japan branch's land — though it's kept out of view from ordinary believers.
They're still out in front of major train stations handing out pamphlets. Everyone just walks right past them, though.
More than that — isn't the bigger factor that the Watchtower is officially designated a cult in Europe specifically because of the transfusion-refusal policy? This is probably about getting that designation lifted.
There's been a rumor circulating for over a decade now that transfusions would eventually be allowed specifically to get the cult designation removed. Believers kept denying it, though.
In Europe, banning transfusions for minors is basically treated as unconstitutional.
It's fine — they'll be resurrected.
There's been a rumor for years that transfusions would eventually be allowed in order to get the cult designation lifted in Europe.
That's because in Europe, you can't legally ban transfusions for minors.
Pretty sure it's an extended interpretation of the "you must not eat people" rule, if I remember right.
Don't you have anything you're really into? If you've got even one thing you love, that's basically a religion too.
Everyone's brainwashed on some level — me, you, everybody. In that sense we're not all that different from people who get hooked on religion.
Criminals, if you flip the perspective, are basically just people who broke free of their brainwashing.
What matters is that you keep thinking for yourself.
Nothing's more fun than religion — that's why people get hooked. There's almost nothing else that gives you the thrill of turning yourself into ultimate goodness, absolute justice incarnate.
Someone spill the inside scoop on the Witnesses 🫣
The Witnesses aren't some Japan-only religion lol
Japan actually has relatively few believers compared to elsewhere lol
To brainwash believers and drain them of money, they say things like "your family is Satan"…
Though that's common across cults like the Unification Church too.
Convert and you're spared, refuse and you're toast — old-school religions have been doing that since forever.
"Your family is Satan"? (´・ω・｀) What's that supposed to mean lol
Jehovah's Witnesses
Mormonism (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints)
The Unification Church
These three count as heterodox/heretical branches of Christianity.
Yeah, it's more twisted than orthodox mainstream Christianity.
Though honestly, the group that deviates even further from orthodox Christian doctrine than the Witnesses is that 1st-century band around Jesus of Nazareth and his twelve disciples. From the standpoint of orthodox Christian doctrine, that group was far more heretical than the Witnesses ever were.
Jehovah's Witnesses are fundamentally an end-times religion, after all. They first predicted God's Kingdom would arrive in 1914, missed it, made a bunch of other messy predictions that also missed, then said 1975 for sure — missed that too, and lost believers worldwide over it. More recently they claimed the Kingdom would come before the small group destined for heaven died out, but so many of them died of old age that they had to invent this bizarre "second group" theory — and even that stopped getting mentioned around 2018.
So now their core end-times doctrine is in shambles, and the transfusion ban they used for internal control is in shambles too. This organization probably doesn't have much longer left.
These days they've just retreated to "God will judge everything on the last day" and left it at that.
If it all comes down to just choosing a path at the end, might as well go with Buddhism's Six Realms lol
I had a classmate in high school who was a Jehovah's Witness, so I sat in on one of their study sessions a bit — I remember the doctrine being a lot more detailed than that. There was this all-red book with weirdly grotesque illustrations, Revelation or something, that broke everything down into super fine categories. Guess they've dropped all that now.
Wonder what that guy's up to these days. Haven't seen him in forever.
My parents are Jehovah's Witnesses, and when I go back home and hear them talk about it, apparently they've quietly dropped the blood-related passages in the Old Testament and now base everything solely on the "abstain from blood" line in Acts. Doesn't really make much more sense either way, but apparently something's changed now — I don't follow it too closely myself.
Background and Key Points of This Topic
Jehovah’s Witnesses is a religious organization that has, based on the biblical instruction to “abstain from blood,” doctrinally prohibited blood transfusions outright, maintaining this policy for many years across numerous countries including Japan. What’s being reported this time isn’t a full lifting of the ban, but permission to partially use “other people’s blood” — such as component transfusions — while whole-blood transfusions remain prohibited, a distinction that’s easy to miss. Opinion on the thread split over the reason for the shift: some suspected it was driven by the personal circumstance of “a senior official needing treatment,” while others saw it as “an organized policy shift aimed at getting the cult designation lifted,” given that the group has been officially designated a cult in several European countries specifically over its transfusion-refusal stance. Part of the backdrop is that in Europe, forcing transfusion refusal onto minors has been treated as a human-rights issue. Commenters also pointed to the group’s history of doctrinal changes to fit circumstances — such as the lifting of its former ban on marriage and repeated revisions to its end-times predictions — with some seeing this latest shift as simply more of the same.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (News Express+) thread “[Religion] Jehovah’s Witnesses to Partially Allow Transfusions of “Other People’s Blood” — Internal Document Obtained, Whole-Blood Ban Remains.”
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