Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Anonymous Combats The Watchtower Society

Anonymous has taken aim at the Watchtower Society of Jehovah's Witnesses for their policies of secrecy concerning child abusers in that religion. They are also upset about the Watchtower Society practice of allowing and even encouraging known sexual predators to represent the religion in their door to door ministry. This means that they are also negligently putting the public in danger in addition to their own children.

They have produced several videos about this. It appears that they are in the process of trying to hack the official Watchtower websites. They also want to obtain the extensive list of known child abusers that is thought to be kept at Watchtower headquarters. It is thought that some of these known pedophiles are serving in positions of authority as congregation elders or ministerial servants.

The Watchtower Society claims that known child abusers are never allowed to serve in positions of authority. However, private correspondence to the elders shows that they are only referring to people who are known to be child abusers by the congregation or the community. Since they try very hard to keep these cases secret, it is likely that many elders and ministerial servants have a history of child abuse that is known by the Watchtower Society, but unknown by their congregations.

It will be very interesting to see how this develops. Although I'm not able to condone illegal activity, a revealing of Watchtower secrets could pressure the Watchtower Society to reform their dangerous policies and could help to protect many children in the future.

In any case, I'm grateful that awareness of this serious problem is becoming more common outside of the Ex-Jehovah's Witness community. I hope this will either result in change or a decline of the Watchtower Society's influence.

See also this discussion about Anonymous.