If you take ‘whole-blood’ or autologous (use your own stored blood) you will be shunned by your family and friends.The Watchtower organization is in control of your life. I don’t want someone else’s blood in me anymore that I would want their other body parts heart,kidney,liver unless I needed a lifesaving transplant so goes the same with EMERGENCY blood transfusions.

Blood issue at a glance: The Watchtower leadership of the Jehovah’s Witnesses say NO blood, BUT they actually DO ALLOW some blood “fractions”.
Problem is this variance is so esoteric complicated that by the time special elders appear in the ER with the rule book, the JW patient is at the point of no return,bleeding to death.
NOW,they blame the hospital staff for not having a “cell saver” machine instead of the Watchtower leaders who are responsible for making the rules.

I was born a 3rd generation Jehovah’s Witness in 1957 and endured the Watchtower’s no blood commandment with longstanding bleeding Crohn’s disease.The Watchtower leadership expects followers to die for their dogma and many have.The medical staff get blamed and are ‘damned if they do damned if they don’t’.

In 20 years there will be artificial blood for anyone who chooses it,putting an end to this drama.

I am Danny Haszard a real lifelong JW with a scary 28 year chronic bleeding disease who “took his stand on blood” and refused it countless times

http://www.towertotruth.net/Articles/blood_transfusions.htm Will you die for a lie?

For instance, your attempt at psychoanalyzing my motives is entirely wrong in every detail, and seems more intended to insult rather than to express an understanding. I will not respond with similar insults to you because I am more interested in positive dialogue than fruitless invective. If as an atheist my motives for wanting to help people are a puzzlement to you then you should consider that your assumptions about atheists, in particular that we are selfish and incapable of altruistic feelings and acts, are simply incorrect. I suspect that you have been told such things by others, but here you are in the company of several atheists who do not fit those stereotypes at all. Consider that you could be wrong. You have nothing to lose but a barrier that separates you from other people. Your faith in God will not be threatened if you find that your beliefs about atheists are not correct.

You are not alone. Many people of faith visit this site and a few of them assume all the awful things about atheists that you have described. It’s not entirely their fault; they were taught these stereotypes by others whom they trusted. Those who have the courage and the quality of fairness to stick around and get to know us by asking rather than telling come away with their faith intact and their bigotry removed, and we are all the better for it.

If you persist in making inflammatory personal remarks about people here, then of course eventually someone will get impatient and will respond with a barrage of insults. There have been a few visitors who were so invested in keeping their prejudices that they worked hard to provoke anger, and when an atheist finally succumbed and flew into them, they left, satisfied that their bias had been confirmed. I hope that you are above such an immature and transparent tactic as that, and that we can get to know you, and you us, on a level ground of respect.

You’re an atheist, one who believes in natural selection, “survival of the fittest”. Why interfere with the natural selection process? It’s very unusual to find an atheist who wants to help people in need, or finds ‘joy’ in doing so.

Not that trope.

Stick around, you might learn something about atheists, David Lester.

Also, you might learn something about science, such as the fact that “survival of the fittest” doesn’t mean “kill the weak.” In human society, it means the opposite. For humanity to survive as a species, a surplus of social generosity is required.

Is it REALLY unusual to find an atheist who wants to help people? The atheists I know are loving, giving, generous, thoughtful human beings. How many atheists do you personally know, David Lester?

On a final note, does donating blood make you feel superior? Have I offended your self-righteous bigotry by refusing your miracle blood? Are you some sort of self-appointed Messiah?

Who peed in your cornflakes? Why are you being such a jerk?

Did you have a bad childhood? Were you neglected or abused? Did mom or dad never hug you? Did one or both of your parents die when you were young?

SOB…. you’re gonna make me cry….

Give it a rest, kiddo. You’re coming off like a big fat jerk. You’re not convincing anyone being like this… are you at least enjoying showing everyone your jerkiness?

I hold Jen’s fascist, hysterical comments as an example of how censure and violence pervades the atheist dogma.

Because I said this

4. Davis Lester, you mentioned Hitler in your very first post on this site, Congrats, you are full of fail. Hermant, can you make first-time posters sign something saying they won’t give us these damn atheist bingos before they post? Pretty please?

I hold that you, as a vistor to this blog, failed to read a single other post before trying to cover ground we have already covered dozens and dozens of times. I neither threatened you with violence nor asked Hermant to remove you from the site, so I do not see how I offering either violence or censure. I also don’t see how this makes me “hysterical” and I have a hunch you wouldn’t have used that word to describe a male poster. And do you really, in your heart of hearts, think I am a fascist? That is just dumb.

What’s pathetic is when not nearly enough of my fellow human beings are willing to make a temporary sacrifice for the betterment of others less fortunate.

And what’s disgusting is when people wrap up their self-absorption and unwillingness to help others in a cloak of religiously-inspired self-righteousness.

~5 million people a year in this country get blood transfusions. Many of those blood transfusions save lives in an actual, verifiable way. As opposed to…how many people is it a year whose lives are saved by the Jehovah’s Witness cult?

Mr Wade, so you don’t want non-blood medical treatment that runs no risk whatsoever of picking up life-threatening infectious diseases, that’s okay. But I hope you never suffer serious blood loss. Perhaps you have accepted a blood transfusion, I don’t know. But will you play ‘Russian Roulette’ with your life and risk contracting AIDS, CJD, Malaria, Cancer, Hepatitis C or other bloodbourne pathogens? What would you like to risk shortening your life with? A bit of AIDS perhaps? Or maybe you would like cancer of the liver, or kidney failure? Don’t worry about me, I get the BEST treatment; non-blood volume expanders, treatment that doesn’t involve anybody’s blood, and doesn’t run any risk of contracting any lethal infectious diseases. Let me educate you; there is saline solution, (the most simplest and inexpensive solution) dextran, Haemaccel, and lactated Ringer’s solution. Hetastarch (HES) is a newer volume expander, and according to ‘Journal of Burn Care and Rehabilitation’: “can be safely recommended for burns patients who object to blood products.” At least now, if you do contract a life threatening disease from a blood transfusion, you won’t die of ignorance. And by the way, yes I did lose a lot of blood once in an accident. I was given a non-blood volume expander without any problem. The hospital and its staff were excellent. Associates of mine have also undergone serious open heart by-pass surgery, joint replacement surgery; one individual had a liver transplant all using non-blood volume expanders. Believe it or not Mr Wade, but people sometimes do die on the operating table or when they’ve lost a lot of blood, with or without a blood transfusion. But of course, most importantly for myself and my friends, we all remain faithful to the God we believe in, even if we were to die.

Your final paragraph is a scream. Are you really trying to tell me that you are unaware of the spread of AIDS through blood transfusions? This is a point of fact so well documented I didn’t bother making any specific references. Surely you can’t be that ignorant! Try looking at africaaction.org which contains a report from the W.H.O. in which they estimate that for Africa, HIV is transmitted to a minimum of 500,000 people per year through unsafe medical injections and blood transfusions. And in one province in China, during the 1990’s, as many as 1,000,000 or more people were infected with HIV through blood selling practices. There’s more statistics at onemillionafricanlives.org/critical. “In Sub-Sahara Africa, 24.5 million people live with HIV. As many as 10% of these people contracted the disease from infected blood during blood transfusions.” Do the math Mr Wade- that’s 2,450,000 lives destroyed by blood transfusions. On a final note, does donating blood make you feel superior? Have I offended your self-righteous bigotry by refusing your miracle blood? Are you some sort of self-appointed Messiah? What do you care whether someone lives or dies anyway? You’re an atheist, one who believes in natural selection, “survival of the fittest”. Why interfere with the natural selection process? It’s very unusual to find an atheist who wants to help people in need, or finds ‘joy’ in doing so. You sound more like an agnostic than an atheist. You appear a little mixed up there. Does the issue of Gods existence still bother you? Are you trying to get in touch with your spiritual side by helping people? It is a fact that everyone has a spiritual need, it’s just that some either have difficulty finding it or they suppress it for some reason. Did you have a bad childhood? Were you neglected or abused? Did mom or dad never hug you? Did one or both of your parents die when you were young? On the other hand, I guess your quest to preserve life in the way you see fit, and the atheist dogma you follow is probably because you believe the mortal existence you live now, is the only experience of life you’ll ever have.

That and babies. But let’s try to be friendly.

What, you want us to be friendly with baby eating atheists? ;o)

Philosopher Jeff said,

November 7, 2007 at 8:17 pm

I agree with the majority of comments and disagree with Hemant. The doctors did the correct thing by not forcing a transfusion.

China’s drs do, but I don’t think they have a very good outgoing society either. There’s too much control of people there… but then again, they are Communist or something like that aren’t they? I wouldn’t want to live in that sort of society where they tell me how many kids I can have, what drug to take for this or that, force my mouth open for this treatment. It’s not very humane after a while.

An eminent medical Professor stated quite rightly, “The evolution of our understanding in this field shows that blood transfusions must one day die out.”

That professor needs a thump on the head. My older son is A+ and a self-proclaimed Buddhist. A couple days after he donated, my aunt’s bleeding ulcers were so bad, that if she had not been found when she was, she would have died. Ironcally, she’s A+ and had 3 quarts of blood. It brings tears to my eyes that it may have been my son who saved her life. Without it, she would have died.

I told her about the irony and she said maybe it was God’s doing. I can’t argue with those beliefs. I won’t argue with those beliefs, because they because they aren’t life threatening. I’m just thankful my son was big enough to donate and that he had donated blood a few days before, because if he hadn’t, the outcome might not have been so good. Maybe it was coinsidence, maybe it wasn’t, but to think that my son might have been the one who saved my aunt’s life brings mixed emotion tears to my eyes. 67 is too young to die and if a young man of 18 y.o. and the person I gave life to was the one who saved her life, it makes the irony of it all even that much more powerful.