Insight on the News
Hospitals Seek Witnesses
The press reports that a few California hospitals are now actively seeking Jehovah’s Witnesses as patients. Some hospitals have been reluctant to operate on the Witnesses because they refuse blood transfusions on religious grounds. Why the change in attitude? Since the economy of the medical industry is in trouble, administrators are looking for additional sources of revenue. But another reason is given. “Recent medical advances making bloodless surgery—the term used to describe operations in which transfusions of blood or blood parts are withheld—less risky also have made the hospitals and doctors involved more willing to operate on Witnesses,” reports the Daily News of Van Nuys, California. “Most forms of surgery can be performed without giving blood if you are very cautious and patient with the patient,” admits general surgeon Dr. Sheldon N. Lipshutz.
Although Jehovah’s Witnesses accept nonblood alternatives, such as saline solutions, they refuse to ‘thrust aside their faith and good conscience’ for a medical practice that is unscriptural. (1 Timothy 1:19; Acts 15:20) They have found that obeying God’s laws is also medically sound. “Fifteen or 20 years ago, I didn’t want (Witnesses) in my hospital,” one administrator told the Daily News. “Today there are too many cases of AIDS and hepatitis spreading through transfusions not to question the desirability of routine blood transfusions. The Jehovah’s Witness point of view makes increasing sense.”
Learning to Do Good
Why did some in Nazi Germany risk their lives in order to save or help people in danger of persecution or death while others who could have helped turned the other way? Dr. Samuel Oliner, a sociologist at Humboldt State University in Arcata, California, along with his associates, is endeavoring to find out. Already, reports The New York Times, their findings “converge on the formative experiences people have in childhood, which seem to make them, many years later, more predisposed than others to come to the aid of the distressed.”
Concurring is Ervin Staub, a psychologist at the University of Massachusetts. “The parents who transmit altruism most effectively,” said Dr. Staub, “exert a firm control over their children. Although they are nurturant, they are not permissive. They use a combination of firmness, warmth and reasoning. They point out to children the consequences to others of misbehavior—and good behavior. And they actively guide the child to do good, to share, to be helpful.”
It is no wonder, then, that parents are instructed to bring their children up “in the discipline and mental-regulating of Jehovah” because “he that does good originates with God.”—Ephesians 6:4; 3 John 11.
No “Truth”?
“You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free,” Jesus stated at John 8:32. Yet a growing trend is to think that the goal of knowing the truth is unattainable. Note the remarks of Bishop John S. Spong, as quoted in The Sunday Star-Ledger of Newark, New Jersey: “We must . . . move from thinking we have the truth and others must come to our point of view to the realization that ultimate truth is beyond the grasp of all of us.” He added: “Every religious tradition . . . revolves around a center none of us finally can claim or capture.” Speaking to a convention of some 600 Episcopal clergymen and lay delegates, the bishop questioned “the traditional, imperialistic claims of Christianity.”
But if “ultimate truth” is not to be found, why did Jesus insist that God must be worshiped “with spirit and truth”? Or why did he state that his followers would be guided “into all the truth”? (John 4:23, 24; 16:13) And why would the apostle Paul state that it is God’s will that individuals should “come to an accurate knowledge of truth”? (1 Timothy 2:3, 4) Or why did he speak of some doctrines as being a ‘deviation from the truth’? (2 Timothy 2:18; 4:3, 4) Certainly, as with the early Christian congregation, a group of worshipers having the truth can be expected to be present today.