I had withheld writing about this because I thought it was obvious what our unchanging stand has been on this subject, but some have been negatively affected by false and misleading claims so much that it is listed among the major claims against us by sociologists. (Perhaps, as psychologists, they take the accusation personally.) Disgruntled former members claim that Jehovah's Witnesses used to prohibit consulting a psychiatrist. This claim originated with a former member, a psychiatrist who used to treat Jehovah's Witnesses. After leaving the way, he claimed that we had a higher number of those with mental disorders than the general populace. (I addressed this claim in another post .) Obviously the claim was bogus. Being a JW at the time while treating JW's, of course he had a larger number of JW clients than non-JW clients because they trusted him to do their treatment over anyone from the world. (A trust which he ultimately betrayed.) Thus he got taken by data bias. He c

Originally posted: Wednesday, April 13, 2022 at 10:52 PM. Some paragraphs have been added or modified. When filling a jar up with sand, if you fail to pick out the rocks, then the rocks limit the sand. That is why so many cult lists fail. The anti-cultist is so busy trying to catch cults in his figurative cult jar with a bunch of identifiers that he forgets about what is not a dangerous or destructive cult so that the non-cults get caught in the jar. Thus, in order to identify what is a cult, we must first take out the rocks by identifying what is not a cult. In each cult identifier post, we will be considering the differences between what is reasonable and unreasonable and possible areas in between. Each post will clearly identify the effects of the related traits under discussion, whether positive or negative, or both. Some may seem to have a negative impact at first blush, but actually have a net positive result in the end, such as reasonably penalizing someone who breaks a rule, a