What do you know? The Jehovah’s Witnesses have kept a database of accused child abusers for more than 2-decades. It hasn’t done much good, though.
Rooted in Deuteronomy 19:15 — “No single witness may convict another for any error or any sin that he may commit” — the two-witness rule states that, barring a confession, no member of the organization can be officially accused of committing a sin without two credible eyewitnesses who are willing to corroborate the accusation. Critics say this rule has helped turn Witness communities into havens for child molesters, who rarely commit crimes in the presence of bystanders.
Don’t take your kids to church on Sunday morning; take them to the park, instead.
Also, though it’s incidental to the thrust of the story, notice what happened when one of the husbands refused to go to church any longer.
That November, as he and Kimmy were preparing to spend the weekend at a friend’s house, Mark suddenly stopped packing and told Kimmy he couldn’t maintain the facade anymore. He never attended another meeting.
Though Kimmy kept going to meetings, her Witness friends pressured her to leave her marriage. “They would just come out of the blue with unsolicited advice,” she told me. “‘Don’t forget, Kimmy, Jehovah comes first!’ ‘At some point, you’ll have to make your choice!’”
Again, then: The 1st-Century church was a cult, and the New Testament is the literature of a cult. The thing that saves Christianity from itself is that most people have too much sense and decency to be good Christians. Read the entire piece for a view of what life is like amongst those who don’t.