Well, in order to warn against the danger of apostates someone must have listened to what they have said. Or is David Splane just speaking about the results that he has heard about that come to witnesses that listen to any challenge of the religion without knowing himself what that challenge is? Is he including himself when he says: “We are not so strong, so spiritual, so intelligent that we can’t be affected by the poison of apostate ideas.” Does he too protect himself? If so, then how can he possibly know what he is talking about? How can his warning be trusted?
It is much more likely that Splane has listened and has found out that the arguments put forth by apostates are irrefutable. Consider this. In an attempt to have ex-JW activist Lloyd Evans removed from the panel of contributors to the IICSA hearings, the Watchtower society submitted a 9 page document accusing him of hate speech against Jehovah’s Witnesses. In order compile their list of allegations someone had to scour 26 of his videos that had been uploaded to his Youtube channel. Lloyd later went on to publicly show that in every instance his comments were taken out of context, thus completely debunking every single charge. But, contrary to Splane’s advice, think of the hours that had to be spent carefully scrutinizing apostate videos in order to compile their list of allegations. Rather than prove that apostate ideas are poisonous, does this not indicate that the organization is trying to hide from their members the truth of what they say?
That is why Splane gives his audience no examples or publicly refute anything the so called apostates have said. The only defense he has to offer witnesses is to encourage them to run and hide. But this is not fighting and is completely contrary to the title and purpose of his talk. Rather than encourage witnesses to run to the safety of a sterile environment in order to avoid encountering any ideas that could be poisonous to their faith, would it not be better to provide an antidote? But sadly there is nothing in his entire talk that strengthens the spiritual immune system of his listeners. All he can do is label anyone that disagrees with him as someone with a contagious incurable disease, like the Jews regarded anyone with leprosy and urge his listeners to avoid them.
But consider again the analogy of the bottle of poison. Actually, it is a fact that some beneficial medicines would be poisonous if used incorrectly, combined with certain foods or substances or if too high a dosage is taken. If we merely relied on someone else to interpret for us what poisonous means instead of reading and analyzing the label for ourselves we could be missing out on a valuable cure for our illness if they get it wrong. Really how wise and mature would it be to rely on someone to just tell us what to do rather than to develop and use our own God given thinking ability? (Pr. 2:11-13; Heb. 5:14)