In the past I vowed to not write about politics or religion, but a newsletter that recently came through the post is worth being “reprinted”. It raises a few valid points, and I am particularly glad to be living in the area where someone actually cares to write such a note.
Jehova’s Witnesses and similar religious sects always undergo a renaissance during the period of hardships. Film lovers can remember the scene with flagellants from The Seventh Seal. The first time Witnesses surfaced in Russia was at the turn of 1980s-1990s, when crime and deficit were on the rise, while politically the country was torn apart by conflicting ideologies. As the text below describes, one of my brightest memories of one of the Jehova’s converts is that of a tireless verbal fountain. I saw the woman many times on the street and on buses, always with a pack of booklets and a never-ending speech full of prophecies. The fact that they are becoming so active now in Britain is indicative of the period of social crisis the nation is surviving. People are reluctant to turn to the “traditional” Church, while they also know that such “common” methods of escaping the reality – hobbies, alcohol, drugs – cost money and don’t really bring satisfaction. And thus, rather than looking for a solution within themselves, confronting their lifestyles and choices, they embrace a new teaching that is far more dangerous…
Hi everyone,
Some thoughts on our local home-grown religious fundamentalists… Jehova’s Witnesses.
If you live locally, you may have had a visit from the Jehova’s Witnesses last Sunday. Not only were the grown-ups out in force, but they had several children knocking at my door. Aside from the fact that these poor kids are brain-washed at such an early age, I’m not sure that it’s a good idea to let them on doors without an adult accompanying them on the doorstep…
So, what exactly do the Witnesses actually offer us…? Well, in a nutshell… Death! Yes, that’s right, folks, even if you’re a mainstream Anglican, Catholic, Jew, Islamist or even (god forbid!) an atheist like myself, unless you kow-tow to the precise ravings of the Bible which this sad and sorry bunch of people say is the only interpretation, your reward is to be struck down by their (loving!) god, whilst a few tens of thousands of their chosen supporters return to a newly established Garden of Eden. I hope god has a good lawnmower, because it must be pretty overgrown by now. Oh, and if you’re gay, lesbian, or bi – you can add yourself to the above Divine hit list, too.
Once upon a time various religious sects indulged their lunacies by making human blood sacrifices to their respective gods. Thankfully, that horror has disappeared, but lingers on in a very nasty way through the Witnesses. They are opposed to blood transfusions, and only a couple of years or so ago, in this country and the 21st century, a young mum, having just given birth to healthy twins, was denied a much needed blood transfusion which would probably have saved her life. Her husband, a devout Witness, refused the doctors’ offer of a transfusion, and she died. Two young children will now grow up without ever knowing their mother, and perhaps suffer a lifetime of guilt as a result of this insane piece of decision making by their parents. Whatever spin you want to put on this story, I call it religious murder.
In May this year, 15-year-old Joshua McAuley, flown swiftly to Birmingham’s Selly Oak hospital after being crushed in a car accident, refused all appeals by doctors to allow them to give him a blood transfusion. He died soon after. This young man could have become a doctor, an actor, a lover, a father, perhaps even the man who discovered how to obtain limitless energy from the most abundant element in the universe, hydrogen. We will never know. Sickeningly, Clive Parker, an elder at the Kingdom Hall of Jehova’s Witnesses at Smethwick, said he did not want to talk about it because he ‘didn’t want to add to the family’s distress’. This nauseating response conveniently hides the fact that adults like Mr Parker are responsible for poisoning the minds of the young and impressionable in the first place.
Anybody who allows their lives to be controlled and run by an imaginary, supernatural being is suffering from a delusion. Anybody who has researched the evidence for god, found it to be non-existent, and STILL chooses to believe, is therefore both delusional and a fool. Now, of course, anyone should be free to believe in the privacy of their own homes, meeting halls and churches, but once a religious organisation leaves the comfort of its home ground and trumps the streets spouting its dangerous nonsense, then anyone, myself included, has a perfect right to offer criticism and an alternative viewpoint. Which, of course, is the reason for this newsletter.
The problems with (any) god is that its commands, rules and laws (remember, we are still talking about an imaginary entity) can be translated and used by anyone with a particular agenda and viewpoint, and (of course!) cannot be questioned by mere mortals. Neat, eh?
And therein lies the problem, for it is precisely this kind of dangerous, non-thinking acceptance that can, and does, lead perfectly reasonable people to commit the most heinous acts in defense of their chosen religious dogma. We only have to consider the suicide bomber, or the Taliban who throw acid in the faces of young girls who commit the ‘crime’ of attending school, or the religiously accepted practice of surgically removing a young girl’s clitoris.
Neither, as some religious apologists would have us believe, is religion the provider of absolute morality. The still unfolding scandal of child abuse within the deeply secretive Catholic church being a modern case in point.
Our 4,600 million year old planet Earth orbits our sun in our galaxy, the Milky Way, in which there are many billions of stars and planets. We know, too, that there are billions of galaxies, and that our 13,7 billion year old universe is continuing to expand at an ever increasing speed. With both order and chaos as two sides of the same mathematical coin, there is no guarantee that we humans will survive indefinitely. Modern humans have only been around for some 200,000 years. By comparison, dinosaurs existed for 180 million years before becoming extinct.
If we are continue to prosper and survive as a species, we must use carefully and thoughtfully the highly developed organ which can truly be said to separate us out from the rest of the animal world: our brain.
As the 5th ape, we must recognise our place within the natural world, with the full understanding that we are an animal species which is part of a highly complex ecological web, but whose brain gives us the ultimate responsibility of managing the fate of our planet. It is a responsibility we must not shirk, and it can only be achieved by a calm and cool appraisal of who and what we humans really are. A continued and irrational reliance upon the supposed words of a ‘Father Christmas / fairies at the bottom of the garden’ god-type figure and the resulting subsequent subjugation of our truly amazing brain is clearly not the way forward.
David.