Apathy Sketchpad

These are all a little old now, but I think they’re fairly important stories. They were all in the news within the last month or so:

• Jose Mestre is a Portuguese man in his fifties. In his teens, he developed a tumour on his face. It was pretty noticeable; not something you’d easily miss. Fortunately, it was entirely operable.
• Emma Gough is a 22 year old woman from Shropshire. She recently gave birth to twins, a girl and a boy. There were complications during pregnancy, but luckily the hospital staff were trained and equipped to handle the situation.
• Dennis Lindberg comes from Washington State. He has leukemia, but again he was lucky that there was ample medical equipment to save his life, or at least to significantly prolong it.

In any reasonable society, those would all be happy stories, but Emma and Dennis are dead and Jose is alive but the tumour is now so big that he’s blind in one eye, can barely eat, and is having increasing trouble breathing. That, and he looks like a troll painted red. And this is all because the three of them refused point blank to accept any form of medical treatment that might involve a blood transfusion.

They did this because they’re Jehovah’s Witnesses, members of a cult which defined itself in 1931 and has somehow managed to amass 6.7 million members since. Wikipedia (the free encyclopædia that anyone can edit but the moderators will just change back) currently describes them as follows:

Jehovah’s Witnesses believe only their religion represents true Christianity and expressly teach that no other religion is Christian. Witnesses consider the entire Biblical canon, excluding the Apocrypha, to be the inspired word of God. They do interpret some scriptures literally, but they believe that biblical writers and characters often employed symbolism, parable, figures of speech, and poeticism. Thus, they insist that they are not ‘fundamentalists’ who they feel are in error in taking a strictly literal view of the Bible. They hold that the Bible alone should be used for determining issues of doctrine [although] interpretation of scripture and codification of doctrines is considered the responsibility of the Governing Body of Jehovah’s Witnesses.

The Watchtower Society, who run the cult, describe them thusly:

Actually, Jehovah’s Witnesses are interested in you and your welfare. They want to be your friends.

The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy defines The Watchtower Society, who run the cult, as:

A bunch of mindless jerks who’ll be first against the wall when the revolution comes.*

They do believe some pretty weird stuff, not least that playing chess is a sin and much to George Orwell’s presumed relief the world will end in 1975. (To be fair, most of them don’t believe this any more; like all other cults they have a governing body who can decide that inconvenient beliefs weren’t true after all.)

Now, I’m all for religious freedom. If people imagine that an invisible man will make everything okay in the end then that’s just lovely for them, and in some ways I envy how easy it must be to get through life in such a pathetic state of denial. But there has to be a limit to these things. Jehovah’s Witnesses can trace the origins of their religion. It goes back, in one form or another, as far as  Charles Taze Russell in the 1870s, when it was simply made up, by reading the Bible with the emphasis in different places. When you’re looking at a set of beliefs that you can trace back to their conception, that should suggest that they just might not be the ancient and timeless words of Jehovah God. Add to that the Jehovah’s Witness tradition of tithing: the Watchtower Society gets a cut of members’ wages, and it gets to tell them what to do. Now call me a cynic, but if I was a heartless manipulative bastard, that’s exactly the kind of organisation I’d found.

Aside from the direct cost, through tithes and donations, this cult has a wider, indirect cost to society: Emma Gough’s children now have no mother. Fortunately, she was married, but the cost to the public had the father not been known or not been alive would have been far greater. Jose Mestre’s surgery, which he’s finally agreed to have now that technology allows it to be done without blood, will cost far more than it would have had he accepted it forty or fifty years ago, and that extra money has essentially been wasted. Had this been an NHS case then that could have been your money he’d wasted, or even your operation that wouldn’t have gone ahead because his face was there first. And Dennis was fourteen years old.

Fourteen. He’s deemed, at that age, too young to vote. Too young to drink alcohol. Too young to have sex. Too young to marry, to buy a house, or to enter a legal contract. And yet a judge ruled that he was quite up to the job of choosing death over blood transfusion, despite the fact that he’d obviously been indoctrinated into a cult by his wicked step-parents.

At some point you have to accept that this goes beyond religious liberty. People are being brainwashed into effectively killing themselves, they’re sending off money to an organisation whose stated aim is to get more people to kill themselves in the same way, and they’re causing all kinds of difficulties for everyone else. They make organ donation really difficult, too, which kills other, random people — or at least does not even the bare minimum required to help them, which is selfishness in the extreme considering that they’re dead before they stand to lose anything by it. The carbon footprint of people opening their heated-living-room doors to the knockings of Jehovah’s Witnesses on cold days is incalculable (if only because I can’t be bothered to do the calculation).

Is your religious liberty more important than the country’s right not to fund pointless medical care and the upbringing of children whose parents could have easily been saved? It is more important than stopping powerful men from exploiting the vulnerable for money by selling them a spurious and unverifiable paradise? Is it more important than a man’s right to have a face? Is it more important than a child’s right to live?

I believe in freedom of religion only because I object to any kind of “thought crime”. The idea that someone could be prosecuted for being wrong about something (or for being right about it) is abhorrent. But that belief does not extend to giving people the wholesale right to implement all their wacky beliefs. If you refuse medical treatment, then fair enough, but don’t come running to the state when you need more expensive treatment further down the line that you conveniently don’t object to. It is not the job of the state to bail you out if you make a bad decision (unless of course you are the head of Northern Rock).

The heads of an organisation who cause this much death and take this much money from people by promising them an invaluable reward, which conveniently cannot be verified until Judgment Day comes at some unspecified point in the future** should, by any reasonable standard, be in prison. (This ties in neatly with my preferred definition of “cult”: any religion with a living leader or governing body.)

Instead, they are given tax-free status and allowed to open schools. What the fuck is wrong with the world?

In any reasonable society, those would all be happy stories. Clearly, we do not live in a reasonable society.

**The third coming of Jesus, since they believe the second coming was in 1914 but nobody noticed.