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.

On my way home from University a few days ago I was given a pair of booklets by a woman who seemed very polite, but was also, I am forced to conclude, completely batshit insane. I know I just did a fairly anti-organised religion piece, but hey, I can’t control what people randomly hand me in the street, can I?

I’m attacking the booklets and the culture that produced them, not religion in general. You just go right ahead and believe whatever you want. Just as long as it isn’t demonstrably insane and if you try to convince me to believe it too, don’t be offended if I try to convince you that your beliefs are a load of baloney. Fair’s fair. If you want to pick up copies of the booklets yourself, I have the 22 March 2004 issue of Awake, and the 1 April 2004 issue of Watchtower.

The booklets are called “The Watchtower: Announcing Jehovah’s Kingdom”, and “Awake” (the latter being the general interest one, apparently). The dates on the front covers claim them to be very recently made. (Specifically they were printed in a few weeks. How prophetic.) I think Awake is branded the “general interest” version simply because it is marginally the less offensive. In amongst the fairly dull articles about bees, lactose intolerance, and sand, are two of note. The first is about sugars, and is only of note because of how it ends:

Clearly, the complex mechanisms of the living cell bespeak an intelligence of the highest order. In the case of many, this fact engenders a feeling of reverential awe. Is that how you feel?
–Revelation 4:11

Now, I’m not questioning the sentiment. Sugar’s interesting stuff, certainly, but I looked up Revelation 4:11 and it says this:

Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created.

I know the Bible is open to interpretation, and I know Revelation is particularly so, but it’s painfully obvious even to me that that passage is not about biology (at least not in any halfway scientific way). The other article of note is entitled “Why Does God Let Us Suffer?” and is a very poor three-page discussion of The Problem Of Evil. (For a more in-depth discussion than you will find in the Jehovah’s Witness publications, have a look around the webcomic Men In Hats‘ site.) Their answer to the problem (which, as we’ve discussed, in its simplest form states that if God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent then evil cannot exist, and since evil quite obviously does exist, logically God doesn’t) is that God will abolish suffering at His own appointed time. Now, I’ve heard this excuse before. I’ve used this excuse before. This is God saying “I’ll abolish suffering when I get round to it”. “Take comfort”, they say in closing, “in knowing why such suffering takes place — and that it will not last long”. This strikes me as a mistake, because it merely serves to draw attention to the fact that they rather glossed over just why God chooses to allow suffering. It seems fairly common practice in religious propaganda (and mathematics, but that’s a different column) to simply tell people there is an answer and hope we don’t really ask what it is.

Does it make sense, then, to be angry with God because he permits suffering? Not when you consider that God has promised to end all suffering.

That doesn’t follow. That would make me angrier. I would have hoped God would keep His promises. If you can’t truse God, Who can you trust?

Nor does it make sense to feel that God causes bad things to happen. Many tragic events are simply the result of random events. Imagine, for example, that the wind blows a tree down and it injures someone. People may call this an act of God. But God didn’t cause the tree to fall down.

Maybe, but He didn’t stop it, either, did He? If I was God, and I was all powerful and merciful, I’d've created a world where trees didn’t randomly fall down and kill My followers. Also I would tell people outright I exist rather than making them guess, but that’s just me.

The only other page of any interest in Awake is the letters page, simply because they are all very obviously fake and for its claim that pornography is more addictive than almost every major drug.

The other booklet, The Watchtower, is less interesting. Apart from a page answering the question “Why does 1 Corinthians 10:8 say that 23,000 Israelites fell in one day for committing fornication, while Numbers 25:9 gives the figure as 24,000?”, it is mostly taken up with a discussion of what it refers to as “The Spirit Of The World”, but I call “society”. Personally, I would have thought anything with a name like The Spirit Of The World would be a good thing, but apparently I would have been wrong and gone to Hell. Apparently The Spirit Of The World is in fact the Devil working through governments and the entertainment media. According to The Watchtower, “those who are led to believe [the Devil's] claims may easily fall prey to the misguided notion that they are free to worship God in any way they please”. It then goes on to attack all governments and media that dare to portray fornication or homosexuality as anything other than an obscene sin. Then the author goes on to wonder why Solomon stopped worshipping god after being blessed with great wisdom. To me it seems patently obvious: the Bible’s position on these issues is clearly immoral and untenable. You can interpret it differently and take a modern viewpoint; you can assume the Bible is also a product of ancient minds whose views were shaped by their out-dated cultures; you can throw the whole thing out of the window. You cannot take it literally and expect to be taken seriously, because it just doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.