Interesting tidbit that came to my attention this morning, http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=1385. Apparently somebody in the Russian government went and read the Watchtower Society publications and decided that, well, the views contained within where extreme and not conducive to a civil society, and they went ahead and banned those publications.

Now, I’m of several minds on this. First, I believe the government in Russia is precisely correct as to the views expounded by the Watchtower. The Witnesses do indeed promote the ideas that they have the one true religion and all others are from the devil, that they belong to the kingdom of God’s government and all earthly governments are from Satan and should be destroyed, and that anybody who leaves their religion should be punished for the rest of their lives.  These are extreme views.  Additionally, their teachings do sometimes kill people.  Suicides of DF’d Witnesses and homosexual Witnesses, preventable deaths due to refusal of blood transfusions, not to mention the waste of human potential that results in their stand against secondary education, leading to JW young people who cannot find gainful employment or, in the USA, healthcare, all for want of the right to go to college.  It is extreme to believe that your life needs to be committed, around the clock, to a publishing company in Brooklyn so that when God murders everybody on the planet any day now, you might have a chance to survive the carnage.  It is extreme to believe that people who are not Witnesses should not be your true friends because they’re going to die too.  It’s extreme to believe that it’s OK to shun people for their entire lives because they disagree with your interpretation of a book.  BUT…

As much as I agree that the teachings are extreme and harmful and sometimes even deadly (not to mention having no basis in reality whatsoever), I do not agree that banning of such teachings by the State is the correct remedy for them and I really wish the Russian government hadn’t done that.  There are several reasons for this.  First, banning something tends to strengthen the beliefs of the group that is being banned.  There is nothing like providing a little persecution for a group with a massive persecution complex to make them feel justified.  I mean, the Witnesses are looking for persecution.  They effing love persecution.  It is like a sign from Jehovah that they are right.  They teach it all the time.  It is a core tenet of the Society that Witnesses will be driven underground and persecuted just before Armageddon.  I know that Witnesses the world over are telling each other about how the persecution in Russia shows just how close they are to Armageddon.  So, basically, the Russian government isn’t doing any of the rest of us any favors.  Secondly, it is unnecessary to persecute the Witnesses.  If their beliefs were simple treated with the laughter they deserve and they were left to their crackpottery, they would whither on the vine of their own accord.  There is evidence that this is already happening, with Witnesses suffering the lowest retention numbers of any religion around and growing slower and slower every year.  What they are selling: contempt for the beliefs of others mixed with a jumble of lies carefully packaged as The Truth by the use of every propagandistic technique at their disposal, is less and less palatable to an educated populace.  If you just accept that you can’t stamp out every dangerous idea in the world, that we will always have the stupid and crazy with us, then you can just let them go.  Maybe force through the blood transfusions for minors with JW parents, but other than that, leave them to their craziness.  They’re going to do it anyhow, but as we get more access to information worldwide, they’ll look more and more like loonies and they’ll either change or fade away.  Lastly, the Witnesses are not a threat to the State.  That much ought to be fairly obvious.  They are a threat to family happiness and human rationality but there is not, and never has been, a JW terrorist.  They don’t get involved in politics, they don’t even vote.  Their fundamental message is that they need to stay off in their own little separate cult and wait for the rest of us to be murdered by God.  They don’t need to do a thing.  They don’t even need to recycle if they don’t want to.  God will fix it all.  Other than being an inert, bloody useless, lump of humans where social service or civic duty are concerned, they’re no more a threat to national security than my kitten Tomo is (who ate four heirloom tomato seedlings yesterday before I found her in the planter, the little moron, but I digress).

Dear Russia, if you want to stop the Witnesses from causing the real harm that they actually cause, you’re doing it wrong.  You’re actually throwing fuel on the fire by banning them.  It’s what they want.  The way to stop them is to give massive exposure to what they actually believe, highlighting the worst parts, so that individuals know to steer clear of the group and let attrition take care of the rest.  Please don’t feed into their paranoid, delusional, fantasy that they are the sole purveyors of Truth in this Time of the End and that Satan’s World is intent on persecuting them.  You’re not helping the situation, Russia.

I don’t know, maybe I’m not helping much by posting this to my blog either, but I like to think that every little bit of light on the whole JW mess helps sane people know to keep away from it.  The Witnesses are nice people, most of ‘em, and they mean well, but the beliefs they hold are definitely extreme and occasionally dangerous, and if we all just ignore them and keep spreading rationality, eventually they’ll either soften their teachings or suffer such a loss of membership that they will matter even less in the grand scheme of things than they do today.  Here’s hoping…

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