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A journey into Apostasy – the beginning of the end
“Does Jehovah have as much delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as in obeying the voice of Jehovah? Look! To obey is better than a sacrifice.” – 1 Samuel 15:22
Watching your childhood toys being packed up invokes memories of an innocent age lost in a sea of time, preserved in a cardboard box. Presents from Christmas like the Millennium Falcon and X Wing fighters bought after watching Star Wars for the first time. Spectrum games given for your birthday where you fight valiantly against hordes of ghosts and monsters to save the damsel in distress.
I was still a child when such things were gathered, and what was chosen by an elder would be buried or burnt for all time. For those things above suggested a power beyond that of Jehovah, referencing the occult and satanic machinations. My mistake was playing one of my computer games where you collected a crystal ball during a visit by an elder. Even PAC man did not escape this moral maze. I was nine years old when childish things were put away.
The year before at school assembly we had thanked God for the rain. Which made me wonder, if God decided where the rain should fall, why was there drought and people starving as a result in Africa? If we were all God’s children we all deserved life giving water.
My mother did not have the answers. There were no science books at home, and the internet did not exist. That same evening there was a knock on the door by Jehovah’s Witnesses. She put the question to them, and their answer made her start a bible study with them.
By the time I was ten this study involved four meetings of two hours a week each, door to door ministry at the weekend and about 20 odd hours of personal study preparing for questions at meetings. At these meetings Watchtower and Bible Tract Society publications were read, and bibles checked to see scripture said what the publications referenced. My aim was to find the verse while the sound of rustling still resonated in the hall.
To prepare for the end of this system of things I was taught at home during high school. The aerial for the TV was removed to prevent watching subversive programming shortly after the first Iraq war. The end of days were clearly at hand were the mutterings of the faithful.
Not even one per cent of the population identifies as Jehovah’s Witnesses, and of all faith groups it has the biggest exodus of children once they are adults. My time came early having read subversively Douglas Adam’s Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. It had been banned by the elders because it suggested an alien race built the earth, not Jehovah, and for mice not us. The humorous quotes a lodger mentioned made me want to read.
Hitchhikers made me think how would I prove God not aliens made the earth? Researching Society publications for this ultimate answer unearthed instead prophecies made that did not happen during the 1920s. My head swooned. The bible warns against false prophets and to reject them. Plus new editions of books I had read changed dogma while quoting different scriptures. Once, those destroyed at Sodom and Gomorrah would be given a second chance after Judgement day in an old edition. Now, the new edition said they had already been judged for eternal destruction. There was no acknowledgement of the change – it just happened.
I was fourteen when my mother and I decided to leave. Her doubts started because she would not say “only those that call on the name of Jehovah will be saved”. She felt it was for God, not man, to make such judgements. So she was not allowed to go door to door.
Wonder and curiosity – these are qualities that made me to want to understand the world and universe I live in. For me there is a greater comfort in knowing we are working to reduce suffering caused by disease than thinking God will end this but probably kill 99% of the living population in the process.
Those qualities are not childlike but essential qualities to go beyond unquestioned obedience and sacrifice.
I had gone from bible student to being regarded as an apostate. Despite the elders best efforts I found there was a richer world of knowledge, culture and humour than was imaginable in the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
For more on The Apostasy Project click here
Follow up blog: A Brave New World (on becoming an apostate)
Article written by John Sargeant on Homo economicus’ Weblog
Follow @JPSargeant78
Bibliophile Insult for Ray Comfort
Ray Comfort, the evangelist that tried to stick it to atheists with a banana, has learnt the meaning of the word bibliophile to publicly add to his ignominy, on Facebook. Bless.
The bananas video is here in case you missed the slap stick argument:
Article written by John Sargeant on Homo economicus’ Weblog
Follow @JPSargeant78
Frans de Waal tries to give atheists a good hiding in Salon; Anthony Grayling takes him down
UPDATE: Reader "GJG" notes that Grayling's review is available for free here.
I'm not sure what has happened to primatologist Frans de Waal, a man whose work I've greatly admired, for he's been on a bender against New Atheism, using all the familiar tropes about the movement being both militant and "religious" in nature. One would think that if he attacked one side of the faith-vs.-atheism debate, it would be religion, for, more than anyone else, de Waal has discerned and publicized the roots of human morality in our relatives—primate and otherwise.
ON GAY MARRIAGE, RELIGIOUS FREEDOM AND WILD HYSTERIA
The European Court of Human Rights ruling this week on four cases of conflict over religious rights, and the continuing controversy in Britain, France and elsewhere on proposals to legalize gay marriage, shows the ongoing battle over how we should define religious freedom. I wrote a long post on this question last year, trying to establish some fundamental ground rules from first principles.
Benevolent Sexism
Chivalry is not restricted to gender – it is a code of conduct that covers how to behave to one another. Ideally with honour and respect.
Am I more likely to hold the door for a woman than a man? No it really depends if someone is following me. However there are ways in which it may happen.
Today went to the aquarium in Plymouth with a zoologist. We were talking about kin relationships. I mentioned that I could see from birthdays I remembered and value of gifts given I was more disposed in giving to babies of female friends and female relatives as opposed to offspring of male.
Is this because I am certain of the mother in a way one cannot be of the father? I would like to think not consciously. “The Selfish Gene” is a good introduction to this topic that I can recommend reading.
So in a sense there could be a benevolent/altruistic sexism happening. Is this part of genetic disposition or cultural attitudes? It could just be good manners, and just maybe if it is genetic and helps your breeding chances it may still remain with us.
Everything and Nothing
A priori arguments suggest that something existed before anything came into being, and as the “steady state” concept was disproved meaning the universe was not eternal the only remedy for something rather than nothing was a creator.
Whilst I doubt that this science programme from the BBC with Professor Al-Khalili will satisfy any young earth creationist it does try to answer that question with science. Hope to get round to watching soon – enjoy! (Reposted videos from here).
Part One – Something
Part Two – Nothing
No blogs this weekend
Getting over some bug – plus have loads of stuff to do so doubt will have much time to blog.
However will try and tweet on iPhone – have added the follow button on the blog side bar. Otherwise I am on Twitter JPSargeant78
Why do people get angry when what I need is soup!
Christopher Hitchens – Mladic the Monster
Christopher Hitchens on the west’s dithering over former Yugoslavia below. I remember while in Germany having a go at protesters that did not want NATO to be involved that at what point would they like the international community to use force to prevent genocide? They became slightly less peaceful when I suggested that of all the people’s of Europe they should know better. Humanity must stand together when monsters come.
Mladic the Monster
Our failure to respond to the Serbian atrocities prolonged the slaughter.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, May 30, 2011, at 12:48 PM ET
I suppose it is possible that the arrest of Gen. Ratko Mladic is as undramatic and uncomplicated as it seems and that in recent years he had been off the active list and gradually became a mumbling old derelict with a rather nasty line in veterans’ reminiscences. His demands would probably have been modest and few: the odd glass of slivovitz in company with a sympathetic priest (it’s usually the Serbian Orthodox Church that operates the support and counseling network for burned-out or wanted war criminals) and an occasional hunting or skiing trip. Though there is something faintly satisfying about this clichéd outcome—the figure of energetic evil reduced to a husk of exhausted banality—there is also something repellent about it.
As a confused old pensioner or retiree, Mladic is in danger of arousing local sympathy in rather the same way John Demjanjuk did but of doing so within a few years of the original atrocities and not several decades. Moreover, Mladic was a director and organizer of the mass slaughters at Srebrenica and Zepa (as of the obscene bombardment of the open city of Sarajevo), and not a mere follower of orders. The new and allegedly reformist Serbian government bears some responsibility for this moment of moral nullity and confusion, since it seems to regard the arrest of Mladic and his political boss Radovan Karadzic as little more than an episode in the warming of Belgrade’s relations with the European Union. You don’t have to be a practicing Serbo-chauvinist to find something a bit trivial and sordid in that calculation. (And what if it doesn’t prove possible to stretch the increasingly inelastic Eurozone to accommodate Serbia’s pressing needs and add them to those of Greece and Ireland? A possible hostage to fortune here.)
There’s another deplorable consequence to the presentation of Mladic as scruffy and pathetic. It will become almost impossible for people much younger than I am to understand what a colossal figure he used to represent. I use the last eight words very carefully, because at the time I considered him a vastly overrated individual, credited with political and military abilities that he did not, in fact, possess. But if you tried, in Washington in the early Clinton years, to suggest that Mladic’s blitzing of Sarajevo ought to be met with a military response, this is what you would get. It was a sort of large-print version of the “Arab street,” rewritten so as to replace Arab or Muslim with Orthodox or Russian:
If we fire on Serb positions, they will abandon all restraint and obliterate Sarajevo. … The Yugoslav National Army will go on the offensive nationwide. Milosevic will appeal to Moscow for weapons and diplomatic support and will get them. … You have to remember that Tito’s wartime partisans pinned down 20 of Hitler’s divisions …
On and on it went, not always with all of these points made in one burst (though I do recall Defense Secretary Les Aspin managing to compress them pretty neatly, not to say hysterically). Of course, in the end, the Mladic forces did what racial and religious fanatics always do and went too far. At that point, there had to be some kind of Western punitive retaliation. And then it turned out that the Serbian gunmen were not “crack” forces or “elite” troops at all, but a sordid militia with an unbroken record of victory against civilians. And, though Russian demagogues like Vladimir Zhirinovsky did turn up in Serb-occupied Bosnia, Russia showed little inclination to stake much on its sentimental history as Mother of the Slavs.
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Even after the exposure of these and other chronic weaknesses, the Serbian leaders were offered concession after concession at Dayton and over Kosovo, until the entire myth was dissipated by Milosevic’s insane attempt to extend ethnic cleansing into Albania and Macedonia. By the time it was over, the iron logic of European fascism had triumphed again, as it had after 1945, and large Serbian minorities in Krajina and Kosovo were being cleansed from places where they had long residence and deep roots. If anyone should have been agitating for the arrest and arraignment of Mladic over the past few years, surely it should have been the Serbian rank and file?
At times like this, we are always reliably reminded of what John Quincy Adams said about the risk to the United States of going “abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” The monstrous character of Mladic and his movement needed no exaggeration. To this day, a lot of people do not understand how much misery and chaos and suffering it purposely inflicted. But the monstrous nature of his power and reach was paradoxically and enormously exaggerated—not by those who wanted to confront it, but by those who did not! This meant that the whole nightmare was needlessly prolonged and the expense of concluding it greatly increased. On whatever basis the post-Tito Yugoslavia was to be reconstituted, there was one that was utterly impossible as well as unthinkable: a “Greater Serbia,” whereby smaller republics and their populations were forcibly cut to fit the requirements of a dictatorial tailoring. It will one day seem incredible that the NATO powers did not see this right away and continued to treat Slobodan Milosevic as a “partner in peace,” thus opening the road that led straight to Srebrenica and the murder of people ostensibly under our protection.
Srebrenica is one of the best-documented atrocities in modern history. We have everything, from real-time satellite surveillance (shamefully available to the United States even as the butchery was going on) to film and video taken by the perpetrators, including Mladic himself. The production of this material in court will, one hopes, wipe any potential grin from his face and destroy the propaganda image of the simple patriotic man at arms. Whatever our policy on monsters abroad may turn out to be, at least we should be able to recognize one when we see one.
Don’t Forget Your Towel!
in celebration of the life and works of Dougals Adams people may be seen drinking fermented vegetable products while having about them towels. The braver among them may well be wearing a dressing gown. Should you encounter such carbon based life forms don’t panic. it is a homage to his work: “The Hitchehiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”.
More on towel day can be found here.
Clegg – pulling the punches?
Cameron defies Clegg over Lord Ashcroft defence job
David Cameron gave a government advisory post to Conservative donor Lord Ashcroft despite objections from Nick Clegg, the BBC understands.
The muscular liberalism is looking a bit limp wristed.
