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Jehovah's Witnesses vs. ISIS Printer friendly page Print This
By Jaime O'Neill's Blog
The Smirking Chimp
Tuesday, Mar 31, 2015

I don’t think I’ve met anyone who is ever thrilled to see a couple of nicely dressed Jehovah’s Witnesses coming toward the front door, bearing pamphlets and wearing smiles. I must admit that I don’t like to see them coming to my door, either, but I always tamp down the temptation to be rude to them. In fact, I admire the courage and basic decency that drives them to brook the rudeness and outright hostility so many other people show them. So I return their smiles, take the pamphlet, and thank them for it. After all, these are people who have found something that gives them comfort in a harsh world of uncertainty, and they want to share that comfort with their fellow travelers in this vale of tears. They are never rude themselves; they are uniformly pleasant and sweet-mannered. Beyond that, they’re just about the only people I ever see anymore who actually looked like they gave a little thought to their appearance before heading out in public, whether to board an airliner, or buy their groceries.

In matters of religion, I’m an agnostic, but I have growing impatience with all the religions that sprang from the desert regions of the Middle East so long ago, those often ugly tales told by mostly illiterate mystics who had a lot of time on their hands, and who spent most of that time in the company of ungulates from sheep to goats to camels. Christian, Jew, and Muslim. The bullshit does grow tiresome, what with the internecine warfare, the hair splitting over doctrinal nonsense about imagined worlds and concocted rules that often are rooted in a) a powerful fear of women, and b) an even more powerful fear of death that has been employed to ensure death comes sooner to those who don’t believe as they do. It’s no surprise, then, that being reunited in the after life with our mommies and daddies is one of the chief promises these religions offer, and if that isn’t the kind of comfort you were seeking, they also sometimes promise virgins, if you’re sufficiently avid in your faith to be willing to a) kill infidels, or b) seek martyrdom through violent early death.

Back in my peace movement days, I came across a quote by H.G. Wells, who had written that human survival “…is a race between education and catastrophe,” and, boy howdy, those words seem even more cogent in this century than they did in the last. Sure, all of us “duck and cover” survivors who made it through the Cold War knew the cloud that was casting a shadow over the survival of our species, not to mention lots of other life forms on this planet. But the century we live in now seems even more imperiled by religiously enshrined ignorance and faith-based superstition that have always been at war with education and reason. Under the domes of state houses throughout America, tax-exempt churches now push spineless and/or complicit co-religionists to pass a wide range of anti-education laws, rewriting history, curtailing access to information, undermining science, or imposing religiously inspired laws on fellow citizens who don’t share their faith. Meanwhile, half way around the world, the Dark Ages are making a comeback bid in the form of a wave of Islamic religious zealotry that makes lots of liberals want to turn their attention to the Inquisition and the Crusades in order to assert the equivalency of Christianity and Islam, all in the interest, I guess, of respect for diversity that seems not very diverse at all.

I’ve been rather appalled of late by the number of so-called liberals who want to make excuses for the outrageous acts done in the name of Islam, whether by ISIS, or by the assholes who planted that bomb at the Boston marathon, or the guys who shot up the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris. There’s way too much desire to conflate such acts with Christianity, to somehow suggest that the fact that Christians used to behead people, too, makes it somehow hypocritical for people in the West to get upset at Islamists who do it now. When President Obama tries so hard to make a distinction between ISIS and mainstream Islam by citing our own history of atrocities in the West, he is displaying responsible adult leadership by pushing back against the right wing drumbeat that would make all Muslims the equivalent of ISIS. But when I hear “progressives” doing something like the same thing, I hear nothing much more than that “let’s blame ourselves first” idea so popular in left wing circles. Progressives who make these exculpatory comparisons between Christian Crusaders then and ISIS murderers now are often in the same line ahead of right-wing Obama haters, and I’m just not sure how much good they do in the battle for women’s rights, gay rights, or secular humanism when they bleat this bullshit to one another, as so many do here on this website, secure in the expectation that their views will be echoed by others who are singing from the same dog-eared hymnal.

Perhaps the next time one of these self-righteous lefties wants to lecture others on the equivalencies between the current ISIS followers and historically bloody Christians, they might ask themselves who’d they’d rather see come up their walkway: a couple of black-garbed ISIS thugs carrying long knives, or a two well-groomed Jehovah’s Witnesses bearing pamphlets inviting them to join them at a gathering in which early and violent death is never going to be prayed for by anyone.

And yeah, I know that ISIS isn’t likely to be at my door anytime soon, but those sociopaths are showing up at lots of people’s doors in Syria, Iraq, and environs, and I’m pretty sure most of those people would much prefer a visit from the Jehovah’s Witnesses, too.

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