Yep, my (non)award winning series on the November issue of the AWAKE! magazine continues. This time, the Watchtower Society has gone into grudge match mode by throwing a world without religion into the ring with one that has religion. Which side will be the victor in their article? I bet it’ll be a surprise! OK, seriously, at least they didn’t use Hitler as an example of an atheist regime in action (the Nazis weren’t atheists). So they did a better job than I was expecting right there. All the AWAKE! magazine gives us is a picture of Hitler shaking hands with a Catholic and a subtitle about how awful other religions were for supporting (cowering before, really) the Nazis. That’s pretty mild when you consider how the Watchtower Society goes after other faiths, especially Catholics. Hey, maybe this will be a step up!
In my last post, I wondered if the Society would bother reaching out to atheists, or if the whole magazine would be about atheist bashing to win over members of Christendom1 at our expense. In the past, their condemnations of atheists have been fairly mild when compared to how some groups deal with us. Maybe the Watchtower Society recognizes how many ex-Witnesses have become atheists and doesn’t want to drive us farther away? Or maybe they have something else in mind.
Whatever the case, let’s see what’s in store for us in this AWAKE! article.
- Christendom is the Society’s label for non-Witnesses who claim to be Christian, not mine. ↩
What do Jehovah’s Witnesses have over most ex-Jehovah’s Witnesses? A written narrative for almost any question you can think of, that’s what. Thanks to the Society’s narrative, Witnesses don’t have to think about their answers when a mean old apostate raises objections about the Society’s teachings. They can just quote the Watchtower’s narrative without using their own reasoning skills. That’s fine for them, but it’s a real problem when Jehovah’s Witnesses turn that narrative on the rest of us–especially if they’re trying to pressure us back into “The Truth” with pseudo reasoning. Not because they’re right, but because they can use that narrative as a hammer to shame former believers into submission. As always, the rest of us have to answer their rapid fire challenges the hard way: by reasoning on the spot for ourselves. Aggressive Witnesses probably won’t turn you back into a blood-card carrying member anytime soon, but it can sure leave you feeling like a dope. Or even ashamed.