The August 2011 Awake! contains the most secular article I've ever read in this magazine. It's entitled "Ibn Battuta Reveals His World". The three page article reads like it could easily have come straight out of National Geographic for Kids. It's a biographical essay about a 14th century Muslim man whose claim to fame was traveling. He racked up 75,000 miles during his lifetime, "a feat unequaled before the age of steam".
The first thing I did when glancing through this article was to jump to the final paragraph looking for the usual JW sales pitch. It wasn't there. Next I scanned for scriptural references. Not a single one. My interest now peaked, I actually began reading the article slowly and carefullly. (Yuck, I know.) 99.5% of the article shows no bias in favor of the Bible, Christianity and certainly not JWs. Nor does it bash Islam one iota. Only one little word betrayed the providence of this article as being the Watchtower Writing Department. Here's the quote. See if you see the same thing.
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"On his way to Jerusalem and its Dome of the Rock shrine, he stopped at Bethlehem, where he noted the veneration that professed Christians gave to Jesus' birthplace."
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Professed? That's right. Per WT dogma, by the 14th Century "true" Christians pretty much didn't exist anymore.
But hey, other than that tiny little bit of deeply veiled self-promotion, this article was about as neutral and secular as anyone could ask for.
I'd love to hear anyone else's review. Also, I'd love to hear ideas about how or why an article like this made it into Awake!
om
p.s. I'm sure the article is available to anyone on Watchtower.org