Growing up JW, the paranoia over demons oftentimes seemed to reach a medieval frenzy. There was no shortage of places where demons were hiding, ready to possess those who stumbled upon them. Is there any religion on earth more superstitious (aka demon-fearing)? I'm sure there are, but looking back, it sometimes doesn't seem like it. Sometimes the decision-making on whether something was demonic or not was not a display of trained perspective powers, but very much like the scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail: "So if she weighs the same a duck, she is made of wood, and therefore…a witch! Burn her!"
I remembered my parents got rid of their wind chimes. Then came the Proctor-and Gamble Scare of the 80's--time to throw out your Crest Toothpaste. Urban legends of dancing Smurfs abounded and were taken as gospel (it was always somebody they knew who knew somebody who saw it happen!). And although we had my translations of the Bible, my father burned the NIV version of the Bible that a schoolmate had given me, because he was Pentecostal (and thus viewed as really full on demons). The fire was every at the ready for anything else even remotely suspected. Of course, many demonic things, so the stories went, were impervious to flame. So why try?
I was taught never to pray aloud about private things--because then Satan and the demons, who can't read minds, would be listening in. If I mentioned aloud some weakness I was struggling with, then they would hear of it, and exploit it. By implication, that would somehow override the help from God…
All forms of secular music were suspect, especially rock. Supernatural Beings evidently needed mundane methods like backwards masking to take over people's minds--why that never was fully explained. Nobody knew where these hidden mines lay, but rock was deemed to be teaming with backwards messages that fed into the subconscious and those that listened, were sure to be influenced to follow. My parents were always convinced that the music that I listened to was demonized and were afraid I'd get taken over at any moment.
Of course, according to some articles, you had to beware of even classical music that had pagan themes. Evidently, listening to instrumental music would cause people to worship the demonic Greco-Roman Pantheon, perhaps? I remember one article said that basically it was to be safe it was best to stick with 19 th century non-religious folk tunes.
One pioneer I knew got rid of a jazz album because it had a picture of the Smurfs on it--she said she got rid of it and prayed for forgiveness. As a friend of mine was trying to nudge me to consider her for a romantic prospect, I was happy to hear that. I knew that she was not the one for me!
In my early teens, video games had just taken over the world: Pacman, Space Invaders, Defender. These were considered violent. My parents worried that the flashing lights and sounds would hypnotize me and make me susceptible to demonic forces. Again, superhuman entities seemed to be powerless without the help of flashing colors and sounds.
Of course, the greatest offender was fantasy and science fiction in movies, novels, comic books, ect. But then--in the 80's and even early 90's, the Society's official stance on this was moderate…at least, as moderate as a puritanical religion can get. Basically, it left it up to a Christian's judgment. With the advent of Harry Potter though, there seemed to be a crackdown on the genre.
I could never understand why there was never a differentiation between FICTION and NON-fiction. Basically, all entertainment was viewed as 'training', not as stories invented by an imaginative human mind. The logic was that the demons can't read your mind, so by reading a book or watching a movie with supernatural elements they will view this as interest in spiritism, and one would come under their influence and started practicing spiritism. <Sarcasm> Oh yeah…after reading LOTR as a teen, I was so ready to buy a plane ticket to Mordor and forge the One Ring because that definitely showed me how spiritism works in the real world and made me want to play copycat. </Sarcasm>
Some viewed all stories of superpowered humans as somewhat suspect, because such tales were supposed to ultimately stem from stories from pre-Flood materialized demons and their Nephilim offspring. Evidently human minds couldn't be that imaginative and fiction was somehow disguised true stories. "When in doubt, do without," so one family said.
While the publications never mentioned names of books and movies outright, district and circuit overseers were under no such compunction. Congregation elders were more free-wheeling. It is funny how even if the talk was only a five minute one, if it was said on the platform, it was referenced by others later on and things received an unofficial banned.
<rant> Last year, I watched Harry Potter for the first time. I couldn't believe how innocuous it was--this was what they were all afraid of? I mean I thought it was rather dull, but was it abounding in evil? I just saw a very cliché work of children's fiction. It didn't inspire me to practice anything I saw, because I could see that it was not intended to emulate. These weren't real people and nobody practices these things in the real world because they aren't possible and those who do practice 'witchcraft' do nothing of the sort. It was a run of the mill work of make believe, not spiritism. </rant>
Of course, if a story had a ghost in it…that was automatically viewed as spiritism. Never mind that Jesus told as life-after-death story in the Rich Man and Lazarus, a parable were a man dies and goes to a burning hell, and dead people talk to each other… If this was a Hollywood movie, say a comedy based on this, some JWs would shudder and not even as much as look at the poster.
Sometimes there is double-standard. Shakespeare wasn't viewed as bad in the Society's articles; even though Hamlet featured a ghost, and Macbeth featured witches (I think I remember Macbeth's wife even implored the demons to embolden her). On the back of the Awake, I remember reading a blurb that said, "Have you read all or parts of the Iliad?" It held up the Iliad as a good work of classical literature, then the article went on to talk about the benefits of Bible reading. Stop the press--the Iliad is full of pagan gods (aka demons) interacting with men. What is the difference between the Iliad and Lord of the Rings? Why not say, "Have you read all or parts of the Harry Potter?" For one is full of gods people actually worshiped…the other is made up characters with made up powers that nobody with any sanity believes in, and no beings of a divine nature.
It was funny, I saw on Youtube that the Golden Age magazine once advertised a book "Angels and Women"--the contents of which were supposed to be related to a person from a repentant demon, a story about the pre-flood times. Samuel Herd on the GB read it and mentioned it in a talk--he said he couldn't put it down (he viewed it as fiction). It's funny though how it is instructed in the Keep Yourself in God's Love book not to related a 'true' story about the demons. And of course, fictional stories are banned as well…of course, popular stories need not having demons or supernatural beings to be viewed by them as 'spiritistic'.
For me, the jury is still out on whether demonic forces exist. Maybe they do. But things on Earth seem to operate according by purely natural means. It never made sense to me that with all the tens of millions of fallen angels being cast to the earth, why the earth doesn't abound with verifiable supernatural accounts of all sorts, especially in this age of cell phones with video cameras. What's a matter--are they camera shy? I thought they wanted people's worship and adoration?
When people do relate these stories to me, I have to wonder. Were there two or more independent observers? Otherwise, a single person relating what happened to them can easily be explained in this era of diagnosed mental illness. Especially is this is the case where they have had a history of taking drugs (druggery is what the Koine word translated in the NTW as 'spiritism' literally means). Drugs sometimes triggers latent genetic time bombs, such as schizophrenia. Even drunkenness, which is winked at in the organization, can produce hallucinations.
After reading about Jungian Archetypes, it seems many of these stories of superpowered beings do have a common source, within the collective unconscious. Humans have need for myths and fiction and oftentimes derives many of the same symbols, not being it comes from actual accounts from pre-flood times, but because they resonate deep within our hearts. The monomyth, for instance, is found from Harry Potter to Spider-man to Star Wars to Lord of the Rings to the Odyssey, to the story of Buddha, Zoroaster, Moses, and even dare I say Jesus, and what we find are coming-of-age stories. All these symbols relate to the journey we find ourselves on from birth and are meaningful to us, even though we don't sometimes understand why.
Sometimes I wonder if it's not that fundamentalist religions like the WTS are battling against demons, as they believe they are, but the battle is rather, one of resonant mythical symbols. The symbols of religious fundamentalism battle the symbols of say…fictional Harry Potter-- and like the Fermi exclusion principle; they cannot occupy the same state.
In that case, of course Jesus seems to be the Greater Moses, Joshua, David, and so forth. Maybe not because they are prophetic, but because all these accounts stem from the same unconscious source. Was the Law is a shadow of what is to come? Perhaps. But maybe it mirrors Christ because we find the same resonances in all these stories.
Or maybe a Creator implanted these symbols into the core of our being (aka the Law written into our hearts). Maybe like Tolkien said: Yes pagan myths do abound with stories of divine beings coming to earth and dying and coming to life again, but they all pointed to Christ, the one divine being who really did come to the earth to die for us. Of course, I don't really know if this is true or not. I cannot say. These are things I'm still trying to figure out.
Regardless, as Stevie Wonder says,"When you believe in things that you don't understand. Then you suffer. Superstition ain't the way."