Growing up in the UK we didnt hear ANY stories about smurfs being demonic or evil etc, I watched the smurfs without a bad consciense.
What were the stories? The rules and the reasons why? How widespread was this crazy idea?
Smurf WArs
by snare&racket 22 Replies latest jw friends
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Roberta804
Here in the USA it was crazy! My eldest son was little, 33 now, I thought the cartoon was cute, but they were dead certain they were demons. Well I left in 1986, but on the last day I was there I got the key and put Smurf stickers everywhere in the Kingdom hall. My little going away present.
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Tameria2001
I was a teen at the time and never had any Smurf items, but my younger sister sure did. She had a doll, a drinking glass, and a pair of slippers. She even had them for quite a while with no problems. Then all of a sudden the Watchtower came out about something on how they are demonic. I can tell you one thing, when it comes to supernatural stuff I'm a little more sensitive with it. I'm not going to go into all the details, but if there is a spirit around I can sense it. Anyways, back to my sister's Smurf items, until the Watchtower actually came out about it there was not any problems with "demonic" activities, and I use that world very loosely. All of a sudden one day, after a talk was given, my sister's Smurf glass fell and broke. There was nothing "supernatural" about it, it fell and it broke, nothing more or less. With just hearing that talk only a few days earlier, mom got it in her head that the "brothers" must be correct, and she threw away all my sister's Smurf items. The story of the broken glass took off like wild fire, and slightly changed to fit, what the Watchtower had been saying was true. I was there the day that glass was broken, and I can tell you that there was no "demonic" activities going on that day.
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snare&racket
ROBERTA that is an amazing story. Did they freak out?
Your son is same age as me. I watched it too, we had no such ideas here, at least not locally. It is funny how JWs have this notion of being united in worship, yet they are so varied on so many topics, a symptom on the misinterpretation of literature (not scripture) and the abuse of powers. I was made to bin my favourite music because a local CO heard about a music gig where condoms were handed out (VERY responsible in my opinion now), the CO mentioned clues to the name of the band and suggested parents go home and check their children's music collection.
The next circuit geographically, where the band originated, did not have such a talk. It may seem minor, but it didnt at the time and highlighted the very human nature of the WT belief system.
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snare&racket
Tameria...... May I ask how many demons have you seen, observed clearly and interacted with?
I was convinced I could sense such things as a JW. I think it is promoted as a 'sensitivity' to unclean things i.e. 'look how spiritual I am' kind of thing. But in reality, I was picking up on visual,and cultural queues.
Pagans, 'witches', 'wizards', druids etc are quite prominent in my old territory (Celtic origins) and their homes and the atmosphere in their homes were quite predictable and similar. I remember asking one long term study, whether she had anything left over from old pagan ideas etc, i told her i had a feeling, I kept mentioning it for months, then she found a cloth bag....... Of....... Magical crystals!....
ooooohhhh.....
she tried to destroy them (???) but couldn't...... There it is, the undeniable evidence of evil handy work, straight out of a Lord of the Rings esque novel.
She got rid of them eventually and my 'sensitivity to evil' was made evident and therefore my spiritual purity....
BULLSHIT!!!!.... She had a house that was kind of dark and full of old antiques and bric a brac, it was just my stupid JW superstitious mind.
When I left the JW's and questioned the validity of religion, I remember asking myself about all those demonic experiences.... Then I remembered that they were all second and third hand, I actually saw ....NOTHING! I didn't even hear anything that could not be explained! Most were stories about taps, light switches and other mechanical devices. All the feelings I had..... WE'RE JUST FEELINGS, fed by JW nonsense...
My fear of all things spooky has long gone, demons.... there is not ANY evidence of their existence, not one shred!
I hear by call down all the demons, you bunch of arse faced, weak willed, smurf fudging, pig faced anus faces........Nothing..... .......
Snare x
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mrsjones5
Heard about it out here in Californa back in the early '80s. I thought of it as just another kooky thing jws were willing to believe without question. Didn't believe it myself. I thought the cartoon was stupid and nothing to be afraid of.
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problemaddict
I am not sure the branch ever actually names the cartoon. I think it had more to do with Gargamel being a wizard, albeit an inept one. Then one day a kid throws a smurf down the aisle, and someone says it walked out of the KH. This is how urban legends begin.
The organization is full of them. Perfectly explainable things being attributed to demons or persecution. Two examples.
1) Ever heard the story of the people being held down and couldn't move or speak? They prayed and prayed and finally got out the word Jehovah and they were released? Totally demons. But actually its a physiological thing that workd on the brain stem when you are in REM sleep. There is a normal explanation for it.
2) Did you Nestle Quick has blood in it? This was big in the black community. Yep the Quick bunny is trying to subvert your faith by putting the tainted substance in his disgusting shake. Ingredient list be damned of course. Someone had the "inside track".
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snare&racket
Yeah we were told skittles had blood in them, to make the red ones...... Ooooh red skittles...... Sinfulicious..... X
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Moses Unedited
There was a very infamous urban legend that circulated among Jehovah’s Witnesses about a child’s Smurf doll that jumped up and ran out of the Kingdom Hall due to the speaker saying “Jehovah” throughout his talk. Many JWs really believed the legend!
One piece of folklore that circulated was that the creator of the Smurfs was a Satanist. An observation that was observed was that Smurf spelled backwards spelled: frumS (meaning: “from Satan”). It was imaginative silliness of course, but JWs took this very seriously.
Another thing that fed into this belief was a TV show in the early 1980s (I can’t remember which one) that showed security camera footage taken in the middle of the night at a Toys R’ Us store. The footage allegedly showed Smurf dolls being tossed off the shelves and onto the floor by themselves. This got a lot of attention from JWs.
There seemed to be a lot of hysteria among JWs back in the 1980s about demonic influence in the entertainment field. When it was discovered that playing Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” song backwards on vinyl contained satanic lyrics, it seems to spark a lot of paranoia among the JWs I knew. I remember JWs playing many of their records backwards looking for spiritistic lyrics.
The Smurf folklore only seemed to feed into and bolster this paranoia.
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Gopher
Even Dial soap was rumored to have blood in it. How icky to bathe in that stuff if you were a rumor-believing dub drone.