I’ve been sorting through my old JW books and found one published in 1951, What Has Religion Done for Mankind?. Skimming through it, a few sections caught my eye.
The Society’s comments about the dangers of the totalitarian “red religion” of communism are hilarious, since they easily apply to the Society itself. Substitute Russell, Rutherford, Knorr, and Franz for Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin, and Brooklyn for Moscow, and voila!
To give you a little background, in 1951 McCarthyism was hot, J.D. Salinger had just published The Catcher in the Rye, The African Queen and A Streetcar Named Desire were new movies, and "Kisses Sweeter Than Wine" was a popular song.
From the chapter, “Red Religion and the Lawless Man”:
One totalitarian system fears another such. One modern development that has thoroughly frightened the totalitarian religious system of the pope, yes, and all Christendom too, has been the rise of totalitarian political power in Eastern Europe. . . .Because they deny his existence, the Reds may deny they worship the Devil. But they have set up a state religion by requiring the people to give their unquestioning obedience to the political state as their highest counselor, guide, provider and protector. In this they attribute to the state what really belongs to the living and true God, Jehovah. For him they have substituted a man-made visible organization. . . . As its Holy Scriptures Communism has the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin, who are spoken of as inspired writers. “Inspired” by whom?
Carrying our comparison farther, we note that Communism has its missionaries . . . It has its priesthood or hierarchy, that Politburo with all its lesser orders of functionaries for the guidance of the people in Communist orthodoxy and with power to demand and hear confessions and to issue excommunications, to forbid heretical literature and to censor and expurgate books, magazines, movies, stage plays, poetic and musical compositions. It has its shrines and pilgrimages. Moscow parallels the Mohammedan Mecca.
[bolding mine]
pp. 317-318
I was also rather shocked to discover that the Society evidently still believed in 1951 that African-Americans were a race cursed by God:
The infant Krishna, or black god, is represented in India at the breast of the goddess Devaki and is shown with woolly hair and marked Negro features. How well this matches Nimrod who was the son of Cush, whose name means “black”!
p. 194
In a chapter called, “Compromise with Demonism a Snare,” the Society explains that when you know you have the truth, killing those who don’t believe as you do is not genocide or intolerance:
[Previous paragraph quotes Deuteronomy 7:1-5, about how the Israelites shall utterly destroy the Canaanites.]But was this not the rankest kind of religious intolerance as well as genocide? Is this not the kind of intolerance that is practiced in lands today under totalitarian and dictatorial rule? Not at all! This was the divine command and it was in favor of keeping the pure religion alive in the land God gave. The pure and the false could not exist side by side without hurt to his people and danger to their opportunity for eternal life in the new world. They had agreed to worship only Jehovah as God, and he was giving them the Promised Land to possess. Hence he had the sovereign right to determine what should be done to demon religion in the land. . . .
Hence the extermination of the demon worshipers in the Promised Land was no case of religious intolerance. It was not an authorizing of them to go outside the God-given land and invade the outside worldly nations and destroy their idols and wipe out their false religion and all those who practiced it. Neither is this any Scriptural basis for the Roman Catholic religion to torture and kill so-called “heretics” in lands where it dominates and to forbid other religious sects to carry on there. In doing so Catholics are not copying the Israelites example. History shows that in the lands they have invaded they have not obeyed God’s commands to the Israelites to smash the idolatrous images there and to destroy the demon worshipers.
[bolding mine]
pp. 155-157
I was aghast that they fault the Catholics for not being harsh enough!
Ginny