Farkel:
You’re quite right. The JW religion and their fundamentalist brethren are quite shallow and one-dimensional. I’ve often thought the song "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" very well describes their world view, only you must of course replace the pagan Santa Claus with Jehovah, and instead of no Christmas presents for the naughty, there is no paradise hope:
Jehovah God is Coming to Town
Oh! You better watch out,
You better not cry,
You better not pout,
I'm telling you why:
Jehovah God is coming to town!
He's making a list,
He's checking it twice,
gonna find out who's worldly or nice.
Jehovah God is coming to town!
He sees you when you're sleeping,
He knows if you read your Awake.
He knows when you've been bad or good,
So be a Witness for goodness sake!
So...You better watch out, You better not cry
You better not pout, I'm telling you why.
Jehovah God is coming to town.
We’re the chosen ones, you better get on board.
Chucky-toot-toot and rummy Rutherford.
Jehovah God is coming to town.
Gods vicious wrath and an Armageddon stew,
We’re the only ones saved, you’re all gonna die too.
Jehovah God is coming to town.
The Witnesses on Earth will have a jubilee.
They're gonna build a Paradise
That no worldly sinner will ever see.
Oh...You better watch out, you better not cry.
You better not pout, I'm telling you why.
Jehovah God is coming to town
On a more serious note, I recently finished a book by Joseph Campbell called "Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor" – a collection of his lectures. A good deal of the book is concerned mainly with mythos (or connotative) versus the literal (or denotative) of religious mythology and how many people get caught up in the literal, thus missing the meaning/connotative (the mistake most fundamentalists are trapped in). In his view, a literal understanding of scripture or myth is only the first step, that of a child, towards a full understanding of these stories. These myths, legends and stories were never intended, by those who created them, to be interpreted literally. To do so obscures their true meaning and is an insult to the texts. That is why is it so easy to tear apart most religious myth on a literal level and why literalists so often appear foolish and/or stupid.
So religions like that of the Jehovah’s Witnesses are really very childish and simplistic. They’re religious infants. They haven’t gone past the literal to find the deeper meanings in these stories.
Campbell also points out that most of our religious traditions are based upon stories created thousands of years ago in cultures that have little or nothing in common with the cultures of the present. Not only that, their knowledge was very limited (he used the ancient Jewish model of the universe as a sandwich – the firmament below, the firmament above, and above everything heaven). Your example of the Tower of Babel would be another example, as if we could construct something that reached heaven, wherever that may be. This is another reason it is so easy to tear apart literalist religion. Present day, these stories don’t speak to us in any significant way. So we either need to reinterpret them in a manner that relates to our current time and circumstances, or create new mythologies that do.
CPiolo
