Comments

  1. wzrd1 says

    You have a very, very strong masochistic streak if that’s what you took a break from grading to watch!

  2. ck, the Irate Lump says

    The first 35 seconds or so were okay. It went downhill fast after that. I got another 20 seconds or so in before I had to turn it off.

  3. F.O. says

    @PZ you are always exposing yourself to this kind of inanity. In a way I think it’s the right thing to do, but doesn’t it take a toll on you?
    Every time I watch such a thing a bit of love for humanity dies in me.

    I genuinely wonder what is healthier; if I avoid exposing myself to such enraging/depressing material I’ll save myself a lot of emotional burden in the short term, but if I watch it, I will (maybe?) build resistance through exposure and understand better what other people actually think.

  4. says

    When I’m feeling mean I try to knock the JoHos off script by dropping science like I’m Marley Marl. But they’re well-practiced and doggedly determined to give you that stupid pamphlet. Not even flat out stating in the first five seconds that I’m an atheist and I know everything I need to about their faith and no fucking thank you doesn’t even stop them. In the end I always reject the idea of taking it because that seems to sting the most.

    I’d feel bad about it since they seem so earnest and polite and I’m Canadian, but this video is one of the reasons why no one should.

  5. Blattafrax says

    ‘It’s like going on an airplane. What would happen if someone wanted to bring something on the plane that wasn’t allowed? It’s the same with Jehovah.’

    Exactly!

    The rules for getting to heaven are arbitrary, pointless inventions of people scared of an effectively mythical evil monster.

    Surprised the JW are so open about this.

  6. Holms says

    “[Jehova] wants us to be happy, and he knows how we can be happiest.”
    Unless you’re gay in which case he has no fucking idea, because in that case he wants you to have a miserable marriage.

  7. says

    Unless the rules have changed lately the TSA allows a woman to travel with her wife on the plane. Its a strange world indeed where the TSA is more tolerant than God.

  8. Trickster Goddess says

    I occasionally get JW leaflets in my mailbox and I am always amused by their depictions of Jesus, particularly his fresh haircut and use of styling gel.

  9. redwood says

    it’s always bugged me how some people are so certain they know what God believes or thinks and want you to know it too. It’s also amazing how often God’s beliefs just happen to be the same as theirs. Too bad the Idjit never speaks for Itself. Handy, that.

  10. gijoel says

    And then they both went out to commit a hate crime. :(

    Jebus, I feel sorry for the kid with the two mothers. She’s going to spend the rest of her life having morons try to convince her that her parents are bad.

  11. Athywren - not the moon you're looking for says

    Is it just me, or does it look an awful lot like mommy & daddy are a mixed race couple? Wasn’t that one of the things that’d get you “kicked off the plane” not too long ago?

  12. PDX_Greg says

    Nice of Jehovah to let you on the plane if you still have the blood of your slaves on your knuckles (as long as they did not die immediately). After all, Jehovah just wants us to be happy!

  13. says

    You know, if I was God, and I wanted all the intelligent beings I created to join me in paradise, I think I might put a little more effort into finding a way to improve the success rate a little.

    Maybe I would try cutting out the pesky middlemen, who just confuse everyone with their contradictory messages, and simply imbue all my creations with a perfect innate understanding of their role in my universe, and what I expect of them.

    Abolishing evil could work.

    Or I might simply dispense of the natural world altogether, beam everyone up into paradise, and have done with it. If some people need a little attitude adjustment along the way, then so be it.

  14. graham says

    Last time I had a JW at my door I kept bringing the conversation back to Noah’s Flood. What kind of ‘loving god’ would murder by drowning virtually every human being and animal on the planet? She didn’t seem to have an answer for that (or at least not one she thought a sane person would be able to hear without laughing in her face) and eventually made her excuses and left.

  15. Anton Mates says

    It’s like going on an airplane. What would happen if someone wanted to bring something on the plane that wasn’t allowed?

    “They’d have to take the train instead?”

    “No, silly! There’s no ground transit to Paradise. They have to get off the plane and surrender the prohibited item to the airline, which will ship it separately to their final destination.”

    “So if I’m gay, I just have to make sure I don’t die while my girlfriend’s inside me?”

    “Exactly! Make sure to pass away fully clothed, while maintaining a proper distance and carrying no more than 3.5 ounces of each other’s bodily fluids. Then you go to heaven, she goes to heaven, your gay sex arrives 7-10 business days later after the angels finish checking it for explosives, and you can start making up for lost time!”

    “Wow! Thanks, Jehovah! But what happens if I die in the middle of the gay sex?”

    “Well, honey, obviously you can’t get on the death plane then. So your soul’s stuck in your old body until it can cast off its depraved lusts. That’s how vampires happen!”

    “And this is all in the Bible?”

    “It might as well be, everything after the Torah is fanfic anyway. Make your edits with a pink Sharpie and the elders won’t notice. They can’t see red light anyway.”

    “I thought that was bees?”

    “Yes. That’s bees.”

    “Ohhhhhhhh.”

  16. wzrd1 says

    @Anton, “Make your edits with a pink Sharpie and the elders won’t notice. They can’t see red light anyway.”
    I dunno, seeing red and things brownish is my natural state of late. One cataract is maturing, posterior lens capsule opacification is going on with the one where the cataract was replaced with an IOL (Intraocular lens).
    Think of that as a cataract junior, blasted easily away with a laser – if I ever get scheduled with that doctor… It’d be nice to see blue again.

    Maybe, “The elders can’t see non-photo blue, so use that for your edits”. ;)

  17. grumpyoldfart says

    At the start of the movie we discover that Carrrie has two mommies.

    In the middle it is implied that both of them are going to miss out on Paradise.

    At the end, the two main characters are trying to figure out ways to save Carrie.

    Why does Carrie need to be saved?

    The two mommies upset Jehovah and Carrie gets banned from Paradise!

  18. Matrim says

    But Galatians 3:28 says there is no such thing as male and female…now I’m really confused. (I’m not really, but go with it)

  19. dannorth says

    “You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”

    ― Anne Lamott

    Seems to be pretty much always relevant when talking of the religious right.

  20. horrifiedexwitness says

    @grumpyoldfart

    Because Witnesses believe that a child’s salvation is dependent on their parent’s beliefs/actions until they’really old enough to make a ‘rational’ decision to get baptized of their own accord. Generally in about the 12-14 year age range, give or take.

  21. Scientismist says

    People have their own ideas about what is right and wrong. But what matters is how Jehovah feels.

    How do we know that what matters more isn’t how Zeus feels about Ganymede? (Does the TSA pat down the loincloth of young men being abducted by eagles?)

  22. woozy says

    @2 ck the irate lump

    Actually I thought the first 35 seconds were the worst. I can accept a religion believing any arbitrary weird ideas for whatever reason. I can even accept the idea that they believe they should proselytize to me for my own good. But to look at classmate’s drawing of her existing family, the family she has and the only life she knows, and to believe it should be eliminated is sickening. I mean it doesn’t matter if one believes it is wrong, I can accept that, but this is a little girl already in existence and this is her entire *life*. Sheesh. … Okay, the very last 15 seconds where the child is encourage to spread the word through the child were also appalling. What the heck is the child supposed to do if you tell her her parents are wrong and her entire life is evil.

    I mean there’s rejecting a concept abstractly, that’s one thing and it’s bad enough as it’s hateful and bigoted. But when it comes to attacking a specific real person and a *child* at that…. fuck.

  23. anbheal says

    There’s a great comment, not far into the YouTube thread: “or, ya know, you could leave Carrie the fuck alone….just a thought.”

  24. ledasmom says

    I remember with great joy the day a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses handed me a copy of the Watchtower, I thanked them politely, and half a block down the sidewalk I realized I was wearing a shirt that said “GIVE BLOOD” in twenty or so languages.

  25. Matrim says

    My first thought whenever I see the whole “God wants you to go to heaven” thing is “then he sure did a shitty job of setting things up.”

  26. Rich Woods says

    @Trickster Goddess #9:

    I occasionally get JW leaflets in my mailbox

    Me too, usually around Easter time.

    What annoys me about them more than anything now is that they are not sufficiently absorbent.

  27. blf says

    What annoys me about them more than anything now is that they are not sufficiently absorbent.

    The JW’s leaflets, or the JWs?

    There seems to be a batcave or vat or whatever it is they use in Marseille, so we get occasional infestations here. I just pretend (which isn’t that hard) to not understand Français, albeit that does not help with the leaflet-through-the-letterbox problem.

    Last year we had what I suspect was a moronic cult infestation — I managed to avoid the two neatly-dressed gentlemen, albeit they made several attempts to babble at me (once in English) — which was somewhat amusing as they were here during at least part of the Summer, when it is hot, and so were sweating like crazy and obviously uncomfortable in their rather-heavy-looking suits and ties and (I’d like to think) horsehair shirts and magic underwear and couldn’t drink the cafe and and and… Certainly a few giggles.

  28. wzrd1 says

    I’ve had many a long discussion on religion with Witlesses, inevitably, they fail to return and are replaced by more and more experienced witlesses, to the point of actually sending elders to my door.
    Clearly discussing life lessons, experiences acquired from global travel and contradictions in their book causes significant attrition in their ranks.
    As for their pamphlets, had they stuck them in my mailbox, I’d have them charged. It’s illegal for anyone that isn’t a postal carrier to use a mailbox.
    What they hand me is promptly filed away for posterity in file 13.

  29. Gregory Greenwood says

    Athywren – not the moon you’re looking for @ 12;

    Is it just me, or does it look an awful lot like mommy & daddy are a mixed race couple? Wasn’t that one of the things that’d get you “kicked off the plane” not too long ago?

    Yup – I imagine that would be a problem when you come to the paradise security check in desk, and while general society has moved on from that bigotry for the most part, from what I can gather the JW’s aren’t all so enlightened, and keep claiming that their god is eternal and unchanging anyway, so it doesn’t seem likely that he will have kept pace with progressive social values.

    Then there is the fact that a proper biblically sanctioned marriage affords the husband unfettered ‘conjugal rights’ over his wife – if she has ever said no to him, or ‘had a headache’, then she will probably wind up getting a frosty reception when she rolls up at the gates of paradise at the very least, being a ‘disobedient wife’ and all.

    And let’s not forget that a biblical marriage affords the husband sexual access to the entire female compliment of the household, so I hope she doesn’t mind if he has sex with (or rapes – the bible doesn’t care about consent in this kind of case after all) any female domestic help they may have taken on. Complain about that, and she can kiss her weird Stockholm Syndrome concept of ‘paradise’ good bye.

    It also sure looks to me like the mother is wearing modern clothing constructed from modern materials and thus is likely to be composed of – gasp! – mixed fabrics. Given that that is a big no-no in teh bibble, I’m pretty sure she won’t be allowed into her fantasy celestial ISIS training camp ‘paradise’ on those grounds either. A sin is supposedly a sin, after all, no matter how stupid the notion it is based on is.

    It seems like she should really have read the small print on her afterlife sales brochure a bit more closely…

  30. says

    I used to get regular visits from the Jehovah’s Witlesses until I crossed the line with one of their missionaries. She first badgered me while I was up to my armpits in oil and grease replacing the head gasket on my car so I wasn’t really interested in a conversation. That was until she introduced her son as Mustafa. It turned out she had been married to a Turkish Muslim. That gave me a hook and some bait so I played the Muslim card trying to convert/confuse her. I even got hold of some information pamphlets and some tracts from Ahmed Deedat to give to her. I was enjoying the conversations and was clearly making some impression when after about 5 visits she stopped coming. For about a year there was no sign of her until she dropped the pamphlets off at my Turkish Muslim neighbours and asked them to return them to me. I also noticed when others from her group were doing their rounds they would often stop outside my house and look at my house number and a list presumably of houses in the street. I assume it was the avoid like the biblical plague list. My suspicions were confirmed when after over a year free from visits a new group of missionaries turned up. It turns out they were from a newly opened centre and hadn’t been warned about me. When I asked if they knew my previous visitor they said she had only just returned to missionary work after spending a year of counseling and retraining to deal with a faith crisis. It seems I had some effect. Of course I asked them to say hello to her and thank her for returning my pamphlets. That pretty much guaranteed no further visits and until I moved to a country where this sort of doorknocking is discouraged I only had to contend with the occasional Mormon.

  31. Goblinman says

    As debatable as many of the TSA’s policies are, at least they give a REASON for not wanting certain items on planes. Literally the only argument this video makes against homosexuality is that God doesn’t like it. Straight-up authority-worship.

  32. Meg Thornton says

    I have to admit, I haven’t ever had any problems with the local Jay-Dubs. Admittedly, this is because I tend to answer the door and leave the fly-wire security door locked and shut between us, so they can’t get their leaflets to me in the first place. That plus the polite re-iteration of “not interested” and a very strong willingness to shut the door in their faces (which apparently comes through in my body language) if they persist gets the whole business over and done with very quickly.

    My maternal grandfather was Christadelphian. The Jay-Dubs in his hometown (a medium sized country town in Western Australia) got a nasty shock whenever they showed up at his front door, because they had someone who was not only willing, but ABLE to argue theology and the meanings of biblical texts with them up hill and down dale. I think the local Jay-Dubs had his address all marked out on index cards for smart-arsed newcomers from the Big City who thought they were all that. Certainly he never saw a particular group of them more than once. I think the address is still marked as “do not disturb” by the local JW hidey-hole, since my maternal uncle still lives at the same address (large block, two separate houses), and he’s Christadelphian too.

    (There are some nice side-effects to having fundamentalists in the family. For one thing, it certainly makes religious callers a lot less frightening to deal with).

  33. toska says

    It’s like going on an airplane. What would happen if someone wanted to bring something on the plane that wasn’t allowed? It’s the same with Jehovah.

    Yes, only in the case of your classmate with two mommies, the “something” Jehovah is asking her to leave behind is her parents.

    Fuck. Jehovah.