Re: Religious News/Quotes of the Day
Posted: Tue Sep 21, 2010 11:37 pm
Promoting Freethinking in NW Arkansas
http://fayfreethinkers.com./forums/
And:"Anti-intellectualism among millenarians and Bible Literalists is a recurrent phenomenon, but no other religious movement in America ever has been as programmatically set against its intellect as are Jehovah's Witnesses. The Fundamentalist majority wing of the Southern Baptist Convention are devotees of pure reason compared to Jehovah's Witnesses."
-Harold Bloom, The American Religion, pg. 162
Also:"Though there are a number of rather savage apocalyptic scenarios current among American Fundamentalists, I am aware of none quite so inhumane as the Jehovah's Witnesses' accounts of the End of our Time. There is something peculiarly childish in these Watchtower yearnings: they remind me of why very small children cannot be left alone with wounded and suffering household pets." --Harold Bloom, The American Religion, pg. 169-170.
I say "practicing JW's" because most have left. They have a high turn over and thus there are far more ex-JW's or non-practicing JW's in the US than there are practicing ones. It's really hard to believe such horse manure. If you don't partake of the regular feast of mind numbingly stupid programming you tend to "fall away." They have to proselytize constantly to keep new idiots coming in. Plus, they learned this psychological trick early on: there is no better programming than self programing. Repeating the nonsense over and over has the profound effect of convincing the person doing the talking."A long acquaintance with the literature of the Witnesses leads one to the conclusion that they live in the intellectual `twilight zone'.... Whenever their literature strays onto the fields of philosophy, academic theology, science or any severe mental discipline their ideas at best mirror popular misconceptions, at worst they are completely nonsensical."
[Alan Rogerson, _Millions Now Living Will Never Die: A Study of Jehovah's Witnesses_, 1969, p. 116]
And then to top it off, they think they are God's gift to the universe. Remember, Jehovah made this all for them. That's why he gave them his name, "Jehovah," in their title. They are his "Witnesses." You are all going to be destroyed in Armageddon and be thrown out with the garbage. They are the one true religion, everyone else works for Satan, they are precious, you are garbage (unless you get on their boat before it's too late). So as you would expect, along with all of the ignorance you will find a strong wiff of arrogance with these people. They are God's chosen ones after all."Studies in the US suggest that Jehovah's Witnesses are more likely to be admitted to psychiatric hospitals than the general population. According to an article in the "British Journal of Psychiatry", they are three times more likely to be diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia and four times more likely to be paranoid schizophrenics. As a writer in the American journal "Free Inquiry" puts it: "Either the Jehovah's Witness sect tends to attract an excess of pre-psychotic individuals who may then break down, or else being a Jehovah's Witness is itself a stress that may precipitate psychosis. Possibly both of these factors operate together."
He added:So it’s war he wants, and he’s rallying his homophobic, misogynistic friends at the Vatican against his fellow citizens in a holy alliance which is supposed to include their worst historical enemies, Jews and Muslims. I’m beginning to think we’ve entered a new phase of religious warfare on Earth: it’s no longer going to be Muslims vs Christians or skirmishes over minor doctrinal differences, but the faithful against the secular. The only thing they can agree on is that non-believers are the enemy (at least they can finally agree on something) of their unfounded truths.
The Freethinker UKI should point out Frattini’s howler in his call for a new humanism. Is he really unaware of the fact that almost all atheists are humanists? And that faith in the supernatural is by definition not humanism, because it relies on a power outside humanity to solve humanity’s problems? That’s why we call ourselves humanists.