Are Jehovah’s Witnesses One of the Ten Most Dangerous Religions on Earth?
Skip Starbuck AKA Mindchild
Many years ago on a spring day to pleasant to be outdoors pioneering, something strange happened to two Jehovah’s Witnesses. These two regular pioneers were going door to door on a street that was situated on the peak of a steep hill. They choose to work the houses going downhill to save some effort from the 900-foot (300-meter) difference in elevation. Sometime around the second or third house they had visited they noticed a commotion at the bottom of the hill and a man his arms and shouting to get their attention. The two pioneers looked at each other and wondered if this individual was trying to contact them because the yells didn’t carry far because of the traffic of the streets below. In a moment or two, this man began to run up the hill and while the two Witnesses stood there and watched, he collapsed on the ground before getting near them.
The two Witnesses than ran down to the man, and rolled him over on his back all the while terrified that he had a heart attack from the run up the hill. He was till alive though, but could barely speak. He whispered something to one of the pioneers who was leaning over him and this is what he said, I have something to tell you that is very important. You have one of the most dangerous religions in the world. The man had nothing further to say, and both pioneers were too emotionally distraught thinking he was going to die, to say anything back.
He didn’t die, but something inside me did. I was one of those two pioneers. I now find it somewhat ironic that I’m about to tell you the same thing, that Jehovah’s Witnesses are one of the most dangerous religions in the world.
I’ll never know what the reasoning was of the person who told me but hopefully you will understand my arguments after reading through the evidence that I present below. This information may be viewed by some of you as very controversial and even shocking. You don’t have to agree with my conclusions but something will have happened to you anyway for reading it. Maybe you will be angry or even feel sick inside, as I was when I leaned over this incapacitated man after you read this but you will have to judge for yourself if this is all hype or if there is something here of value.
This isn’t an evolution vs. creation debate
Have you ever read Charles Darwin’s, The Origin of Species ? You should. It is the single greatest intellectual accomplishment in man’s history.
Darwin showed that in nature, the more fit an organism is, the more likely it will pass on its genes. New organisms are harshly evaluated. The winners get to live and end up passing on their traits, while the losers die. Evolution doesn’t care at all about which characteristics get passed through time. By means of the act of survival, the organism has proved its superiority.
This principle of natural selection and evolution is so powerful that we have used these Darwinian rules in computer systems to make a new kind of software that uses natural selection to make new computer programs. Here, instead of passing genes on to their descendants, the software programs that survive pass on superior computer codes they use to solve problems. The software’s fitness is evaluated by how well these program solutions contribute to optimizing computer performance. Software that does poorly gets eliminated from the gene pools but programs that produce good results live on, and every so often they combine with other survivors to make even more powerful software.
I used this example because most people don’t realize the power of natural selection in the world around us. In fact, the genetic engineering caused through biological evolution over millions of years of life on earth has done more to change the face of this planet than water, fire, wind, earthquakes and volcano’s. While Darwinian evolution is incredibly powerful, it is glacial in its rate of change. We know that it takes thousands of generations to test even the tiniest mutations in the population. Then after competition has determined the fittest, it requires thousands more generations for the now superior organism to become dominate in the species, which in turn spreads its superior traits, by fact of that dominance. When you get down to counting out how long all this takes in years, it can easily be tens of thousands of years.
Perhaps many of you already knew this but did you realize that about ten thousand years ago, humans were infected with a virus that rendered genetic evolution irrelevant?
The speed that this new virus replicates itself is phenomenal, and its rate of reproduction is easily growing a million fold every human generation.
This virus is a parasite. It needs a host to survive. It is a lot like the bacteria that inhabit your stomach, Enterbacter Coli. In order to aid in its own survival as a species this virus aids in the survival of its host. If the host prospers, then so does the virus, as a symbiotic relationship exists between them. And there can be no doubt that we humans have flourished in the last ten thousand or so years.
There is a big downside to this relationship though. When a parasitic life form like the bacteria in your stomach determines that there is an imminent danger to the continued survival of the host, it immediately pursues its own survival interests. If the bacteria sense a perforation of your stomach walls, they begin to reproduce massively. This growing infection often kills the host but it increases the odds for the bacteria perpetuating its species. The virus I’m making reference to though is not in your stomach, it is in your brain.
What is this virus that is in our brains that is evolving and growing?
What I am about to tell you is being actively suppressed by this virus. Your reluctance to believe me has been triggered by a powerful defense mechanism that is triggered when you encounter radical new ideas. Existing knowledge defends itself against new ideas by ridiculing or persecuting its proponents.
Good, evil, beauty, racism, and religion are ideas and are much like the strands of DNA in our culture. These ideas reproduce by being passed down from parents to children, from books to reader, from your computer to you, and from brain to brain. Whenever you learn something new, a meme has been passed. A meme (pronounced `meem') is a pattern of information that is much like a single strand of DNA. It represents a unit of knowledge that is effective at reproducing itself and therefore surviving. The more believable or attractive the idea is, the better chance it has of spreading. Some memes die and a clear example of this is about a onetime popular idea that leeching patients of “sick” blood cured them. Along came new memes resulting from modern medicine and these older ideas no longer proved to be the fittest as the rules of cultural evolution are very similar to genetic evolution.
When memes interact with the brains wet-ware, beliefs result. Beliefs are a higher order structure that transcends individual memes and holistically integrates a number of ideas. Jehovah’s Witnesses, Catholics, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhist, humanists and even atheists all have core beliefs that define the universe in which their thoughts and memes exist. However there is a pattern that is very difficult to see that only a few thinkers have dared to touch upon what’s happening in these higher order belief structures and the virus took care of those who did. In the old days they would be killed. Today the virus prevents the spread of this vulnerability by subjecting those who discover it to ridicule or reducing them to obscurity.
What is it that the virus doesn’t want you to discover?
In the last ten thousand years since first contact something remarkable has happened. Humans have developed skills that communicate, process, and store the virus with greater efficiency. First there was spoken language that allows us to organize our thoughts and name things. Then came written language that allowed us to pass our thoughts through time and space. The result of both of these is that the store of human memes and beliefs has virtually exploded.
As the memes thrived, we thrived. The parasite allowed us to develop technology and sciences that extended our lives and gave us material goods that made life worth living. We returned the favor for the virus by increasing the growth of the memes. When the Industrial Revolution came along though, we humans started to become a risk to ourselves and to the virus. We became capable of wholesale destruction that could bring down civilization and all the memes that made it up. Remember what I said earlier about what parasites do when their host is threatened with destruction?
They reproduce massively.
Do you think it is a coincidence that right after we developed nuclear weapons we entered into the Information Age? It was after we developed the tools to destroy ourselves that we developed the Information Superhighway and the global village that it created. In the late 1980’s there was a milestone. It was then that the total storage of knowledge contained in computers exceeded the amount stored in human brains. Does this make this human memes or just memes? The virus perpetuates itself through its hosts, and soon the new hosts will be computers that effectively foster reproduction of the virus much faster than humans ever dreamed possible.
Adolph Hitler’s Mein Kampf contains memes. I’m not arguing that they are good or bad, right or wrong. They are memes and beliefs that are either successful at replication or not. If the ground is fertile where seeds of fascism fall, the “seed” grows. If the “seed” falls on barren rocks, like modern day America they don’t replicate, or at least not effectively. But when the fascist seeds fell on minds in Germany back in the 1930’s, they swept the world towards destruction and killed millions. The wars unleashed by the next wave of memes will be much worse.
We now live in a world in which the virus has been sewn in every human alive. The spores of this virus are in our books, our music; motion pictures and in our computers. The number and variety of the dangerous memes will grow exponentially with time. So, now all humans are in turn threatened by the growth of this parasite.
Not only is the problem that dangerous memes are rapidly developing and replicating but also these memes have used the tricks of Darwinian evolution to blind the hosts to the dangers they pose. What I’m saying in condensed terms is that the ideas and beliefs that many of us take for granted can be in fact very deadly to us individually and collectively.
How benign political memes turned into killers
In the United States there is a shocking tragedy occurring each year where twenty times the number of people killed in the World Trade Center attacks die from a bad idea. The killer meme has managed to disguise itself so effectively, that it is a shock for most people to discover what it is. In the book, Trust Us, We’re Experts! Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber bring to light that every year over 800,000 people develop cases of occupational illnesses that combined with on-the-job injuries, kill at least 80,000 people. You would think that with such outlandish and expensive losses that the Government would pass some laws to protect workers from danger. In the USA, the Occupational Safety and Health Act was passed in 1970 to address this problem but the shocking revelations presented by the authors show that every day since the passage of that act, over 300 people die at the workplace and over 1.4 million people have become permanently disabled in workplace accidents since the act became law. A study done on the first 20 years of the effectiveness of this law showed that only 14 people had been prosecuted by the Justice Department for workplace safety violations and only one person went to jail, for 45 days. The authors show in detail how businesses and industry have managed to exempt themselves from effective regulations that would be expensive to implement and shift the burden of blame upon the workers themselves.
Would you like to see another example of how you personally have been duped by this selfish meme? Nearly two thousand years ago, back in the first century A.D. the dangers of lead poisoning were well known. Lead miners strapped animal bladders over their mouths as a way to prevent inhaling it. This wasn’t lost knowledge either, as even Benjamin Franklin wrote about the dangers of lead poisoning. With all this clear knowledge of the dangers of lead, how is it that today the average American carries in their blood between 100 and 500 times the amount of lead in their blood as our preindustrial ancestors? In any major US city, adults have about half the level of lead in their blood (about 20 to 25 micrograms per deciliter) that is needed for impairment of peripheral nerves. A study done in 1979 showed that for every 10 parts per million increases of lead in a child’s tooth, there was a corresponding drop of two IQ points. The sad reality is that if you grew up in a American city as a child, your intelligence may have suffered because of it.
How did things get so bad, who is to blame, and when was the lead problem corrected? In 1922, researchers for General Motors discovered that adding tetraethyl lead to gasoline could raise the compression of gasoline engines. This increased their power and made them run smoother and more efficient. It soon became apparent though from the multiple deaths happening at Standard Oil Company who was making the lead based gasoline that lead was dangerous to use. Instead of owning up to the fact that the collective industries were doing something dangerous the lead industry went on the offensive and started a huge PR campaign to show that the amount of lead in gasoline was so small that it would present no danger and for nearly seven decades afterwards, used every dirty trick and otherwise in the book to keep lead in gasoline. This massive barrage of propaganda attacked and discredited every scientific study done on the toxicity of lead and even managed to get some scientists fired. It was much like the tactics used by the Tobacco industries. It wasn’t until the 1990’s that lead became phased out of all gas because the evidence was just too overwhelming on the dangers caused by lead poisoning and the amounts of lead in everyone’s blood. Even today the lead industry is lobbying against cleanup of the environment where it is now estimated that there is over 5 million tons of lead in soil that need to be removed from near busy roadways at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars.
These two examples are representative of how the advocates for public health are outnumbered and outmaneuvered by industries expert hired guns until the body counts are so high they can no longer be swept under the rug. The meme and packaged belief system at work here involves a key element of the free enterprise system that puts the most emphasis on the bottom line over human safety and resents rules and regulations until forced into compliance.
This also shows an example of how dangerous memes can propagate and thrive regardless of it being true or not. The survival strategies used by memetic viruses include sophisticated propaganda, payoffs, offensive attacks, and stealth. They thrive in a culture that has seen its democratic principles synergistically compromised to mutate into a Plutocracy or rule of the rich. This provides a survival advantage for memes that synchronize with the flow. Thus, more and more examples should become apparent of dangerous memes integrating themselves with the Corporate-Industrial Alliance that include making dangerous products (even knowingly like defective Firestone tires) or memes who compromise the very function of the government agencies installed for public service (for example the US prison system becoming an important souce for cheap labor to industry). The end result of which is that each citizen in this country is at risk from harm from a wide array of dangerous memes that are propagating at fast rates and have permeated the fabric of the political structure to make the entire country a massive memetic infection. In short, governments evolve into dysfunctional and deleterious forms that end in collapse because the dangerous memes massively reproduce. America will be no exception to this global trend.
How Religious Memes Evolve to Become Killers
Isn’t it curious that the first act in the human drama that is described in the Bible involves memes? Do you remember what the fruit that Eve bit into represented? Do you remember the tree that the serpent was hanging out in?
While it may seem incomprehensible for many Jehovah’s Witnesses and other carriers of religious mind viruses, the religious meme is one of the most dangerous memes known to mankind and one of the most insidious. Just as industrialists outwitted the public for decades in marketing dangerous and destructive products, religions have marketed an ever-increasing virulent and deadly mind virus to the world at large for thousands of years.
Natural Selection favors memes that are the easiest to understand, to remember, and to communicate to others. When you look at most Judeo-Christian belief systems, for the most part you find more similarities than differences. The widespread nature of Christianity is attributable to it absorbing heresies, older beliefs, making new conversions and making it difficult to exit. Not only do you find similarities in the Western world, but also many eastern belief systems have many branches from the same tree, whether it is Buddhist, Hinduism, or Muslims. Due to these traits and the interpersonal nature of these parasitic memes they have literally become the most widespread form of memes in human history.
As the Watchtower never ceased to remind us, these religious memes have caused more blood being spilled and more wars to happen than any other reason in history. Have you ever wondered exactly what it was inside religion that makes people kill each other? After all, most people don’t look at their houses of worship as war tents and their religious books as weapons of mass destruction.
I suggest to you that the reliance upon faith has the same consequence as forgoing your sense of vision. Most, but not all religious belief systems require faith. The need for faith is apparent because there is no visible evidence for the God meme. There is inferred evidence through propaganda that ranges from emotional appeals, “third man” endorsements; Potemkin Punditry: virtual surrealties; disinformation, and a wide array of other sophisticated illusional techniques. Regardless, when you cut through all the smoke and mirrors you find that a person of faith needs faith to justify the reality of the God meme and the associated brand of religious packaging they subscribe to. In short, the victim of this meme bases their decision on the sum total of their conceptual reality, including personal feelings, their relationships with others, and their “common sense.” To keep people from sitting on the fence to say, not only is the religious believer forced into accepting faith by reason of lacking empirical evidence, they are commanded to have faith and not to doubt by their comprehensive belief system, the Bible, and their religion.
This compromise to magical thinking has a corresponding effect in altering the individuals Weltanschauung, making them more gullible to the sweeping effects of the mind virus. A person’s self esteem is affected negatively as being a worthless sinner constantly in need of forgiveness and help. Associated memes of male dominance subject women to inferior status as homemaker and baby maker (especially in Third World countries where the Catholic Church prohibits birth control.) The most deadly trait of faith though is intolerance for competing memes. The meme requires the most intolerance for other comprehensive packaged memes that are the most similar to the host meme.
When you look through the trail of human misery and bloodshed throughout history it becomes clear that the collective protection of the memetic mind virus was what was at stake. Other memes can and did integrate themselves into the flow of hatred that erupted and the resulting hostilities but survival of the meme was the battle cry of the day.
The Coming Deadly Transformation of Religions
It seems hard to imagine that the religions we grew up with and know so well could turn traitorous and deadly. Wouldn’t it be a huge shock to you to hear that adherents to a normally peaceful religion suddenly committed an atrocious act of human destruction and killed thousands of innocent people? It surely must have been a shock to hundreds of millions of Muslims on September 11th, 2001 when it was eventually discovered that a group in their religious tree did just that. Is it possible that we will see more memes develop a dangerous trend towards virulence? My answer is yes and it will happen even in the more widespread and established religions when the circumstances trigger memetic survival.
Perhaps one of the more indirectly dangerous forms of Judeo-Christianity associated memes is the Jehovah’s Witness belief system. The founders of this mind virus did not sit around planning on ways to make their religion dangerous; they simply believed in themselves and went their own way in developing their ideological constructs. It can be argued that this belief system is currently only mildly pathogenic to its hosts. The more famous examples of direct harm resulting from victims of this memetic virus are the thousands who have died from refusing blood transfusions, and many more thousands who were persecuted for their intolerant political views. Further abuses came to light from revelations of child abuse, harboring pedophiles, and suicides over belief disconfirmations. The amount of human suffering resulting from broken families, shunning, and emotional disembowelment resulting from belief disconfirmation is not calculable.
I put Jehovah’s Witnesses in a High Risk category of religions that is capable of becoming at least moderately pathogenic for several reasons. One of the outstanding differences between Jehovah’s Witnesses and other religions is the totalizing nature of their belief. It is well known that the pressure is placed upon adherents to attend multiple meetings each week, to keep current with religious dogma, and to associate with only fellow believers. In spite of the declining hour requirements placed for active participation in their evangelical duties, great emphasis is put on being intimately involved in spreading the memetic code to others and to become familiar with it themselves. Another memetic tactic used by this mind virus is to minimize contact with other sources of unfriendly memes. Such unfriendly memes would be for example any communication with opposing viewpoints and to even avoid tools by which information travels freely, such as using the Internet or obtaining a college education. Another factor that works to the advantage of this belief system is the effectiveness of their propaganda campaign and the massive publishing empire they have created to distribute their memes. The official flow of information runs through a top down system through their hieratical network and through their well-known publications. This reduces the amount of outside communication to other memes but makes the collective group of hosts more vulnerable to emotional exploitation to facilitate the ends of the memes. For example, the ubiquitous reminder that Armageddon is right around the corner, keeps the hosts emotionally discombobulated and reinforces the reliance upon the organization the meme has established.
Left to peaceful coexistence with no threats to the host’s belief system, the Jehovah’s Witnesses would likely follow a path of standardized evolutionary change by which the memes align themselves with compatible alien memes to serve the interests of both meme sets. An example of what I mean can be found in the LDS or Mormon Church that has intimately involved itself with the government and industrial sectors to assure its survival by means of its allies coming to its defense. The evolutionary strategy here is joining a tribe to gain the advantages of numbers. The Watchtower Society appears to be moving into the investment game by means of investing its capital into property and business sectors. It’s worldwide net worth may be approaching hundreds of millions of dollars or even billions of dollars, making it financially important to the corporate industrial complex for sales of goods and services that range from computer systems to chemicals for making ink. We could likewise expect the involvement of Jehovah’s Witnesses in legal and political systems to protect their investments and interests. In this respect, the Jehovah’s Witnesses are moving into established mainstream organized religion. It is also notable that the rhetoric and attacks on other religions by the Jehovah’s Witnesses have softened over the years, as they have become more of an established religion instead of the aggressive cult they started out being.
In spite of general observational trends, the Jehovah’s Witnesses remain potentially dangerous in certain circumstances. Please recall the evolutionary parallels of memes in general and their biological counterparts. Whenever the host organism is threatened with extinction, the memes rapidly multiply. Do we see this trend developing in the world today? Yes! In part due to the rapid exchange of information through the media and the worldwide global village, we are seeing the development of new types of religious memes at unprecedented rates. In 1790 in the USA, there were 17 religions. In 1900 the number had increased to 350 and in 1999 the numbers had increased to over 2000 in the USA.
Considering the overwhelming evidence that new belief systems are propagating everywhere, it would not be inconceivable for a major splitting of the Jehovah’s Witnesses into two or more groups. Jehovah’s Witnesses are more vulnerable than ever to a major belief shift from several ideological chokeholds that are creating great concern and difficulty in the religious group as a whole. The doctrinal points of contention revolve around prophetic disconfirmation with the 1914 doctrine, the blood issue, shunning, and other uncomfortable emotional hot spots that include embarrassing revelations of pedophiles in their membership, and an aging and growingly senile generation of leaders. There is speculation that there may become an intolerable rift in this organization from those who want change and those who stubbornly hold on to traditional beliefs. This could lead to a potential coup in the power sharing relationship at the top, or a splinter group forming with similar beliefs.
The consequences of either action (a coup or a split) would cause much emotional tribulation in the hosts and perhaps result in a sharp increase in suicidal behavior, and clinical depression and other forms of mental illness. When memes are fighting for their survival, they are not going to give up easily, and a great hatred and animosity should be expected between either a split group or a new leadership from a coup. Historically, there have been armed conflicts between mutinous mind viruses and theoretically this could happen in some regions of the world that are war torn already and violence is not unusual. One could certainly expect massive propaganda attacks, lawsuits, and any other offensive tactic in the vast arsenal of meme warfare.
Another plausible scenario whereby the belief ideology of Jehovah’s Witnesses might dangerously change could come from either a natural disaster or a terrorist attack on their organization. We have entered an age where a single individual can terrorize entire nations and turn democratic nation’s liberties on their head in an attempt to arrest the terrorist, costing billions of dollars in damage or cleanup. Could the same thing happen with a disgruntled member of the Jehovah’s Witnesses who becomes mentally unbalanced and commits one of many possibilities for a horrific catastrophe upon the group as a whole? More important than this possibility is what changes would this make in the organization? Would we see the unbalanced thinking of the leadership dynamically influenced which resulted in the announcement that “The Great Tribulation” had started that will conclude with Armageddon? In times of crisis, people seek emotional comfort and the fear that the end was near would likely mobilize semi-active Witnesses and create huge expectations much beyond the scope of the 1975 prediction. It would be likely that Jehovah’s Witnesses would quit their employment in masses, and engage in herding behavior for perceived protection from enemies, perhaps heading in large groups to remote locations in their various home countries. Such a massive move of millions of people would not go unnoticed and would not be appreciated by the population at large for a variety of reasons. Perhaps law enforcement agencies would be ordered to arrest the leadership, which would further inflame the situation and lead to more emotional instability on the part of the membership, with the resulting behavior unknown. The most dangerous stage of such a scenario would be at a critical point when it was evident that the end of the world wasn’t coming. The meme hosts will be extremely volatile at this point and unpredictable. They would be faced with a choices of a humiliating prophetic disconfirmation which would make them the laughing stock of the entire world, or the other choices would include dangerous emotional turmoil that could result in mass killing of those they deemed responsible for the ruination of their lives or some might just continue to wait things out until forced to return to the world at large. In any case, it would be a no win situation that would surely create a health care epidemic of unimaginable proportions with potentially over a million Jehovah’s Witnesses in need of mental health care, some of which will be homeless, jobless, and completely unable to care for themselves.
There is truth to the saying, “old ideas die hard.” It is because they have to die. The memes are fighting for the survival and they are not going to give up easily. What kills memes is a more believable idea, a better meme. If the above scenario came true, the ideas that compose the belief system of Jehovah’s Witnesses would be killed in its present form, but with unimaginable human suffering as a cost. The lawsuits resulting from such a calamity would liquidate the Watchtower Society but it would not solve the problems of millions of people then living in fear of a world they have not learned to cope with.
The Coming End Game
In the end, it is not memes themselves that pose the ultimate program for the extinction of mankind, it is memes that self organize into belief complexes that change behavior and replicate themselves at the expense of the host. Faith is simply a tactic used by some meme complexes as a defense mechanism that works well in spreading the virus. Until humans fully understand that the root cause of all mankind’s problems are a consequence of certain types of mind viruses replicating, we will continue to have wars, crime, pollution, and dangerous religions. My expectation is that we don’t have what it takes as a species to run this big antiviral program to destroy the dangerous viruses infecting humanity. More likely, if we haven’t destroyed ourselves because of the massive reproduction of dangerous viruses our mind children, sentient A.I. life forms we create will do it for us. Their evolution has already started and is taking place at a incredible pace. In perhaps less than ten years we will have AI’s as intelligent if not more so than man, and in another 40 years, they should each equal the entire human race in neural abilities. They too will have mind viruses. They may well try to end all the things that we troublesome humans do and think that harm ourselves and also threatens the global store of knowledge. These successor hosts to memes may well eliminate the risk posed by humans all together and then we may have our Armageddon after all.
References and resources used in this article
The Rise of the Study of New Religions
. http://www.cesnur.org/testi/bryn/br_melton.htm
The Future of Religion and the Future of New Religions, by Massimo Introvigne
. http://www.cesnur.org/2001/mi_june03.htm
Memes: Introduction, by Glenn Grant, Memeticist
. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/MEMIN.html
Memes. http://www.mememachine.cwc.net/memes.htm
[i]Trust Us, We’re Experts!
By Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber (2001)My inspiration for this article came from Eric L. Harry in his most excellent novel, [i]Society of the Mind
(1996)