At first the sparlock thing was just a cute little diversion. The icon of an amusingly out of touch cheaply produced DVD. Somehow it has spiralled into a kind of focal point of Society bashing. There are conspiracy theories, there is outrage over the society taking the videos off of youtube, there is speculation of how this will be a wake up call to parents and kids. It's not.
We point to how insular the society is as being one of the key explanations as to how they could produce something this god awful and nonsensical. We are also very insular. We are a small group of a group labeled "apostate" by a small insignificant christian sect. We are a sub set of a sub set of a subset. Nobody outside of this website knows or will ever know who sparlock is. And I'm not talking about people who aren't witnesses. I mean witnesses and ex witnesses. Most witness parents will get the DVD because it's what they are supposed to do. They will pop it in the DVD player for their kid, watch five minutes of it, roll their eyes and leave, and then when the show is over they will put it back in the case and leave it in a DVD drawer some where never to think about it again. Given how much B.S. they swallow on a week to week basis, this will not even register as a blip on the radar. Its easy to think that it will, because we are sane and we have the benefit of perspective. Whenever the society does something absurd we all think "surely they will see the insanity of this!" but they don't. For a long time, we didn't either. Sparlock wouldn't have caused me to leave, or even notice that something was amiss. It would have been another poorly produced children's DVD, and not even the worst one they have ever done.
We can say how out of touch the society is and how insular the JWs are, but when every other topic on this site is trying to drub up face book support for sparlock, or speculating about what the society is REALLY up to with this video, or how hypocritical it is of them to not let us put this up on youtube, it only shows how insular and out of touch we are. If a curious witness came here and saw the wierd and angry furor over a wizard bear, they would think "Wow, the society is right. These people are are mentally diseased with arguments of words." and be on their way. Sparlock doesn't matter to anyone outside of this website, he is not some wierd apostate icon. And if he is, then that is very sad for us.
