The passage below is an extract from Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses. As you well know, he is not the greatest of religion, in particular Islam, and by way of a return compliment, the world of Islam is not his greatest fan either.
In this extract, Salman the Persian reflects on the multitude of rules and regulations this purveyor of new religion, the prophet Mohammed, has laid down for the faithful.
So my point? JWs are not the only ones captive to dogmatic, rules-based, inflexible religious institutions.
Amid the palm-trees of the oasis Gibreel appeared to the prophet (Mohammed) and found himself spouting rules, rules, rules, until the faithful could scarcely bear the prospect of any more revelations, ??. ,rules about every damned thing, if a man farts let him turn his face to the wind, a rule about which hand to use for the purpose of cleaning one's behind. It was as if no aspect of human existence was to be left unregulated, free. The revelation - the recitation - told the faithful how much to eat, how deeply to sleep, and which sexual positions had received divine sanction, so that they learned that sodomy and the missionary position were approved by the archangel, whereas the forbidden postures included all those in which the female was on top. Gibreel further listed the permitted and forbidden subjects of conversation, and earmarked the parts of the body which could not be scratched no matter how unbearably they might itch. He vetoed the consumption of prawns, those bizarre other-worldly creatures which no member of the faithful had ever seen, and required animals to be killed slowly, by bleeding, so that by experiencing their deaths to the full they might arrive at an understanding of the meaning of their lives, for it is only at the moment of death that living creatures understand that life had been real, and not a sort of dream. And Gibreel the archangel specified the manner in which a man should be buried and how his property should be divided, so that Salman the Persian got to wondering what manner of God this was that sounded so much like a businessman. This was when he had the idea that destroyed his faith, because he recalled that of course Mahound (Mohammed) himself had been a businessman, and a damned successful one at that, a person to whom rules came naturally, so how excessively convenient it was that he should have come up with such a very businesslike archangel, who handed down the management decisions of this highly corporate, if non-corporeal God.
Eyeslice