vovat | Who Watches the Watchtower?

While Bill O'Reilly is still harping about the War on Christmas waged by the secular-progressives, Garrison Keillor is ranting about how secularists are ruining Christmas by celebrating it. I guess it's clear that secularists are ruining Christmas in some way, but nobody is entirely sure how. Funny that, historically, it's pretty much always been Christian groups that have opposed the celebration of Christmas. You probably know about the Puritan government banning Christmas (as well as several other holidays) in seventeenth century England, arguing that it was both too licentious and too Catholic. In more recent times, the Jehovah's Witnesses are the Christian sect most famous for forbidding the celebration not only of Christmas, but of all holidays and birthdays, although they do acknowledge the resurrection (without calling it Easter, mind you). Their reasons are somewhat similar to those of the Puritans, although they're concerned more with the holidays being too pagan than too Catholic. They also add that the only birthday parties mentioned in the Bible are those of the Pharaoh and King Herod, and nasty shit went down at both of them. I suppose their excuse for not celebrating any of the Jewish holidays that are specifically mandated in the Old Testament is that Jesus claimed to have fulfilled the old law, but doesn't Paul say that choosing whether or not to celebrate holidays is up to the individual?

Really, aside from the rule against blood transfusions and the insistence on referring to God by name (and a name that's essentially a misinterpretation of the more accurate "Yahweh," at that), the beliefs of Jehovah's Witnesses don't strike me as too much different from those of other conservative evangelical groups. [1] I do have to give them props for staying out of politics and nationalism, however, as opposed to all the people who insist they're not "of the world," and then go out of their way to make sure Republicans take office. The common caricature of the Puritans is that they were opposed to anything fun, and we can paint a lot of modern groups with the same brush, if it weren't for the fact that some people find painting enjoyable. Hey, maybe they're right, and I'm not going to get my shiny new body when Jesus comes back. I'm inclined to think, however, that the whole doctrine of self-sacrifice is based on a mistaken notion. I get the impression that the initial idea was that a person should be willing to suffer or give up something they love IF it's beneficial to someone else, and this was eventually corrupted into the concept that suffering in general is noble. Sitting on a pole and wearing a hair shirt doesn't seem to me to be at all beneficial to anyone, and neither does a refusal to exchange presents on Christmas if you want to.

[1] They also have a lot of failed prophecies about the end of the world, but the belief that we're living in the end times appears to be pretty common among fundamentalists, and somehow has been for ages. The original year for the Watchtower Society's apocalypse was 1914, but when that came and went with no signs of the world roasting like a marshmallow, the Governing Body instead decided that this was when Jesus began invisibly ruling in Heaven. Wasn't he already doing that? No, according to Watchtower teachings, he didn't kick out Satan until then. Also, Jesus and the Archangel Michael are the same person. I think the rationale for this one was, "Hey, have you ever seen them in same room together?" For what it's worth, the designers of the Our Lady of Perpetual Help icon apparently thought the answer to this question was yes, as that's Michael in the upper left-hand corner.