Jehovah’s Justice

So about that new light, and who they chose as center figure for that. 

A while back the Mormons got flack on this site for their skin lightening teaching. Well, the Jehovah’s Witnesses deserve as much if not more flack for their racism. 

For anyone out of the loop, the Jehovah’s Witnesses believe paradise will emerge on the planet itself after Armageddon, after which everyone who wasn’t preached to in all of history is revived to be preached to. They recently slightly changed it to mean that the sinners can’t actually commit new sins during the thousand year trial period, and they made a whole video display about that.

The change is trivial, but what’s really jarring is this character.

We’ve seen this guy before in previous propaganda; he was one of a lineup of revived people shedding their culture. The rest of the line up is gone, he’s central now and he’s got an additional African indigenous man and a conquistador, all resurrected, as backdrop.

He’s reborn in his traditional clothing and with the longer hair, but minus his decorations; things that are considered sinful for a man to wear who are to be without any decoration, and even for a woman as they’re bright and take in addition rather than being subtle.

“In their former lives, some of them practiced horrible, vile things.”

Like this white guy being genocidal towards native people and the native guy … dancing shirtless and with ornaments around a fire as part of a (very badly replicated) cultural custom. Sure, Watchtower Society, those are definitely, clearly the same kind of horrible, vile things. Definitely. /sarcasm

“… so they’ll need to learn to live by Jehovah’s standards. Who will teach these unrighteous persons?”

Who indeed.

Fun fact : all old cultures will be pulverized by meteorite strikes, and all new buildings will be in the westernized JW style. There is no home to go to.

His willingness to be taught is then demonstrated by starting to wear a western shirt; unlike the conquistador, who stays in his heathen buttonless shirt as a sign that he somehow wouldn’t agree with the new new world.

Who better than white people to show indigenous people the wonders of nature. It’s not like indigenous people have been practicing ethnobotany, controlled fires, hunting that uses all parts and pesticide free agriculture for eons and are currently prime advocates for respectful coexistence with nature. No sir, paradise is pristine parks where everyone always wears their Sunday best.

“They will need to develop a relationship with Jehovah …”

They have redrawn the former painting to emphasize the guy’s hair being too long and unruly by JW standards …

… so it stands out more when it’s cut in the next shot. 

Unseen Tears.

That’s how his relationship with Jehovah progresses, through the only clear trait he was introduced with : his culture and its removal. There’s no indication he committed real crimes like the conquistador, but by Jehovah’s Witness standards, his culture is a sin. All the world is ruled by Satan, who created various cultures to offend Jehovah. Growing closer to Jehovah means to be …

Taught to loathe their own culture

“… and dedicate their lives to him.”

A century of trauma at U.S. boarding schools for Native American children

“What a privilege it will be to see obedient humans become free of the burden of sin and death, and gain perfection.”

Death by civilization

Look at the guy in orange. That’s supposed to be a resurrected Israelite.

In older illustrations they would sometimes feature people in Asian or even African garb, this has also disappeared. The only cultures now allowed in Paradise is modern white and their generic concept of Israelites. Suspiciously pale Israelites who occasionally have blond hair.

Jehovah’s Witnesses believe in a resurrection with a trial period of thousand years, during which people who did not yet have the chance to convert are indoctrinated. If they do not convert, they will be killed. 

Everyone else becomes the immortal inheritor of the planet under the all white male heavenly government, who will run a monoculture in a worldwide park.

The staff could have chosen a drug addicted teen with spiky as the centerpiece of their message about growing into a good church boy for their disturbing post genocide fantasy, but they chose to aim it at indigenous cultures.

At this time. Apparently they looked at the news about the residential school massacres and decided that yes, now is the time to double down on the cultural purge theme. It must have been inspirational to them.

Imagine being murdered by one of those schools, waking up to a strangely paved over, unnatural version of the world you knew, and be told that the Christianity they made you convert to was wrong, and you have to convert to this other type of Christianity in this new school or you will be killed again.

That’s what Jehovah’s Witnesses hope and pray for : that they get to reenact global colonization with the backing of supernatural forces.

How many mass graves and extinct cultures are needed to convince Christian apologists that missionaries and missionizing are inherently xenophobic?

The answer is apparently always, “At least one more.”

It just like… look. If your religion has an explicit instruction of belief that it needs to take every other religion out there in the world, wipe them out, and replace them with itself, that religion is xenophobic. And the people who engage in the fulfillment of that process are xenophobic. It might not be as explicitly nasty a xenophobia as ethnic genocide, but it’s still an instruction to commit cultural genocide.

this was a good take until the second comment. the religion itself isn’t resting on an explicit instruction to take out other religions. 

Even that instruction is from a translation that was created specifically to support colonization, imperialism, and an imperial hierarchy. The crusades were created as a political declaration by the Pope to stop various christian countries from fighting with each other, NOT scripture 

Also, non-prostelyzing christians exist. the vast majority of christians come from sects that aren’t active colonizers. Christians of colour have a right to their religion

And this is a bad and “super-rich” take.

Yes, Christianity’s proselytizing is based on the explicit instructions in the text–it’s called The Great Commission, and is repeated, not once, not twice, not thrice, but FIVE separate times:

Matthew 28:16–20 Mark 16:14–18 Luke 24:44–49 John 20:19–23 Acts 1:4–8

Each time instructing Christians to “go forth and make disciples of all of the nations” in one form or another. And they did.

So by the time of the Crusades, aggressive missionization had already converted the native cultures of Europe to Christianity. This was as part of an explicit campaign of targeting pagans via Interpretatio christiana starting in the 590s AD, 500 years before the Crusades. Hell, in the 1030s, 60 years before the First Crusade, a pagan revolt in Poland was put down by force by Christians. And away from full Church control, but under the command of newly converted Christians full of zealotry, wanting to convert pagans as their book instructed, Norway saw Christians lock Norse priests in their temples and burn them down in the 1010s. Iceland was converted by threat of civil war by the Christian lords of the island in 1000. And

So yes, missionization IS based on Scripture, missionization has always been an active and explicit part of Christianity as a religion, and missionization has been an explicit policy of the Church pretty much since it assumed power in the remnants of the Roman Empire, saying explicitly that it needed to target non-Christians and destroy their religions. And away from the Church’s hierarchy, Christians acted in accordance with that belief and continued that pattern of behavior WELL before the Crusades or the King James Bible (which is what I’m assuming you’re referring to with that historically illiterate comment on it coming from a translation done to support colonization and imperialism, which the KJV certainly does, but those impulses were there well before that translation was made).

And as for “Christians of color”, how the HELL do you think their ancestors were converted in the first place?

And I never said that they had to stop practicing Christianity… so that’s an interesting slip of the tongue there, if you assume missionizing is synonymous with “having a right to their (Christian) religion”. But believe me, I would love it if more Christians would shift to non-missionizing interpretations, but for too many of them, that is the core and basis of their faith, like a religious Ponzi scheme.

My dude, my wife and I both grew up in Evangelical Christian churches. She got it worse than I did, but we absolutely both got the full indoctrination before our queerness broke us out of it, and uh… The entire religion absolutely relies on converting everyone who does not agree with you. There is no tolerance of non-believers allowed, it’s functionally immoral in that worldview to NOT try to convert people because if you leave them to their pagan beliefs they will suffer eternal torture. There is literally no “live and let live” in Christian theology, because either you have a moral obligation to convert the nonbelievers, or you feel it is right and reasonable that they should suffer for ETERNITY for not choosing the correct (subjective, very hard to discern in the mortal realm) path while they were alive. …Christian faith is innately xenophobic and actually genocidal - it wants to destroy culture, community, any religion that is not its own - and I promise my wife and I can argue any of its points as well as any evangelical Christian. We understand you. We understand you so well. That’s why we know how dangerous you are.

@the-super-rich-kid Hey, I’ll be honest kiddo, you need to reread all the bible verses that @the-library-alcove​ linked, because a) I grew up in evangelical xianity and b) he’s right, but if you won’t, just reread this:

Like… Jesus explicitly just said “go and make everyone else Christians like you”.

That is explicitly cultural genocide. That is what cultural genocide is. “Go and destroy all other religions so that their people will be my disciples.”

It has been part and parcel of the Christian belief system since JESUS FUCKIN GOT CRUCIFIED AND PURPORTEDLY CAME BACK TO LIFE, so… you really need to not try arguing that’s something modern. It’s been in Christian teachings since essentially Day One.