Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Jehovah's Witnesses are wierd, too...

Following the tongue-in-cheek theme of my previous post, I discovered that Jehovah's Witnesses are weird, too.

I was watching another documentary on PBS (which I really don't do that often) and this one was on the Jehovah's Witness church. Seems that Jehovah's witnesses take the 7th commandment "You must not murder!" literally. So much so that they refuse to fight in the US' wars. They made a big stink when they refused to fight in the clearly (?) good vs. evil struggle of WWII. Their refusal to join the military on religious grounds lead to some major Supreme Court decisions regarding conscientious objectors and religious liberty.

Look, I realize JW's have some extrabiblical beliefs and that Hitler needed to be stopped, but what would happen if we really obeyed scripture? Why do people that fight over the literal translation of the Bible always seem to explain away or ignore the literal translation of difficult passages?

I'm not saying Christians shouldn't join the military. I'm not saying the US should never declare war. I do know however, what would happen if we refused to kill fellow human beings. The American way of life would disintegrate but Christianity would survive.

Just a thought...

1 comment:

tom sheepandgoats said...

Another way to look at it is that 1940's Germany was made up almost entirely of two mainline denominations. If even one of those denominations had taken the same no-killing stand as did JWs, other nations would not have had to worry about stopping Hitler.

Both world wars started in Europe among mostly Christian nations. Perhaps that is why Europe today is not especially fertile ground for churches.

The same neutral stand that kept American JWs out of the war also kept German JWs out. If they had fought here, they would have fought there as well, cancelling each other out.