Let’s take a trip to Paris, France. The year is 1796, and a new game is sweeping the city, drawing wealthy thrill-seekers in from miles around. The game is one of chance. A wheel with 36 slots embedded in it is spun, and a ball is tossed into the mix at random, landing unpredictably in one of the 36 slots in the wheel. You may recognize this game- today we call it ‘Roulette’. What inspired the inception of this odd betting-game?
Well, the owner of the Parisian casino knew that the odds of a player guessing the exact slot in which the ball would land in are so low that the casino will never be at risk of losing money overall. In other words, to a casino owner, this 1-in-36 chance is more than enough to reliably make money from. It’s a safe bet that, over all, the player doesn’t win.
Now, imagine that our casino owner was not satisfied with a 1-in-36 chance. He wants the odds to be even more remote. You suggest to him that a 1-in-100 wheel be built. He declines. With a wry smile, he demands that a wheel with 38,000 slots is constructed. And the fun doesn’t end here. He proposes that in his casino, players will be forced at gunpoint to choose a number from the first (normal 36-slot) wheel at random. The ball will then be rolled on this normal roulette wheel, and if the player guessed wrong, he is to be mercilessly executed at gunpoint.
If, however, the player manages to guess correctly, the player gets a second spin of the wheel. This second spin, though, uses the big wheel- the one with 38,000 slots. Again, at gun point, the user must select the correct slot to preserve his own life. Only if these two statistically unlikely events are completed successfully and in a row does the player leave with his brains still in his skull. What relevance does this have to you?
Your consciousness emerged into the world at random when you were conceived. Obviously, you had no choice or influence prior to your conception as to where you would be born, when, and to which parents. At this point we need to bear an important fact in mind: the vast majority of people on Earth swear by the religion in which they were born and raised. If you were “born in the truth”, then you fit into this category in exactly the same way as most Catholics, Muslims, Buddhists and so on. You may argue that you “believe based on research”, or “based on knowing it just feels right”, but you must both remember and admit that so do those other religious people. Muslims, Born Agains, and Hindus all feel exactly the same way as you do, if not stronger.
Christianity is one of around 30-or-so major religions world-wide. And even Christianity, as you are keenly aware, is not a single and unified group. In fact, a conservative estimate states that there are more than 38,000 different denominations of Christianity (according to Christianity Today – General Statistics and Facts of Christianity Today). Jehovah’s Witnesses are simply one of those 38,000.
And in the cosmic game of life, even Jehovah’s Witnesses themselves teach that the stakes at the table are no less then a person’s life. So because of the fact that most people pursue the religion of their birth, this is akin to being executed for failing to roll the correct numbers in the ridiculous game of roulette outlined earlier. And this only gets worse.
Why does it get worse? Let’s throw another dimension in- time. Had you been born in Northern Europe a few hundred years ago, you would be preaching about Odin, and Thor. Or a few hundred years before that and a few hundred miles south and you’d be a Greek, firm in your beliefs about Zeus and Apollo. Ask yourself in all honesty – what makes you different from those people? If you were born into The Truth, then what’s to say you haven’t simply been indoctrinated into a belief system that happened to be there and available at the time and place of your birth, largely due to your parentage?
Now you see that, in actual fact, the chance of you being in the correct religion is not just 1-in-36, followed by 1-in-38,000. If you add the factor of time, the odds shrink even further! It’s far more likely that you are a nothing more than a product of your upbringing and geography than that you somehow have fluked your way into ‘The Truth’.
Now, of course, this in no way ‘disproves’ Jehovah’s Witnesses, and we would never claim that it does. However, we absolutely must acknowledge and admit that the chances of us being born into the correct religion are slim, to put it mildly. So at the very least we do well to take every opportunity to ensure that we are in a religion that teaches things which are factually true, which is what you will do in reading the rest of this book.
A Peer-review
Before we go on to examine those facts, let’s leave the roulette wheel and the casino, and return to the twenty-first century. In fact, let’s walk out onto the platform of your Kingdom Hall. Imagine a packed Hall on a Sunday; everyone from your congregation is in attendance. As you stand there, you begin to honestly assess the people you see before you. Now, in this mental picture, one by one, different groups begin to vanish before you eyes! Firstly, every member of the congregation who has or has had a psychological illness or issue disappears, leaving nothing but an empty seat behind. Next, anyone who could be described as ‘uneducated’ vanishes. Gone are all the ones without a full and successful secular schooling history, leaving only those who gained an education to a higher than compulsory level. Included in the group now gone are all of those kindly old sisters who wouldn’t know a supernova from a super-virus. The next group to vanish are those “born into the truth”, the remaining people who happened to roll the dice right and be born into the ‘correct’ religion. The final group to disappear comprises of anybody who entered the truth at a time of, or soon after, emotional trauma. The ones who came into the congregation on the promise of seeing dead loved ones again. Now, ask yourself frankly: who are you left with?
For the vast majority of congregations, the answer is “not many people”. But that fact highlights a disturbing truth: For the most part, the only people who will believe what Jehovah’s Witnesses teach are either:
• Mentally Ill
• Stupid or uneducated
• Indoctrinated from birth
• Only believe based on a promise, not on weather or not it is true or factual.
You can see why this is a disturbing thought. Although it is true that the Bible says that it is not out of the ‘educated ones’ that God chooses his people, the fact that the only people who actually believe it broadly fall into the above categories is alarming.
Again, we are not saying that this somehow ‘disproves the truth’, however we are saying that it should prompt you to be open to an honest examination of weather or not your beliefs really do line up with reality. To drive this point home further, let’s think about the implications of the above statement. Fair warning: the following is going to be a frank presentation of the stark reality we are left with in light of what we have discussed about the apparent qualities of those who believe ‘the truth’.
Given the fact that the congregation comprises of the people listed above, we are left with only two possibilities. In line with the theme of this chapter, The Luck of the Draw, please read the possibilities below, and make a sober judgement which you honestly think is the most likely reality.
Possibility 1: ‘The truth’ is, at its core, a fairly decent interpretation of an ancient book of myth. It has nice people who pick out the good morals of this book, and do try to live by them. But its ultimate claims are untrue, and inconsistent with reality. This is why the only people who actually believe it are either those mentally ill, insufficiently educated or simply brought up in a way that precludes them from knowing otherwise. This leaves the only ‘converts’ as those who are simply comforted by certain promises the religion makes, not by the innate factual truth of the Bible.
Possibility 2: The truth is completely true. People who are uneducated and mentally unstable are the ones who naturally would discover the ultimate truth of the universe and everything in it. Also, those born into the truth are given a full opportunity to explore the world in every detail, looking at opinions and researching outside of the religion’s texts and publications. And somehow, the entire world misses the fact that God is subtly helping Jehovah’s Witnesses by means of supernatural intervention from time to time.
Even if you chose possibility 2 from the list, you will still see the value of embracing the questions to be raised in this book. Why? Because you agreed, “…given a full opportunity to explore the world in every detail, looking at opinions and researching outside of the religion’s texts and publications.” With this agreement made, let us continue.
Success in the field
We’ve all spent our Saturday mornings trudging slowly from house-to-house after begrudgingly wrenching ourselves from our warm beds. And we’ve all had that forbidden thought dance mockingly across the landscape of our minds: “Nobody listens; this is a waste of time!” Of course, this is a natural result of the general apathy we see in the western world. Over the course of the last 20 years I personally have seen less than half a dozen ‘converts’ that came into the truth from the ministry, and stay in. In fact, I’d be hard pressed to name even one. But it’s fine; Jesus and the Bible predicted that people would be apathetic, and we are living right at the time of the end, are we not? Well, let’s think of another possible scenario.
One of the reasons we often use for why the work continues and Armageddon remains conspicuously absent is that there are “still people left to ‘come into the truth’”. Well, we’ve already discussed that for the most part these people are not found in major western society, so where are they? Well, the majority of growth among Jehovah’s Witnesses today is found in the poorer societies.
This means that countries and societies where people are less educated, and have a worse overall standard of living are far more likely to accept the truth. Why do you think this is? Is it that their unfortunate position in life affords them a uniquely humble perspective? Or could it be that their lack of understanding of the universe combined with their burning desire to have relief from their miserable life, along with their cultural propensity to superstition, makes them prime candidates to ‘accept the truth’? Really, what is more likely?
No comments:
Post a Comment