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Last week's NewsNews article for the week of 8/22/07. Jehovah’s Witnesses Declare Immunity
To Hurricanes Attempts to deal with the devastation of Hurricane Katrina has yielded many interesting and innovative strategies, some of which skirt the bounds of sanity, such as buying a house boat to ride away the flood waters, or a plane boat to race ahead of the winds. Jehovah's Witnesses based in Florida have come up with a solution. “Where others will have to suffer through the coming storms our beliefs shall be our salvation,” one community leader stated emphatically. No, this isn’t a metaphor. Having determined that Global Warming is real and in fact a result of human activity the Jehovah’s Witnesses, famous for their stand on certain forms of medical intervention, have decided that the environmental changes also constitute “unnecessary intervention by man in the works of God”, and thus not binding to members of their belief system. In short they have declared that Jehovah’s Witnesses around the world shall be immune to the effects of climate change, mostly the effects of excessive UV radiation and sudden floods and hurricanes, unlike the rest of us. As odd as it may seems the same authority that decided this has thrown in a few fringe benefits. Now Jehovah’s Witnesses claim immunity through the same means to Coke Zero and Donald Trump’s comb over. This is not entirely unprecedented, having chosen to have nothing to do with blood transfusions, iPods or Ford Mustangs, while making life difficult, has not been without advantages, and has helped maintain a separate identity for the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Jehovah’s Witnesses in Florida are naturally pleased with this turn of events as predictions of another Katrina as a result of climate change run rampant through weather forecasting communities. When ridiculed for adopting a position that amounted to “burying (their) heads in the sand” Witnesses leaders emphatically stated that this was impossible, as burying heads was the official Bush Administration policy when dealing with natural disasters, and for the Jehovah’s Witnesses to do the same would be a breach of copyright, an act of dishonesty they could not allow. Natural allies have been certain business concerns, already using religion as a tax dodge, seeking to do away with this troublesome Global Warming and getting down to making money. While most Big Business adamantly holds to the idea that Global Warming is a myth needing further research a handful have come forward to state that if it does exist the best method of combating it may be the low cost change of philosophy approach started by the Jehovah’s Witnesses. More than a little annoyed that their beliefs are being used by corporations to justify their excesses the Jehovah’s Witnesses are willing to open the matter up for debate in just two more years, less concerned with whether the approach works or not and more worried that corporations may copyright their idea and start a landslide. Whether this paves the way for future climate change deniers to cite religion as a defence is debatable, let alone the long-term success of this strategy has a few problems. The Pope recently attempted to declare, “it’s not raining” during a recent mass and still came in wet indicating a lack of short-term success with the strategy.
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