I got a pamphlet through my door today from the Jehovah's Witnesses. I always enjoy reading their literature - it puts a smile on my face. This one was called "Who Really Rules The World?". Unusually for them it makes no claims that soon we will be living happily in pretty gardens, hand in hand with lions, tigers and bears who have all become vegetarian and stopped eating people.
Instead, it's about how the real ruler of the world is not God, Jesus or David Blaine, but is in fact (wait for it)... Satan! No way! It's not made clear quite how he goes about this ruling, but it seems to mainly involve him making people be nasty to each other. Because without his influence they'd all want nothing more than peace and happiness and would never hurt each other at all, honest.
It goes on about how Satan tempted Jesus: "The Devil took him along to an unusually high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory". Now, geography is not my strong point but I think it would have to be an incredibly high mountain to see all the kingdoms. Not to mention the problems caused by the curvature of the Earth. Do they know that the world's not been flat since the Dark Ages? It's possible I suppose that there was a television at the top of the mountain perhaps showing programmes from The Geography Channel. Maybe the top of a mountain was the only place you could get a signal in those days (which would explain why most people didn't have televisions then!).
Anyway, to summarise for a bit, Satan's bad, blah blah blah, he tempts people and machinates and blah blah blah. He's really bad.
It then talks about one of the ways in which he tempts people - by "promoting the idea of survival after death, even though God's Word clearly shows that the dead are not conscious". This confused me a little, as it seems to be denying the concept of heaven, and claiming that dead people can't think anymore. I'm not used to actually agreeing with the JWs. Maybe I've done them a disservice and they do speak sense after all?
Then there is a warning against "spiritism". This "brings a person under the influence of the demons". You should "resist all its practices regardless of how much fun or how exciting, they may seem to be. These practices include crystal-ball gazing, use of Ouija boards, ESP examining the lines of one's hand, and astrology". They're probably right about astrology.
It finishes with that bit from The Usual Suspects about how the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist. I guess that means I have been well and truly hoodwinked!
So by the end of the pamphlet, they had spoken so much sense and made me understand so much about how the world really works that I converted on the spot and sent off for more information. Or perhaps I watched Arrested Development and had a curry. Definitely one or the other of those.
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