Watching the World
Delightful Assemblies Continue
◆ By the middle of July, 464,648 persons in North America had attended twenty-three “Divine Name” District Assemblies of Jehovah’s Witnesses. The program of these summer conventions featured practical Scriptural talks and Bible dramas dealing with many current problems. Those in attendance were particularly thrilled with the concluding comments. These included announced plans for expanding offices and printeries of the Watch Tower Society in Ghana, South Africa, Congo Kinshasa, Nigeria, Rhodesia, Brazil, France, Italy, Spain and Germany, as well as the Society’s facilities at Watchtower Farm, located about one hundred miles from New York city.
Catholic Church in Vietnam
◆ As in other countries the Catholic church in Vietnam has not confined her activities to religious matters but has been deeply involved in the country’s politics. It was pointed out in Newsweek of June 21, 1971, that the French bishop, Pierre Pigneaux de Behaine, who lived in the 18th century, “was directly responsible for the first armed intervention by French colonialists in Vietnamese political affairs.” The Catholic politician Ngo Cong Duc, who is a member of the present government, observed: “The church in Vietnam has always served the ruling class.” A Vietnamese Catholic priest remarked: “The church sleeps with all regimes. But she makes cuckolds of them all.” Compare such action with what is written in the Bible at Revelation 17:1, 2.
Rising Murder Rate in New York
◆ Residents of New York city are living in a violent place where their life is endangered if they just walk down a street at night. In fact, they are not even safe in their homes. In 1960 there were 390 murders reported in the city. In 1970 this figure nearly tripled, to 1,117. This is 14.2 per 100,000 population, about double the nationwide rate of 7.2.
Gambling Addicts
◆ Slot machines are legal in the Australian state of New South Wales, where people feed into them approximately $1.79 billion a year. When the losses are averaged out for the population, it is $31 for every man, woman and child in the state. This open gambling, as might be expected, produces gambling addicts who, in many cases, go hungry in order to feed the machines. A shock treatment given to some of them to break the habit has had a success rate of about 60 percent. The patient is allowed to play a slot machine with play coins but receives through the machine an average of 30 or 40 shocks in an hour’s session. Patients are permitted to select the severity of the shock. They come to associate pain with playing the machines.
Smoking Affects Heart
◆ Heart specialists in the United States have made some experiments on dogs and found that cigarette smoking causes the same chaotic heartbeat in them as has caused death among humans. They said that many of the cases of sudden death due to heart failure are due to the heart rhythm suddenly going widely out of control. Nicotine may be the cause. When nicotine is injected into dogs, it produces similar results. This is a further condemnatory fact in the mounting evidence against smoking.
Gonorrhea in the U.S.
◆ In the United States gonorrhea is now put at 2 million cases a year. It is the most widespread communicable disease in the country. Cases are increasing at the rate of 15 percent a year. Resistance to penicillin and multiple drugs is rising about as fast. Dr. Nicholas Fiumara of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health called the gonorrhea epidemic “an uncontrolled and uncontrollable disease.” He said that the principal factor is that “most females have no subjective symptoms of infection; therefore they do not know that anything may be wrong with them. They are truly carriers of the disease, and between 50% and 75% of infected women fall into this category.”
Pet Cemeteries
◆ Some people become so emotionally attached to their pets that they insist on burying them in a special pet cemetery when they die. And there are those who are glad to make money from these sentimental folks. The popularity of such cemeteries is growing. All types of pets are buried there—dogs, cats, horses, chickens, rabbits, parrakeets and even a turtle and a goldfish. Burials cost from $21 to $2,000 and more.
Catholics Install Deacons
◆ Thirteen married laymen were recently ordained in Detroit as Roman Catholic deacons. It has been more than one thousand years since this office was occupied in the Catholic church. The Second Vatican Council found it necessary to restore the diaconate due to the growing shortage of priests and as an effort to bridge the gap between the clergy and the laity.
Jewish Marriage Ban Proposed
◆ The leading rabbi of the rabbinic body of American Reform Judaism came out strongly against mixed marriages between Jews and non-Jews. He urged fellow rabbis to refuse to officiate at such marriages. It is his view that approximately 70 percent of the children from mixed marriages do not remain Jewish.
Churches Criticized
◆ Objecting to the atrocities committed in Vietnam, a Catholic writer said, in The Catholic Worker of May 1971: “The Christian churches of America—and this applies with special force to my own Roman Catholic communion—have permitted themselves to become fully responsible accomplices to war crimes and atrocities that have been committed by our nation and her allies in Vietnam. . . . In past researches and writings I have documented the scandalous failures of the Catholic Church in Nazi Germany to give witness against the immorality of the Hitler regime and the injustice of its wars. The same scandal, the same failure is now ours. If we have now been forced to confess the parallel between My Lai and Lidice, we must also confess that it has its match in the refusal of our American bishops to protest the former, just as their German counterparts turned their eyes away from the latter.”
Good Example Needed
◆ Those in positions of responsibility need to set a good example. This was highlighted by a report in Industry Week, which said: “One major cause of dishonesty within a company is decay from the top.” Norman Jaspan, a New York management engineer, said: “Any employee who sees shady or downright dishonest business practices coming from top management will have little hesitation about copying them on his own level.”
Womb Surgery Overdone
◆ Australian cancer researchers told a Sydney University symposium that too many women in that country have lost the ability to have children, due to premature drastic surgery. They said that present methods of diagnosis were not accurate enough to distinguish between cases needing a hysterectomy (the removal of the womb) and those where minor or no surgery was required. As a result, in far too many cases, drastic surgery is performed before malignancy is established.
Where Monkeys Excel
◆ In southern Thailand, about 1,000 monkeys work as trained coconut pickers. Each does the work of at least ten men and they are trained to pluck only the ripe fruit from the trees. It takes a monkey about 20 seconds to climb to the top of a 35-foot coconut palm. It might take a man at least five minutes to do the same thing. Despite man’s know-how, he has yet found nothing better than monkeys for the job. Evidence of evolution? By no means!
Freezing the Dead
◆ The Bible speaks of a resurrection as the only hope for the dead. (John 5:28, 29) But a growing number of persons are requesting to be frozen by the Cryonics Society upon death. They are hoping a scientific breakthrough will allow them to be thawed out and revived someday. They also are banking on discovery of a cure for whatever they died from. Cryonics officials readily admit there is no way known today to revive a body once it has been frozen. Some scientific observers view the idea as so much nonsense. The cost of the present freezing operation is about $15,000, not including maintenance. One report commenting on the freezing operation states: “Not only is effective unfreezing out of reach now, but the brain dies within 7 to 10 minutes after the blood flow stops. Unless the brain were chilled or frozen immediately upon death, chances are a frozen man would come back an idiot.” But God’s Word shows that Jesus is “the resurrection and the life,” not any human. Hence, these hopes involving freezing the dead are totally in vain.
Devil Worship Growing
◆ Arthur Lyons, Jr., author of a book on Satan worship, declares: “The United States probably harbors the fastest-growing and most highly organized body of satanists in the world.” He states that the movement numbers about 20,000 now. He says that devotion varies from those who have religious fervor to those who are just curious. Some sex-oriented cults, he notes, are “simply looking for an excuse, any excuse, for an orgy.” The growth of Satan worship is one more evidence that this wicked system of things, under its god Satan, is fast approaching its end.
An Impersonal World
◆ A twelve-year-old boy was struck and killed by a car in Montreal, Canada. The motorist responsible fled the scene. Then a succession of motorists drove over the child’s body without stopping. Another seven cars passed by without slowing down. The body lay in the road at least ten minutes before three students stopped their car and notified police. “This is the most disturbing thing I have ever encountered in my 12 years with the police department,” said police Sgt. Maurice Boisclair.
Warning on Saccharin
◆ A cancer researcher, Dr. George T. Bryan of the University of Wisconsin medical school, has warned that the sweetener known as saccharin is a potential cancer-causing agent. He thinks its use should be limited only to people who have a specific medical need for it, such as diabetics and the severely obese. He thinks its use should be restricted for the same reason that the cyclamate artificial sweeteners were banned.
Blood Transfusion Risks
◆ A study of 48,000 patients who received blood transfusions has disclosed that the danger of adverse effects from the blood is far greater than previously believed, with one out of twenty patients developing a bad reaction. Dr. Charles E. Huggins, associate director of a blood bank and transfusion service at Massachusetts General Hospital, said: “The report is frightening but realistic because the same problems are facing every institution throughout the world.” Few hospitals admit that blood transfusions can produce adverse reactions, for fear of being sued. The Cook County report showed that 5 percent of the 48,000 persons developed immediate reactions to the transfusions. In many cases the reactions were life-threatening. The study did not include the long-term dangers of blood transfusions.
Morality and Atomic War
◆ A lack of true morality greases the slide toward an atomic war, said Dr. Frank J. Ayd, Jr., medical editor and psychiatrist. “I am one of those who believe that society has to make some drastic changes, if we are not to destroy ourselves by nuclear warfare,” he said. “There is a new morality which holds that every human act, even murder, is good if it is motivated by ‘love’.” He concluded by saying: “It is frightening that so many foresighted people believe we may not survive to see the 21st century.” This view, of course, leaves God out of account.