Insight on the News
“Doing It Right”
A recent editorial in the Sun of Gainesville, Florida, contrasted the so-called Moral Majority with Jehovah’s Witnesses in their approach to morality. “[The Witness] publication, The Watchtower, provides the instructions—most of them reassertions of long established principles,” noted the Sun. And “the offender who resists ‘loving concern’ is apt to be ‘disfellowshipped,’ which means dismissal from the congregation. . . . The discipline may offend some Americans, but it is entirely proper for Witnesses to enforce their own fellowship rules. It is a voluntary association, and the exit is easy for anybody who wants out.”
The editorial observed that, in contrast, the religious Moral Majority politically “seeks to enforce its doctrine not only upon its members—but wants to enact its beliefs as national policy.” In the opinion of the Sun, this mixing of religion and politics is unconstitutional, and therefore the Moral Majority is “doing it wrong and the Jehovah’s Witnesses are doing it right.”
Jesus Christ set the example in keeping his moral teaching out of the political arena. For example, when a “moral majority” in his time wanted to politicize Jesus as king in a move to improve government, he would have none of it. “Jesus, knowing they were about to come and seize him to make him king, withdrew again into the mountain.”—John 6:15; compare Luke 12:13, 14.
Atomic Stockpiling “Legitimate”?
In his annual letter to Catholic military chaplains, New York’s Cardinal Terence Cooke wrote concerning the morality of the American nuclear weapons buildup. As published in the National Catholic Reporter, the cardinal declared: “A strategy of nuclear deterrence can be morally tolerable if a nation is sincerely trying to come up with a rational alternative. . . . The church has traditionally taught and continues to teach that a government has both the right and the duty to protect its people against unjust aggression. This means that it is legitimate to develop and maintain weapons systems to try to prevent war by ‘deterring’ another nation from attacking.”
Cooke also said that nations are obligated to rid themselves of nuclear weapons altogether, “but the church points out that this must be done gradually, with all nations cooperating, and with prudence. . . . Under no circumstances,” the cardinal cautioned, “may a nation start a war.” How does this traditional rationalization affect the Catholic flock in practical terms? The record of history reveals that tens of millions of Roman Catholics and their clerical shepherds gave their all in support of the German military machines that ‘started’ two world wars.
‘Evil in Our Century’
An interview with the noted British author Anthony Burgess about his best-selling book Earthly Powers appeared in the French newsmagazine L’Express. “The book deals with the manifestations of evil, its emergence in our century, and our inability to fight it,” explained Burgess. “Politicians encourage it, artists look the other way, and even great churchmen like the Pope condone it. That is the image of our world since World War I.”
The author observed that evil since that time is different: “No historian has ever interpreted [terrible periods in history] as eruptions of evil”—merely “blunders” in attempting “to build a better world.” Now, though, says Burgess, “we begin to believe in a supernatural force with which man made a compact for destruction, or which he allowed to take control of him.”
Right on the Bible’s prophetic schedule, that “supernatural force” produced on earth the “manifestations of evil” noted by author Burgess. Events since 1914 in fulfillment of Bible prophecy indicate that “the one called Devil and Satan, who is misleading the entire inhabited earth . . . has come down to you, having great anger, knowing he has a short period of time.”—Revelation 12:7-12.