But in the Latin alphabet, Jehovah begins with an I....

Every so often, a Jehovah's Witness pamphlet shows up in a phone booth literally just a couple of minutes from where I live. This is one of them. The front design's a bit unusual for a JW pamphlet. Most of the other ones I've seen have people sitting in fields or sunsets, so the Sci-fi grid is a little bit out of left field.

Hit the jump for the inside.

Sorry if the text is too small. You can click the images to get them full size dontcha know.

Now I'm in a fun mood today, so let's go through the End Of The World signs one by one shall we

"Nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom"

Well I suppose this is a change of pace from yesterday's tract, which was babbling about some EVIL KIND OF WORLD PEACE. It seems we're going to blow each other up after all thank goodness.

"There will be food shortages"

Actually, as long as you live in the right spots, food has never been more abundant. We're just really fucking terrible at sharing. That probably sounds a lot more callous than I meant it to. Sorry about that. The point still remains though that our collective ability to grow and transport food has increased an incredible amount in the last century alone due to some enormous breakthroughs in agriculture and infrastructure, and this stuff IS getting rolled out gradually, although obviously we could be doing a whole lot more a whole lot quicker, hence the "fucking terrible at sharing."

"There will be great earthquakes"
There's obviously a few more to be added on to this since this was written. The 2004 earthquake in the Indian Ocean and the 2010 earthquake in Haiti have taken out about 230,000 people each, and there's been a whole bunch of others as well. The quantity or "greatness" of earthquakes have not actually increased or anything though. It's just that for the most part, a LOT more people live in or around areas where earthquakes occur, mostly due to massive population increase, and there's no way of telling when the damn things are going to pop up.

"In one place after another pestilences"
Wow. Seriously? Medical Science in the last hundred years has made INCREDIBLE amounts of progress in dealing with disease. For starters there's the complete eradication of Smallpox in the wild, and in countries with proper medical access, the measles don't kill you any more. The biggest reason that Heart Disease and Cancer are such a big deal nowadays is because people are now living long enough to be killed by them.

"Increasing of lawlessness"
Actually, violent crime was down this year, at least in Scotland and America. and from stuff I can find, seems to have peaked in the 1990s, when this tract was written. I couldn't say whether this is true for the rest of the world, so I won't comment any further.

In any case, The World Is Getting Shittier is not proof that God is about to end the world, or even particularly true, and the correct response to The World Getting Shittier should never, ever, EVER be "WELL HOORAY! LET'S BUCKLE UP AND GET READY FOR THE WORLD TO END." Try "WELL SHIT LET'S FIX SOMETHING!"

Gosh I've been getting awfully preachy with these posts. I'm sure there's some irony in there somewhere.