In Part I we looked at just how likely the Watchtower’s scenario is for Armageddon. We saw that they had pegged the world’s foremost peace-making organization as the instigator of the ultimate war! About as likely an event as your getting a date with Nicole Kidman and/or Brad Pitt (depending on your preference.)

But, for the sake of argument, let’s imagine that Armageddon has come and gone. Now we have seven billion dead bodies stinking up the planet. That’s the first job for the surviving eight million or so Witnesses to tackle, according to the Watchtower publication From Paradise Lost to Paradise Regained.

That’s not so bad: only about a thousand corpses for each Witness to dispose of. According to the Watchtower, a “prophetic month” is exactly 30 days long. So that means each Witness will have 210 days to bury their thousand bodies. That’s about five per day. The Kingdom Halls should start distributing shovels any day now.

I suppose if you’re a Witness child, disposing of your quota of five bodies a day might prove physically demanding (though your body will be undergoing perfection during this time, so that might help.) I imagine it could also leave permanent psychological scars on a child (or even an adult) to have to deal with brutally murdered corpses. One might be inclined to ask a fellow corpse-dragger: “Are you sure this is paradise?” But such a frank question might get one immediately zapped in the “joyous New Order.” Better to keep your real questioning to yourself if you want to stay a Witness — which is really no different than on this side of Armageddon.

All of this is assuming that the Witnesses are evenly distributed where the dead bodies lie. However, this is certainly not the case. For instance: there are currently 243 Witnesses in Bangladesh, which has a population of over 162 million. That’s 669,934 bodies per Witness, and 3,190 burials per Witness per day! To even-out the workload, they’ll have to rush about 162,000 Witnesses to Bangladesh. Rush them there in a world where all modern means of communication and transportation will have been destroyed. It would probably take the better part of the seven months just to move the Witnesses to “where the need is greatest” much less bury all of the bodies in that time!

Of course, just like everything else the Watchtower has ever said, they’ve also contradicted themselves on the issue of whether or not Witnesses will need to bury the bodies. Elsewhere they have stated that their god will “rain down” antimatter to make all the dead bodies disappear! Here is an example from the book we were studying back in my day: The Nations Shall Know That I Am Jehovah — How?

The only problem with that scenario is, due to the tremendous amount of energy given off when antimatter meets matter, it would result in destroying the planet and probably the entire solar system in an explosion equivalent to over a quadrillion atomic bombs. That’s not really a “highly scientific means” of disposing of the bodies, unless you want to dispose of the planet at the same time (which would rather put a damper on any  hope of living forever on a paradise earth.)

Then comes the “resurrection!”

Sometime after, or during the disposal of the bodies, Jehovah will start creating new, perfect bodies! These new models will have one very defective part, however: their minds. You see, this god is going to inject the brains of these new bodies with the memories of people who died (along with their personalities.)

So, here comes our first new model human: replete with the personality and memories of Genghis Kahn — whose last memory was of a sword fight in the middle of a battle, surrounded by his enemies. You won’t want to be anywhere close by when naked Genghis starts flailing about: intent on killing anyone within reach!

Oh, and here comes Stalin, with a perfect body! Isn’t he attractive, ladies? Watch out, though; he has a penchant for conducting “purges” against “counter-revolutionaries” and tends to suspect everyone (so, he’ll probably make a very good elder.) But don’t waste too much time worrying about him; I hear Hitler just got himself a new pair of perfect testicles, and he’s hunting for anyone who isn’t a blue-eyed blonde.

Won’t it be thrilling to have your children babysat sometime by one of your friendly new-world neighbors: Jeffrey Dahmer or Ted Bundy?

Even those mentioned above may not be the worst of the lot to be resurrected.

What I don’t understand is what good this “resurrection” is supposed to do anyone. Oh, sure, maybe a Witness can look forward to meeting some important historical figure such as Abraham Lincoln. But a new body with Lincoln’s memories and personality is NOT Abraham Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln is still dead, and it doesn’t do him a bit of good that there’s now a replicant of him running around in the “New World” pretending to be him.

In Disneyland there has been an animatronic Abraham Lincoln on display for decades. You can watch this marvel gesticulating and verbalizing Lincoln’s speeches to your heart’s content. But it does the original Abraham Lincoln exactly as much good as the Watchtower’s “resurrected” Lincoln would do him: zilch.

I wonder what sort of memories will be injected into the new body of a baby that died during birth, in order to make it the self-same baby? I sure hope Jehovah remembers to resurrect its mother first — still lactating (though in a new body.)

Teaching!

It will be the next job of the Witnesses to teach all of the resurrected ones the Watchtower doctrines. There have been about 100 billion people who have died, so each of the 8 million Witnesses will have to teach 12,500 resurrected ones — some of them in long-dead languages. Good thing their god has given them a thousand years to complete this task! That will give them almost a month to spend on each resurrected one (as they also divide their time in rebuilding the world, growing food, and attending meetings.)

Of course a month will be plenty of time to get a resurrected person up to speed, find them housing and a job, overcome their culture-shock, and induce them to start singing out of the current Kingdom Songbook. {sarcasm}

But I pity the poor young sister who gets assigned an Al Qaeda suicide bomber, and has to convince him not only that the new world he finds himself in is not the Muslim Heaven he expected to be instantly transported to upon death (and where she and the other sisters would be his sex slaves), but also that it simply isn’t the case that “There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet.”

But I think the hardest part of all will be explaining to people that they are no longer married to their resurrected spouses, and throughout eternity can never marry again!

The End of Sex and Romantic Love

That’s right: in the “New World” we are told that there will be no marriage: no uniting of couples who have died. The Watchtower has intimated that once the Earth is full (which their “resurrection” will quickly take care of) there will be no more childbirth (and hence, no more sex.) Jehovah will “remove our desire” for sex, and we may all become hermaphrodites (as Adam started out — in “God’s image” — and as Jehovah has evidently remained.)

“Adam possessed originally in his own person the qualities masculine and feminine which subsequently were divided between him and his wife, when she was taken from his side…As Adam originally possessed all the qualities of character, masculine and feminine, so humanity, when fully restored to the image and likeness of God, will re-attain perfection of individuality. Sex divisions will then be no more. Earth will be filled with sufficient population.” — The Photodrama of Creation, p. 9

Children are typically shown frolicking in the Watchtower’s illustrations of their new world. But, unless these are meant to be illustrations of the very first few years after Armageddon, how can there be any children? Don’t they grow up? And what about the elderly? You never see them in these illustrations. Do they age backwards until everyone is in the prime of their life (about 19 years old)?

Life: Neutered!

The world will be a dreary place without children, and when everyone is the same age and the same combined gender. With desire “removed,” what will people live for? Will it even be a life worth living? Most of the world’s great literature and artistic achievements call forth our inherent desires: we are “moved” by them because we relate to the human passion that created them. Who will bother to read Shakespeare’s love sonnets when the underlying longing they speak to has become foreign to us?

Imagine an eternal life consisting of endless days of routine work (houses, food, and clothes don’t make themselves. Even in the Watchtower’s illustration of the new order, shown above, people are hard at work on the roof.) The only breaks from work will be filled with meetings in the Kingdom Hall, consisting of repetitive praising of YHWH. There will be no children to raise, no career to pursue, no retirement to look forward to, no romantic love to fill your heart with ecstasy. You will live a joyless conforming existence in constant fear of being zapped for breaking a rule.

Life in the Watchtower’s new world will lack all of the essential ingredients that make life worth living. It will be life neutered. I’d rather be dead.

The Watchtower’s vision of the future is not a fairy tale; it is too absurd and cruel to qualify even for that genre. Yet this more-absurd-than-a-fairy-tale story is used to wield control over the lives of eight million Jehovah’s Witnesses! I would like to tell them that it is time to Awake!