(Off-at-tangent bit, as I tend to) – Kingsley, an Anglican clergyman and among many other things, author of The Water Babies, was by the standards of his time, liberal on most issues; but, for sure, he didn’t like the Catholic Church. I hold no brief for Mr. Bergoglio’s outfit – but even I had to abandon Kingsley’s 16th-century-set novel Westward Ho!, not very far into it, because of the incessant virulent anti-Catholic bigotry.
Never underestimate human beings’ capacity for cognitive dissonance – harbouring (sincerely) mutually contradictory notions / attitudes. For sure, George Orwell did not invent the concept of “doublethink”.
No, I am not sure about the 6,000 year part. That was a misconception on my part. What I know is that he accepted the JW mythology, while at the same time accepting modern cosmology, evolution, etc, as a puzzle created by god. He explained this to me one day when I asked him about what I thought was a complete disconnect.
This was the impression I’ve had of both groups with moderate anecdotal evidence. But I find it interesting how many people here have had contact with more educated witnesses.
I’ve heard that a lot of woo proponents/pseudoscientists are engineers by background and that it may come from having a grounding in a lot of scientific knowledge but not having the rigor and skepticism that one would get in a research science program. In other words, you know enough to know that there are tools that say that there’s more out there, but you can’t use them effectively.
I have not met a JW who was particularly worldly or sophisticated, but I have known some through school.
To be fair though, there many (if not most) mainstream Christians who don’t know much about the history of their faith, including highly educated ones. Believers don’t usually seek out texts that are critical of their faith. And good historical texts to be critical.
As usual, it depends. Many Jehovah’s Witnesses reject education as “worldly.” As a university instructor, I’ve had a few JW students that I know about. When it came to my attention, it was always because they had a religious objection to something we were studying and wanted an alternative assignment.
My JW grandparents were very pro-education, but in a limited way (only half of their children finished high school). Their view was that you could and should learn to read and write, but that you could educate yourself. This conveniently allowed them to avoid challenges to the religion. My current JW relatives certainly view my university education as a strong negative, and my ex-witness cousin was actively prevented from seeking a university degree when he was a teen in the late 1990s.
Edit: JWs really are a special case when it comes to their anti-intellectualism. With most other sects it’s a cultural phenomenon that doesn’t extend to rejecting the entire system. JWs are quite separatist and view themselves as different from the rest of society, and society’s institutions (universities, courts, etc.) as irrelevant to them.
Double edit: I’m trying to be fair, here, but I have a strong anti-JW bias so do filter my post(s) accordingly.
The Amish are very much like this. They run their own schools and reading and writing are absolutely required. They want kids to be self-sufficient, able to make a living and able to read the Bible.
They are really good at language education - it’s typical for them to grow up speaking fluent English and German.
What they don’t care for is heaps of scientific knowhow and education for the sake of being cultured. They are renowned for being not only some of the best farmers on the US east coast, but some of the best farmers in the world, but they don’t know jack about calculus or general relativity and don’t know who Beowulf was. Nor do they really care, for the most part.
For example, your typical random person looks at the Great Pyramid of Giza, thinks, “wow, neato”, reads a bit about it, its structure, and its accepted historical explanation, then goes off and finds something else to do.
An engineer learns about the Great Pyramid and starts to study it from an engineering perspective. He tries to think about details about how it was built and how he would build it if he had to, and realizes that there are some complex questions still to be solved. Since he can’t figure out a construction plan, he figures that humans couldn’t have done it and maybe it was space aliens. Maybe those space aliens with the green heads and ray guns, yeah.
Michael Jackson and his family were Jehovah’s Witnesses. I can’t speak to their level of education, but obviously he and his siblings were enormously successful in the wider world.
I can’t say I ever met him properly, but one time that our house was visited by JW’s it turned out that one of them was a former classmate (business school) and coworker of my father’s. Dad invited them in and his pal and him had the grandest time debating theology, medical practices and the virtues of different Biblical translations while the other guy sat on the edge of the sofa and looked terribly constipated.
ETA: the guy was a convert, his college years were pre-conversion. I understand he’d always been particularly “hot” about religious discussion and willing to use bulldog tactics of debate (grab an argument tightly and keep repeating it).
Having grown up Mormon, I’d distance them a bit from the other sects mentioned here.
Mormons in general tend to be educated people. I’m sure they skew above the general population for completion of every level of education: high school, college, graduate school, PhD/MD/etc. They also tend to be successful people in real-world occupations. Plenty of very successful Mormon businessmen out there. Mormons are neither insular nor anti-science.
I once spoke to one who told me that “Two years ago, I was an ardent evolutionist.” I asked him whether he rang doorbells and preached evolution. He didn’t answer. My MIL once told one at her doorstep that they had been trying to get her for 2000 years and hadn’t succeeded. They actually apologized for bothering her. I guess they are really trying to convert Christians.
My wife is Jewish. Pointing out the mezuzah on our doorframe usually gets Jehovah’s Witnesses either to leave, or to quickly shift gears, share a scripture from the Old Testament, then leave.
And thus I am a flint-hearted atheist who nonetheless reaps the benefits of religion when it suits him.
I’ve only ever met one JW, and she was a student at Cambridge University. So, yeah, she was pretty educated. She was devout (like, she would go every week or two to hand out flyers / knock on doors) but sort of cheerfully acknowledged that many people found a lot of her religion to be somewhat absurd. I can’t remember what her take was on transfusions; I think she might have said she would do it if it were a life-or-death thing.
And yeah, echoing what everyone else has said about Mormons being culturally (and, heck, for that matter, doctrinally) very into higher education, although in my anecdotal experience they tend to skew towards the more “practical” disciplines – business, law, medicine. Though Mormons are hardly anti-science – for example, we tend to hear a lot about Henry Eyring the chemist, the father of Henry B. Eyring who is basically the second-in-command of the LDS church right now. Many of the Mormons I went to college with did go into scientific fields, and one of them is now a professor at MIT.
If you tell them to take you off their list, they are supposed to - they have assigned maps. Don’t just say you’re not interested; specifically tell them not to come back. They keep a list, seriously. And yes, they’ve changed their minds about a lot of things over the years. They used to celebrate Christmas. They began as an end of the world cult but when the end never came, despite several predictions, they quietly stopped talking about it. When kids come of age, they are encouraged to research the information for themselves, then kindly handed a list of research materials specifically chosen by the elders for this purpose.
I’m married to an ex-JW and his family still talks to him despite not being allowed to. We met Raymond Franz once (he was a very high up member until getting disfellowshipped). He helped my husband a great deal.
Should have been there the day Mormons came a-knocking at our door…
I think Raindog decided to either leave or go on lurk status. I really liked him &, tho I’m a traditional Trinitarian, we had more in common against the general trends here.
