Insight on the News
“Showy Display” Backfires
● In 1975, Italy imported more of England’s luxury Rolls-Royce automobiles than any other European country. Two years later, imports had dropped to about half of the 1975 total, and this year they reportedly number even less. Is this decline due to an Italian money crunch? No. It is because of kidnapping fears. “Rich Italians who have not yet fled their homeland want to avoid all the ostentatious trappings of wealth,” reports “Parade” magazine.
“I wish I had never bought that . . . Rolls,” cursed one millionaire whose daughter had been kidnapped from the family limousine. “Maybe this never would have happened.”
This illustrates how the “showy display of one’s means of life” often backfires on wealthy persons in one way or another, just as the Bible wisely observes: “Those who are determined to be rich . . . have stabbed themselves all over with many pains.”—1 John 2:16; 1 Tim. 6:9, 10.
Why the Discrimination?
● In an article on religious bigotry, Washington “Star” columnist William F. Willoughby observed that “whenever a Catholic priest or nun or a Protestant missionary is killed—even if not directly because of religious bigotry—the State Department makes due note of it, and most of the big newspapers carry a blurb on it.”
“But for more than two years now wholesale murder and persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses has been going on in Malawi. Hardly the semblance of an official protest—not even from Christians in this country.” Why are the Witnesses selectively ignored in this fashion?
Willoughby notes that Jehovah’s Witnesses “are so unpopular to this day that newspapers seldom pay attention to them despite the fact that literally hundreds of them are martyred or imprisoned each year around the world. They have had to go to court to gain every concession they’ve gotten in this country.”
Jesus Christ explained the reason for this phenomenon. “If you were part of the world,” he told his disciples, “the world would be fond of what is its own. Now because you are no part of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, on this account the world hates you.”—John 15:18, 19.
The Sexual Advice They Prefer
● Many English youths who graduated from school this year were given a leaflet by the teachers on the importance of exercising care in sexual matters. “It said that holding hands could be ‘stimulating’ and lead to other things,” reports the “Sunday Mirror.” “It attacked pre-marital sex because of the right to a clean partner in marriage.” The leaflet was issued by the careers advisory service at Dudley, West Midlands, says the newspaper, and “the sex guidelines were reprinted from pamphlets published by the Jehovah’s Witnesses.”
“I am not a Jehovah’s Witness and I did this personally in my own time,” said the man responsible, a careers’ officer for 12 years. “I believe we should not give just job advice but also vocational guidance.” However, the leaflets were withdrawn and destroyed after a storm of protest from teachers about their content.
Ironically, at the same time that wholesome Scriptural advice on sex was being destroyed, a group of 150 English doctors could do nothing about eliminating the “sick” sexual advice British teen-agers are getting from other sources. In a letter to the “British Medical Journal,” the doctors said: “We wish to draw the attention of the medical profession both to the Government funding of organisations which promote juvenile sex and to . . . teenage magazines, many with massive circulations, which reinforce the callous advice of these official bodies.”
According to the report in London’s “Daily Mail”: “One of the [Family Planning] Association’s booklets contains no section on marriage, . . . Nor does it mention the advantages of self-control, the failure rate of contraceptives, the association of cervical cancer with early sex or the ‘cruel consequences’ of abortion.”