This week, I invited two neighborhood Jehovah’s Witnesses, Meryl and Glenis, in and offered them some birthday cake. They declined, telling me Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t celebrate birthdays, and consider them to be pagan idol worship.
How silly! Birthday parties are merrymaking, not reverence. Birthday presents aren’t sacrifices. Birthday cakes aren’t sacramental. Candles are just candles.
Jehovah’s Witnesses also don’t celebrate holidays in general. No Christmas. No Thanksgiving. None of that good stuff. Fuddy‐duddies!
But here’s what really takes the cake:
We may have caused the Haïti earthquake by drilling down to the earth’s core in the Gulf of Mexico, Glenis told me. (Damn our dependence on magma‐powered cars!) Haven’t I wondered why we have so many more earthquakes these days? She imputed some of this imagined increase to damage to tectonic plates from all our drilling for oil.
I skeptically asked if that were true. If it were, there should be news stories about it. She encouraged me to check it out. So, after she left, I did. It’s false. In fact, the number of major earthquakes per year has decreased recently, which experts consider a statistical fluctuation in an average that’s been stable for over a century.
Moreover, for decades Jehovah’s Witnesses lied about the number of earthquakes increasing since , but The Watchtower surreptitiously backed down from those claims in .
[Ed. 2010-08-14: On her subsequent visit, when I told her what I’d learned about earthquake frequency, Glenis insisted she was just asking how do we know our oil drilling isn't causing earthquakes.]
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