I should introduce myself, since this is my first post. I'm actually not an ex-JW, but rather someone who has just lost his faith in a different church, the Mormon church. I've long suspected that in terms of the organizational aspects of our two churches, how they hook you mentally, how they condition you, how they socialize you and make it very hard to leave, from an abstract level there's really not a dime's worth of difference.
The more I read of you guys' struggles and experiences as you realized that the church you might well have been born into and grown up in wasn't really "The Truth" after all, the more I realize that if you just change some JW jargon for Mormon versions, a lot of you guys' stories would be exactly the same as ours.
I served a full-time LDS (mormon) mission, and where I went, I ran into a lot of JWs. At first I was more argumentative and confrontational, but eventually I took a different point of view. I realized that I was in a country (Switzerland and Germany) where really nobody wanted to hear what I had to say about my religion, and just about the only other people who understood that experience of constant rejection were the JWs. Sure, the JWs didn't have the "real" Truth like I did, but they knew what it was like to actually be a missionary and go through all of that. I actually had a more collegial attitude toward the JWs I would run into on the street after that. I daresay most of them regarded me as some kind of heathen though, not having the "real" Truth like they did. :-)
Anyhow, I'm in a situation that ought to sound familiar to you guys. I have come to realize that Joseph Smith was not one of the greatest men who ever lived, as I'd grown up being taught, but rather he was a fraud, a charlatan, a player who debauched women in the name of God, who set himself up as a light unto the world, but who, in the end, was making it up as he went along. The problem is, my wife still believes. Most of her family still believes. All of my family believe. We don't have the whole official shunning thing that you guys do, but there's a sort of de facto shunning that a lot of ex-Mormons will experience from members based on fear. It's fear that you've been corrupted somehow, and that it might rub off on them.
To a true-believing Mormon, the church is so obviously true, and lead by God, that the only way someone can lose that testimony is if they somehow are lead astray by Satan. Who wants to have anything to do with a guy who is under Satan's influence? Can we blame them? Yeah, from the outside, they're brainwashed fools, but from the inside, they're just protecting themselves from the wiles of the Devil.
So my wife's had a very hard time with this. More than once she's threatened me with divorce. She tells me that this isn't what she bargained for when she married me. She married a man who would lead her to the Celestial Kingdom (the Mormon conception of heaven), and now instead she finds herself married to a guy who not only has no interest in the Celestial Kingdom, but could well pull her down with me. Let me tell you, it's been pretty rough.
Unlike the JWs, since there's no officialy mandated shunning, we get web forums where defenders of the faith, ie: Mormon apologists, will argue with Mormon critics, including ex-Mormons, about the church, the evidence that shows it's not true, etc. I've been participating on a couple of these boards for some time, and I have to say, it's really amazing just how brainwashed the true believers really are. And that was me.
I had the strongest possible testimony that the LDS church was true. I knew it. I took it for granted. It was a bedrock value in my life which influenced my thinking about anything and everything. Small chinks in my belief system came up over the years because of things like the debate over Evolution, which I believe is a true description of how species developed, the Noah's Ark story, which I believe is pure mythology, etc. I believed in Evolution, and figured that the LDS leaders, whom we sustain as Prophets, Seers, and Revelators, were simply wrong about it. They were also simply wrong about Noah's Ark. But none of that really mattered, none of it threatened my faith in the church's truthfulness, because those details were not the important ones. They were not necessary to my salvation. What was necessary to maintain faith was believe in Joseph Smith's prophetic calling, which would underpin belief in his church, and a belief in the atonement of Jesus Christ.
After all, Noah's Ark may not have happened, but if Jesus's atonement didn't happen, then it was all wrong.
I lived my life with these little chinks in my belief, growing ever so slowly wider, until a couple of years ago. That's when I read some really damning material about Joseph Smith. My faith was threatened. I was scared. I know what it feels like to fear that the belief system one has lived his whole life by is actually not true. When you guys say this in your posts on this forum I know exactly what you mean. I felt it too. It was so hard to accept that I literally had to force myself, as a matter of will, to recognize even as just a possibility that the church might not be true, and let the chips fall where they may.
That was sort of like a threshold for me. Once I forced myself to acknowledge the possibility, hitherto impossible in my mind, that the church wasn't really true, the whole edifice of my faith crumbled rather quickly. I let the chips fall where they may, and they indicated to me that in fact the LDS church was just as not true, just as manmade, and just as lead by man, as any other church.
I was raised thinking the LDS church was special. We, alone out of all of the world's religions and churches, actually had The Truth, and that was a very special thing. I used to thank God that I'd been born a Mormon. I imagined, almost with a shudder, what my life might have been like had I not been blessed to have been born into the true church. I imagine a lot of you probably felt the exact same way about the JWs.
Now I realize that the LDS church is not special, literally. It's not the sole true church on the Earth. It's just one of thousands of non-true churches. It's just one more drop in the bucket of wishful thinking and institutionalized mythology that is the world's religions.
And you know what's cool? It's cool to realize that I really am just like you guys. There's no difference between us in a sense, because we're all people who've come out of two of the thousands of the world's false religions. My church isn't any more non-true than yours, and yours isn't any more non-true than mine. They're both completely and utterly not true, and now, rather than being "special" people, blessed with an honor most people in the world didn't enjoy (membership in God's one true church), we're all just human beings, trying to figure things out and make the most of our lives.
I guess if this post has much of a point it's that you guys should recognize that your experiences aren't unique to the JWs. As I've long suspected, these are the experiences that are pretty common to people who somehow manage to free their minds from the flypaper of false religion, or from religion in general. I listened to a podcast a year or so ago from a guy who had left the JWs, and he described his experiences, and I swear if you just changed a few jargonized words, and skipped the official shunning, this story could have been exactly like a guy leaving the Mormons. It's fascinating to me.
I can't promise I'll participate much on this forum. As much as we have in common regarding the nature of our experiences and the struggles our leaving our faiths causes us, still I don't have the exact same specific experiences that bind you ex-JWs together.