Since leaving the JW Organization, who is believing?

by Issa 66 Replies latest jw friends

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  millie210

  nicolaou
  I know it wasn't your intention but this is the type of comment that really winds up many atheists. Why make the assumption that the only reason we abandoned god is because we got "hurt"? Didn't it occur to you that our reasoning may be sound? That perhaps we may have some intellectual integrity?

  Hi nicolaou,

  Fair question. I think the answer lies in my simply not explaining myself clearly.

  I have zero problem with atheists. My closest relationship off the boards is with an atheist.

  If I in my journey, were to become an atheist I would really want it to be based on where my conclusions lead me.

  My statement about reactionary behavior would apply equally to the person who joins a church because they hate the Witnesses.

  There is no belief or lack of that I take exception to. I take exception to the method of choosing the way forward.

  I think it is better to act than react.

  Thank you for your response and allowing me to explain that my post had no particular group in mind but rather a methodology.
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  Old Navy

  The Book tells us that life is precious. All life. It also tells us that ALL will be raised from death and made whole, cleansed and healed. At this point in our existence it matters not if it is believed or rejected. ALL are covered and ALL are included. None will be forgotten. We will all live again to find and experience all that we are longing for. Then we will know.
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  Xanthippe

  Hi Issa, I was a Christian for a year or two after leaving but not a church-goer. My husband and I started reading books on evolution, because we could now read whatever we liked, and realised we'd been lied to by the JWs about the lack of evidence for it.

  I also could not see that anyone is in charge of the world and realised all the religious explanations for why God permits suffering are all extremely convoluted explanations for why we don't see him doing anything. One day the penny dropped with me that we don't see God doing anything not because of Adam and Eve, sin or arguments with the Devil but because he's not there.

  We were humanists for a while but we found that we couldn't catagorically say there was no life after death as humanists believe. Browsing in a second hand bookshop we found a book on near death and out of body experiences which was very surprising and have read many books about them since.

  I have no religious beliefs and am now an atheist by I think it may be possible for consciousness to evolve to exist in non-physical states. I don't believe in anything supernatural, everything in the universe has by definition got to be within the laws of physics but I allow for the possibility that we don't understand all of physics yet.

  My husband attained a physics degree after leaving the JWs having always wanted to go to university because he loved the subject. He said you have to throw out what we call common sense when you study particularly quantum physics because that expression no longer applies. So I think the universe is full of possibilities and I never stop looking for answers. Good luck with your quest Issa.
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  dubstepped

  My plan was to leave and become an independent Christian. Then I applied the same critical lens to the Bible as I had to Jehovah's Witnesses and realized it was just as flawed as the cult I just left. I am an atheist now, as is my wife. I certainly don't believe in any god from a so called sacred text. Could there be something more? Sure. But if there is and it wants anything from us then it isn't worthy based on it's lack of ability to communicate. I see no evidence. I would have to want the things around me to be evidence and that's an act of will, not an act of some god.
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  ballistic

  I think there is more to this subject than whether ex-jws with a religious viewpoint are tolerated on this site; a larger question of whether leaving the witnesses results in more people with a non-religious viewpoint than those leaving other religions, and I strongly suspect it does.

  The reason for this (if I'm right) is to do with my last post about real faith and what it is. In my previous post, I mention how faith is something you feel (you know, like makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up), whereas the focus in the witnesses is more on facts and knowledge, pre-study, books ad nausium.

  In a religion so full of so called "knowledge", it seems a pretty safe bet to try to disprove it with ... other knowledge or as others said, place the lens of science over it, scrutinise the Bible itself with scientific method.

  And I did that too. I think that if you were brought up in the witnesses and want to scrutinise your religion with cold facts, then turning to science and making that your god may be the easiest way and it took me 10 or 15 years of doing that before I decided to turn inside out, and look at myself and my place in the universe all over again with fresh eyes.
  
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  Fred Franztone

  I.e. before you fell in love with the baby Jesus.
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  ballistic

  [quote]"I.e. before you fell in love with the baby Jesus."[/quote] , no not me, you'll have to find someone else to take the piss out of.
  
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  Searching

  I've become a non-denominational Christian I guess if you wanna get super technical I'm a Evolutionary Creationist, can't really find one church to go to that I'd feel comfortable with. My views about things the bible have changed since leaving the Org. It's flawed, written by men & of course not infallible, the stories in the Old Testament are mostly that, stories - a way for the writer to show who God is, and how he differed from the Gods & Goddesses worshiped at the time. There (probably) was no actual Adam or Eve, nor a Garden of Eden, nor an Original Sin. We evolved, as all things did, as things on other planets are probably doing.

  I've reached a place where I'm content at the intersection of science and faith, they can coexist just fine; I'm always excited to here new fossil discoveries, or our next attempt at searching for life among the stars, in my eyes it doesn't diminish God in the slightest. Sure there's a lot of things that confuse me still, there's always going to be those big philosophical questions that we ask ourselves, but I'm feel much more peace now then I ever did when I was a JW, and I think at the end of the day that's all we are looking for after leaving the ORG, truth and peace.
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  Searril

  EDIT: Posted on wrong thread.
  
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  Driveby

  I went from being a believer but not attending any church to being a JW to leaving the JWs but still believing to being an agnostic to being an atheist. I'm now the happiest I've ever been.