I thought it would be fitting that my first post here should be an introduction. This post has gotten quite long so I decided to break it up into at least two sections. This is the first, I will post the second soon. I hope it doesn’t come across as rambling.
I should start with a confession: It was my Smurf that walked out of the Kingdom Hall in the early 80's. Just kidding (If you don't get that then Google it).
I was born into a Witness family. My father was disfellowshipped and my parents divorced before I was five. When I was in kindergarten my teacher told my mother she was so excited to have such a gifted student in her class. Years later my mother told me she thought the teacher was crazy, "What is a gifted five year old? Someone that can stack blocks well?" Since education was unimportant and borderline apostate, my mother did what any good JW parent would do when confronted with unusual intelligence in her child: she ignored it.
In third grade and again in fifth, at two different schools, It was recommended that I attend a special school for gifted students. Both of these requests were met with yawns of irritation from my mother. What would worldly education matter when Armageddon would be here before I ever saw the inside of a High School?
In middle school I was finally put into a program for gifted students. My mother had no quarrel with this, as it was during regular school hours and didn't require her to do anything. It was the first time in my life that I actually enjoyed school. Mrs. Baie was one of the few teachers I remember clearly from school, and the best teacher I ever had. She often came over to talk to me while the students were working on their assignments; about how "special" I was, about how far I could go, about the importance of college. She suggested that I could skip over grades, that I could possibly even start receiving college credits before I even got to high school. I explained to her that I had no intention of going to college, and this broke her heart. She started calling my mother to have her convince me of the importance of college. Of course this was to no avail. She wanted to have my I.Q. tested. My mother refused. By this time my mother had come to accept that I was indeed blessed with an unusually high intellect, however, her rote reply was that this was a gift from Jehovah that should be used in service to him and to the congregation. “Worldly” education was a temptation from Satan. People that went to college came out evolutionists. I of course agreed submissively, as I had been conditioned from birth to do.
By the time I got to high school, I came to view education as a distraction from spiritual pursuits, the waste of time that I was supposed to see it as. I knew no employer worth working for cared about a high school diploma, they wanted college. I was long since resigned to starting my own business. Without college as a goal, high school seemed beyond pointless. I started to miss a lot of school. I missed so many days that the rules of my high school dictated that I had to repeat my freshman year, regardless of grades. I stopped attending all classes but Algebra. One day my Algebra teacher came over to me and asked "Why are you here? You've missed too many days. I can't give you a grade." I responded that I like math, and I wanted to learn. I told him education should be for its own sake, that it shouldn't be about grades. He never questioned me again.
At fifteen I dropped out of school and got my G.E.D. My test scores put me in the 99th percentile of graduating high school students in all subjects except, ironically, in math. Just because you like something doesn't mean you have an aptitude for it.
The summer after I got my G.E.D. I was baptized. I was fifteen, and I was embarrassed it had taken me so long. Most of my friends were baptized at twelve or thirteen. I Auxiliary Pioneered the following month. This was the start of my “spiritual progress.”
I moved out on my own, with a roommate at first, when I was sixteen. At seventeen I moved from the Pacific Northwest to the south, to a city that was booming economically, in order to start a janitorial business. Not the type of work I would’ve chosen, if I had been presented a choice, but it was one of the few businesses that could be started with very little money and no experience. Inside of two years I was married to a very spiritual (and very beautiful) regular pioneer sister.
Her spiritual interests were the reason I married her. I knew she would be a good and caring wife, and an excellent spiritual partner. I liked her a great deal as a friend. I did not love her, at least not in the romantic sense. I had been deeply in love before, with a girl whom I had had a two year relationship with, and who I very much wanted to marry. I knew what it was like to be in love. I knew even as I proposed, as I walked down the aisle, and through the next ten years of our marriage, that I did not love her in this way.
I can imagine some of you reading this and thinking that I am explaining this fact, the fact that I didn’t love her, in order to excuse some future action on my part, an affair being the most obvious candidate, so let me assure you now that this is not the case. I have only ever made love to one woman and to her only within the bounds of wedlock. Neither did I leave her. I tried desperately to make it work, right up to the end, and in the end it was she that left me. But I am getting ahead of myself.
I have always had a voracious appetite for knowledge. I read on average about two books a month (this past month it was five), both fiction and nonfiction, and I have read at least that much for as long as I can remember. I love learning about history and science. I can’t get enough. My business was not intellectually stimulating to say the least. As my business progressed and I started taking on employees, my job started to require more and more time driving between job sites. I started checking out audiobooks by the armload from the library and listening to them as I drove. It was wonderful. I discovered there were entire college courses on audiocassette! For the second time in my life, I found myself in the position of learning for its own sake what I would never receive credit for, and I loved it.
One day while listening to a college course on ancient Egypt, I learned something that would change my life forever. The Egyptians have written records and artifacts back to the time of the supposed biblical flood and before. Centuries before. The ramifications of this hit me like a ton of bricks. Even if archaeologists were off in their estimates by a thousand years, the flood story can’t possibly be literally true. Yet the Egyptian and surrounding peoples’ fascination and meticulous recording of the positions of the stars make it highly unlikely that the estimates are off by even a few years.
I started to do my own research, going to Barnes & Noble and looking through books of ancient history. In one such book, a chart of world history, I came upon an even more startling fact purely by coincidence: The Babylonian Exile started in 587 B.C.E. This couldn’t possibly be true. That would make the 1914 chronology invalid. Without 1914, all of the other prophetic dates are wrong as well, since they’re all based on 1914. Without 1914, the Watchtower Society has no claim to being anointed in 1918. They would have no reason to exist at all, in fact, such a major failing would be overwhelming evidence that they should not exist at all.
I opened up another book: 587 B.C.E., I opened a third: 586 B.C.E., still another: 587 -586 B.C.E. Even while my trembling hands were pouring through book after book, desperately searching for a single one that backed up the date of 607 B.C.E. (which I would never find), the tumblers of my mind were clicking into place. There were things which had always nagged at me: why do we start from 537 B.C.E. and count backwards seventy years to get the date of the start of the overthrow of Jerusalem? I had always assumed that it was because scholars had overwhelming evidence for the date of the return, yet were unclear on when the overthrow happened. Yet this always seemed odd to me nonetheless. Weren’t there records of both the beginning and the end of the Jewish exile in Babylon? Why are there animals that are clearly designed to eat meat if they’re all going to be vegetarians in the New System? Why is the Old Testament so much more full of far-fetched miracle stories then the New Testament?
These and a myriad other doubts came flooding to the surface over the coming hours and days. Why does the New Testament claim that epilepsy is caused by demons? Why does the bible say the Earth is a circle if there is a Hebrew word for sphere? None of these were new thoughts to me, but I had always been able to lock them away, to bury them, to quarantine those thoughts deep within my mind, where they couldn’t infect my worldview. Now, that room was too full, the lock was forced open and those thoughts all seemed to tumble out at once. My mind was screaming for answers, and I had to find those answers, or deny reality entirely and go tumbling once and for all into madness.
For a time, I chose madness.
My life - A brief history. Part 1
by Galileo 41 Replies latest jw experiences
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Galileo
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IP_SEC
sorry,
I formatted it for you but looks like you got paragraphs now so I bow out.
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Galileo
Yeah, don't know what happened the first time. I copy & pasted from Word & somehow I lost all formatting. Had to go back and manually re-edit. D'oh!
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dogisgod
Galaleo, Welcome. I can't wait for part two. You write well.
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SPAZnik
Nice read. Keep 'em comin'. :)
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inkling
For a time, I chose madness.
'I will go mad!' he announced."
"Good idea. I went mad for a while, did me no end of good.
I just took my mind off the hook for a bit. I reckoned that
if the world wanted me badly enough it would call back. It did.The point is, you see, that there is no point in driving yourself mad
trying to stop yourself going mad. You might just as well give in and
save your sanity for later."-Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe, and Everything
Seriously though, welcome to the boards friend.
[inkling]
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yumbby
Thanks for sharing, you write so well. I'm looking forward to the rest of it.
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startingover
I too headed to Barnes & Noble and experienced the same as you in trying to establish 607. That's about the time I began to figure out I had been scammed.
Looking forward to part 2
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Galileo
Thank you everyone for the kind words. I am going to try to write part 2 tomorrow. Maybe in the evening. The irony of writing my experience on a Thursday night seems to good to pass up. But then there's also Lost...
Inkling, Douglas Adams is my hero! One of the great critical thinkers of our age, and died much to soon. I wept when he died. Have you read the Salmon of Doubt? It is incredible. It was published posthumously, and has some incredible nonfiction essays in it.