Why don't YOU believe anymore?

Crumpet

Someone on another site was asking "what if they are right?" which made me think about why I know that they are not and I wondered what was your epiphany or road to damascus moment or moments that just made you realise - hey I've been led up the garden path here!

here was my response but I really think a list of reasons on one thread for easy reference for newbies would be good. We all have different reasons or things that made us finally think for ourselves.

You definitely need to read some of the above mentioned books. Consider them part of the healing. I wish i had much sooner as it took my 15 years of being out but still believing it was all still true and that crippled me career wise, emotionall, spiritually and physically. You are young enough to really benefit from spending a little time proving to yourself it is all bollocks.

You may decide afterwards you still have a faith in God thats fine. I personally found my big shift came after a visit to the Dynamic Earth Exhibition kids section in Edinburgh (which is a fun morning out anyway) which made me realise that JWs hadnt quite been telling the truth about how scientific evolution is and actually how likely it was and how very simplisitic and ill thought out their arguments are.

But start where feels right to you. If something already strikes you as odd or unsound make your investigation start there and gradually you will find lots of things that seem wrong.

my second turning point was on another JW website which had audio experiences of JWs who had left because of things that were covered up by teh organisation and one of these was how they taught vaccinations were wrong and had blood in them resulting in doubtless qwuite a few JW kids in the States dying or not being allowed to attend school - as this was a government rule. Some parents went so far as to burn acid scars onto their kids arms so they looked like they had been vaccinated so they could attend school. It turned out Rutherford never investigated whether there were any blood products in the vaccinataions and when one enterprising brother did he discovered there wasn't.

I then found the Quotes site which in the last year the WBTS running scared have closed down - all it did was print word for word quotes of their teachings from their own literature - yet they took the guy weho ran it to court and threatened him with all sort of things simply for publishing what our grandparent JWs were encouraged to publsih as good pioneers. That in itself is enough to make me know this is no religion from God.

I have more and more reasons the more I think of it - but you need to find them out for yourself but we're always happy to point you to sites and books that will help.

Nina

So what made you question and stop believing?

dedpoet

Hi Crumpet,

There were a few snall things that made me begin to wonder about the wts, but the big thing that finally convinced me that I wasn't in the true religion was when I read Crisis of Conscience while on holiday in 1999. When I came back, I immediately resigned from my position in the comg, never went in the ministry again, and a short time later stopped attending meetings altogether. I haven't set foot in a kh since November 1999, and never will do again.

I am an atheist now, I was one before I became a jw, and wish I'd stayed that way instead of allowing myself to be conned by those lying, manipulative b**tards into wasting 8 years of my life in their cult.

dedpoet

cyberdyne systems 101

Because after reading the NT through in one go over a few weeks - I confirmed that the docrine that I suspected didnt add up, doesnt and couldn't add up. I began to realise it was another religion providing an interpretation, that was no more true that any others, whilst claiming they had the only channel to God.

I reseached the WTS history and found it to be completely at odds with the claim to be God's mouth piece and his 'faithful and discreet slave'.

In the end what started it was a feeling that turned into deppresion, where my thinking mind couldnt reconcile what I was being taught, this was more subconcious but was strongly exerting itself against trying to still cling to all i'd ever known in my life. It was a harsh reality to finally realise and start my life over. I have to say though that life does go on and i'm becoming more happy, now i've built up new friendships.

CS 101

Hellrider

I know what made me stop going to the meetings. I was 16 years old, my grandma had just died, and her funeral service was held at the KH. I hadn`t been to the meetings in a couple of months by then. At the funeral, this one elder comes over to me, puts his arms around me, and gives me a great hug, and says: "Im so glad you have come back to us". This is a guy that not only was frenchkissing a 8 year old girl in the bathroom at a home study, but also a guy that I had almost never talked to, at least a guy that I had never received a kind word from. And the thoughts that went thru my head was "you fucking Judas". That was it. I never went back after that. That guy died from leukemia some five years later. No great loss to the world.

MeneMene

During the time of Jim Jones and Jonestown there was a long newspaper article telling all about that cult. I kept that article for a long time and read it several times.

The similarities with the WTS was shocking to me at the time. That one article made me sit back and start thinking objectively about the religion I was born into.

LoverOfTruth

False Prophets are to be Avoided.

becca1

The UN issue was the catalyst. Seeing the hypocrisy involved in that issue allowed me to research other things that had troubled me but I was waitng on Jehovah to clear up.

leftbelow

I had a Public Talk on the end of the system and one section was on 1914 so I thought I would get some outside info to add to the talk and researched the year 607 B.C.E. at my local Univ. and that started me looking at everything it is not real easy but at least it's real

Madame Quixote

At fifteen, it was emotion and intuition which guided my conclusions that the JWs were full of bunk. I was tired of being smothered by the JW religion, whether it was right or wrong and intuition told me a loving god would not kill all the other people in the world at Armageddon just because they disagreed with my family. Why would anyone do that to all my nice teachers who showed a personal interest in my and others' advancement; who would do that to the doctors and nurses and volunteers helping people, and what kind of loving god would destroy sweet, little old ladies taking in stray cats, and also destroy all the ignorant people, and the starving people and all the other politically oppressed people who could not get the jw religion; and who would heartlessly kill my non-jw aunts and uncles who also were all deeply loved by me; if I myselfcould not justify such horrendous destruction (being merely a simple, reflection of a so-called "loving" god), then how could the supposed penultimate loving creator do such a thing? If god really planned to do such things, he did not need or deserve my worship so I simply intuited that some people simply invented the jw religion the same way people invented the rest of world's religions, and I managed that assumption at the age of 15.

I guess I was luckier than others who just "can't go there" - into the world of true compassionate questioning and logical freethought. And that is unfortunate not only for them, but also for those who have to live and work with such mindlessness). I think being placed in a gifted and talented program in 7th through 10th grade helped, but I am not sure of it, because my brother and sister were also put into those and other advanced programs and they could not make the jump (out of the prison of Watchtower thinking. This would be a conundrum for me, except that I take into account the emotional damage the Watchtower Society has inflicted on all three of us and my understanding of group and individual psychology.)

Now, at 40-something, after years of isolation from the dreadful cultic teachings of jehovah's witlesses, and after significant immersion and exposure to common sense, natural and social science, logic, and philosophy, my feelings have been reinforced with the facts of a proper education in natural science about human beings and about the nature of the universe, the origins of which must most logically be bottom-up evolution, rather than top-down creation, and therefore, the origins of religion - fascinating as they may be - clearly have their roots in the brains of bi-pedal primates, likely of the hominid species - not in the will of some great higher power, whose own existence cannot be explained by religion nor by science, nor by pseudoscience ("intelligent design") in any credible way, and certainly not in any way that is as credible and scientifically illuminating as bottom-up evolutionary theory because no matter what theory one believes, any creator (intelligent design) has to have an origin, and its own origin would also have to be evolutionary, just like ours is - bottom up NOT top-down. There is nothing more scientific, logical, simple and elegant to explain our existence; and nothing more eloquently explains the supposed existence of god than to assume that he, just like Boeing 747s, are the product of highly evolved brains which took eons to develop.

zack

It was the blatant dishonesty. If as the leadership of the religion the GB would just say: "Look. We don't know everything. We can't know everything. We don't

expect you to believe everything. Help us out where you think we need help. In the meantime, we can fellowship together, be with people who love God and

share common values, and we can all make good friends in a christian environment. We're all just trying to get to the same place, hopefully at the same time. What

do you say? Stay with us. We love you."

Instead they say: "WE ARE THE FDS! GOD"S ONLY REPRESENTATIVE ON EARTH! OBEY US OR DIE!"

The choice between the two is clear.

Why don't YOU believe anymore?

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