When did a lightbulb first go off in your head that something didn't seem right??? (page 4)

Twitch

I was pretty young when the cognitive dissonance started, exactly when I can't say.

But the fights started when I hit the teen years, naturally :)

GoddessRachel

Whoever wrote the Daniel and Revelation books should have won the HUGO award for best SCI-FI fiction!

Yeah, right, if only the writing weren't so terrible too, I bet they would have won some awards! LOL.

RR

When did a lightbulb first go off in your head that something didn't seem right???

Hmmm ... what did people do before the lightbulb? I mean what went off in their heads? a Candle?

JWoods

Hmmm ... what did people do before the lightbulb? I mean what went off in their heads? a Candle?

Edison did invent the lightbulb by candlelight (or at least gaslight), but it was a lightbulb that went off in his head.

About 3mths after my adult baptism when the congregation was redrawn and i was seperated from the pioneer who studied with me. She said I would not manage without her. I was a 28yrs old professional, ran my own home and business and had 'managed' so far without her. Then a year later when i asked a couple of elders for clarification of something minor that i had come across in my personal study and they said I 'studied too much' and had an 'attitude'. Then when I assisted a visitor with poor mental health and was told i was 'bringing demons into the congregation' by encouraging him to continue studying. I was accused of 'dragging in a goat when i should be bringing in the sheep'. Then being harassed and labelled an apostate when i stood as a witness against an elder accused of slander and lying. He continues to abuse, lie and slander to this day and gets away with it.......the lights just continually flickered throughout my time as a jw.

Mickey mouse

When I was very young (maybe 4 or 5) and I believed my life was an experiment to see how a person would react to living in a fake situation. When I saw The Truman show I thought the writer must have been in my head.

brinjen

Hard to say... theres so many.

One of the earliest in memory was learning someone could be disfellowshipped for attempting suicide... on the basis that it's wrong to take any life including your own and you're never given more than you can deal with. It didn't sit right because of a) the blood issue and b) if someone is contemplating suicide, they clearly have been given more than they can deal with. I thought it was cruel.

Never got the logic behind 1914... was relieved to find out I wasn't the only one.

The whole "we never said armageddon would come in 1975"... re-call hardly any of it at the time (had it happened, it would have been just before my 3rd birthday), I mostly heard the re-buttals but at the same time there was a sister in my congregation who was living in government housing and on the pension because her husband cashed in his life insurance believing that armageddon would happen, then died in the early 80's of cancer.

It's hard to say... I believed in it (even when I left) but it never felt right.

mentalclearness

From an early age I remember thinking that there was something wrong with the history part. There was this huge gap from early christians to jw's....The 144,000 only going to heaven was always cause of embarassment to even try to explain. I mean, why??? is that number out of all the numbers that are symbolic, taken literally? The generation flip flop as well......But I always managed to push those "doubts" to the side, thinking that this was a really great community, blah, blah, blah....In the end it was a co's talk about humbleness that just was the last straw. I guess I am too proud for the organization...I guess I finally got tired of the "you're not doing enough" spiel...Lack of love is what did the trick..I probably would have just stayed for the social part, since my WHOLE network were jw's...but I took a good look at what all those years of belittling had done to me and I stood up and thought "I will NEVER do this to my kids!".. Walked out in middle of co's talk and never walked into a hall again. That was more than three years ago!

homeschool

Sept. KM about the need to avoid independent research material (WTF?) girlie, Which KM was this? wow.

I had many lightbulbs, but its only through looking back, I can see they were there. As a child, my mother and I went to a door & the householder yelled at her. "how can you bring your child out to do this when she should be home watching cartoons?!" May not have been those exact words but its what I remember.

*my father constantly telling me what I couldn't do because "what would people think"

*when I expressed my serious doubts around age 18, the girl I was talking to said "But you KNOWWW its the truth!" and she got really annoyed with me. That's when I realized I wasn't allowed to say what was going on in my head without getting in trouble.

Once I realized that I didn't think of Jehooba's Witnesses as the 'truth', all sorts of things kept popping out at me but it took a good 6 years before I REALLY felt they weren't the truth. It took another 5 years before I found this site.

SuspiciousMinds

My first major doubt happened years ago at Pioneer School when I realized that WTS teaches that all non-JWs will be destroyed at Armageddon. I was still a true believer, but I refused to believe this was true. More recently, finding out about the 1995 "Generation" teaching change, and reading up on 1975 has made me realize this organization makes too many mistakes to be able to claim God's direction.