I've always read since a young age.
The thing that allowed me to escape the tower was, 1976.
1976 and reading the JW literature allowed me to escape.
Was there anything different about you that helped you escape the WT?
by Giordano 42 Replies latest jw experiences
-
-
mythreesons
I've always been able to see things from different points of view...IMO it was only a matter of time, especially when I had to start explaining it to my kids and it didn't hold water.
-
free @ last
Being an INTJ is what helped me and I guess a lot of others... we are generally not as occupied with conformity and prefer to make decisions with the mind rather than the heart.
-
VampireDCLXV
Unlike the more 'bookish' types here, I'm not so much the avid reader. I think the difference with me is that I'm highly intuitive, perhaps much more than most others. I am also a hardcore non-conformist.
The more time that passed since my baptism, the more I felt at unease with the people in my own congregation and several others. I knew the doctrines were a bit "off" but I was thinking that the "love" among "God's chosen people" would eventually straighten things out... until I started smelling rat. I was smelling rat and I wasn't quite sure where it was coming from. I took some time before I figured out that JWs aren't what they seem to be. By the time I did, I was deeply depressed and irritable. I was looking for emotional and moral support and finding very little of it. I just couldn't motivate myself to go to meetings or failed service anymore. It wasn't until I joined a local support group and this website that I was able to see the "rat" that I was smelling. JWs are, quite frankly, an emotionally toxic bunch, overall...
V665
-
agent zero
i'm sure it was an unidentifiable combination of many personality and upbringing factors that put me in line to eventually see behind the curtain. looking back, i know i always had a sense in the back of my mind that it could very well be wrong, but i kept it sufficiently repressed to the point of actually believing it, until my world view expanded to the point of being able to confront that my fears were true.
-
Awen
I read the FreeMinds website articles and read my Bible without using WT publications. I also saw a few advertisements on TV which spoke out against the JW's. I decided to question everything and not simply take someone's word for something just because they published a book or have some sort of authority. I realized that my having to "render an account" would be based entirely upon my own deeds and the words of others would most likely be discounted as I do have free will. I can't be like Adam and try to put the blame on God, i.e. "the woman you gave me told me to eat and thus I ate." Adam, like myself had free will and was accountable for his own actions and not those of others.
This is what opened my eyes.
Peace,
Awen
-
james_woods
"the woman you gave me told me to eat and thus I ate."
Wonder what he would have had to say about the mythical Lilith?
-
designs
james-
Science definitly helps, it kind of smacks you in the brain and forces you to reason on everything you have been told. I gave a talk at a college in LA back in 1968 about Our, JW, views on creation and got laughed off the stage, this was Fred Franz's idea on 7000 year creative days. I wish I could have snapped a picture of the class's expression as I mouthed the words about the earth being 48,000 years old.
-
NewChapter
Reading and writing. When I started looking into bible accounts and tried to reconstruct the scenes as a writer would, it led to a lot of questions I wouldn't have otherwise asked. This led to research both in the WT material and secular material. I finally realized how impossible the flood myth was, and others soon followed.
NC
-
clarity
Another avid reader here, but what really helped me escape were my survival skills.
As a kid I was extremely independent and self sustaining. Had to be.
Trust and dependancy are not so much in my 'vocabulary'. lol
Soooooo never really trusted an organization 100% very much and never depended on jw's to be friends with me. Good thing!
That part was easy to drop. Then I found freeminds and jwn!!
My family on the other hand though, do have me 100%!
clarity
