I looked all over for a place to introduce myself and either I'm completely blind or I missed it. I figured I'd just post it here.
Okay.
Hello to everyone. My name's Tabitha. I came to this forum quite by accident and I've been lurking around for the past week or so to get an idea if I wanted to join up. It seems like a good place for me to be, as I still have some lingering...issues regarding "The Truth".
Anyhow, a tad about me. I'm about to be thirty-one, about to be divorced from my ex (in May, horrah!) and currently in a committed, lifelong relationship with my one true love. It took seeing all sorts of wrong out of a man in order to find the right one for me. Once my divorce is through and my man's goes through, we intend to be married. I have one child from a previous "relationship" (read: abusive relationship...), my son, who just turned six last week. And YES, he DID have an absolutely awesome birthday party! lol
I'm very conservative by nature. Once I left "The Truth" I dabbled a good deal in feminism and liberalism, and tried to convince myself that because it was the opposite of JW, that meant it must be good and right. Now that I've grown up a good deal, I realized that I was only doing that to 'buck the system', as it were, and I've since come back around to the ideas of morality and virtue.
I was raised JW from the time I was five until the time I left, which was a hair shy of my sixteenth birthday. I consider myself fortunate that I had the willpower to resist being baptized and all the hookey that came with it. As a child, obviously I had no choice over going in field service and things like that, and the older I got, the more they wanted from me. I'm painfully shy and door to door and giving talks was extremely difficult for me. Of course, they didn't care about that either. Regardless, I finally got sick of it when I was around fifteen or so, and eventually I moved out of my dad's house and in with my mom...and from the day I left, I never went back to a single meeting.
I spent a lot of time hunting through religions because, to me, spirituality IS very important. I just didn't feel like "The Truth" was actually TRUE. I studied my way through a variety of pagan religions, then Spiritualism, then Unitarian Universalism, then non-denom Christianity, then Methodists, then Quakerism...and finally I settled down last year simply calling myself a Deist.
I do believe in God, as I consider him evident in everything around us and in the workings of the entire universe. I don't consider the paranormal to be particularly supernatural at all-- anything man hasn't discovered yet was still created by God, imo. I believe in the God that Jesus spoke of-- the all-loving, all-caring God...not the vengeful, vindictive jerk from the OT. I simply cannot conceive of a god that tortures his own creations, period. I also do not believe in a supernatural Satan/Devil, and I believe that the devil as expressed in the bible is a simple metaphor for the evil within man (for example, Matt 16:22-23 where Peter tells Jesus that he will not suffer and die for the sins of humankind, whereupon Jesus replies "Get behind me, Satan!" Obviously he was not saying that Peter was the literal supernatural devil, Satan. There are other examples of this, but I can't be bothered to recount them now...). I believe that Jesus came here to teach humankind the answer to LIFE, THE UNIVERSE, AND EVERYTHING: to love. Other than that, I don't really believe in the traditional concepts of sin and redemption at all.
At any rate, I don't want to make this a whole huge thing on what I personally believe. Suffice it to say that my views are in many ways far removed from what was beaten into me as a child. The only thing I really took from JW living is the head of household things. I consider myself submissive to my man, I prefer him to take the lead, and he's happy to do so. I consider the HOH thing to be a matter of Natural Order. I don't follow it because Paul said so, or whomever else in the bible. I do it because this is the way it's been since the creation of mankind: the man is the head of the household, the protector, the provider; the woman is equal to him but different, because she is the nurturer and the mother.
By that same token, of course, I don't really care how anyone else chooses to live their life, so long as they don't bash me or mine.
If this is in the wrong place, if a moderator would be so kind as to send it on to the right one, I would most appreciate it!
Thanks for reading!