For those of you who don’t know my story – here it is in a nutshell: I’m not a Witness and never have been. In fact I barely knew anything about Witnesses (other than they come and knock on your door when you’re trying to have a sleep in!) until I met - and fell in love with - a boy at school who happened to be a witness. He wasn’t baptised, though was a ‘born in’ witness.
Fast forward 10 years or so, that boy is now my fiancé and so obviously is no longer a Witness in any way (his choice by the way, I tried to stay out of the decision making process as much as possible with that one). Luckily, he was never baptised, so there was never any of that shunning element or anything, though to say it’s still been difficult would be an understatement. Over the past 10 years, I’ve been ostracised, belittled, criticised and pretty much blamed for anything and everything that my in-laws don’t appreciate about my fiancé.
In the beginning, I was really open to their religion and although I knew it wasn’t for me, I was very much ‘each to their own’ and never really thought too much about it. However as time went on and I was treated pretty badly by several Witnesses on several different occasions, I began to resent the whole religion and started looking into it for myself. I stumbled across (no pun intended) this website among others and was able to look at so much information and literature from old Watchtower and Awake magazines. This is where I found out about so many appalling things that had been published – black people should be happy slaves, if you don’t scream when raped – it means you might have enjoyed it and are therefore guilty of fornication, vaccinations and organ transplants are ‘disfellowship-able’ offences etc. etc.
A lot of this stuff made me really angry, I think because I thought ‘you look down on me and treat me lie crap, yet you are willing to follow an organisation who have quite clearly lied and flip flopped on their own teachings!?’
I’d often share my findings with my fiancé and although he has a very similar opinion about the Watchtower and the Witnesses as me, he is a lot less passionate than me about it.
I don’t really understand why it upset’s me a bit that he (fiancé) doesn’t feel more anger towards the organisation and it’s people – after all he was more affected by it than me – it was his whole childhood and he knows it was all a lie!
I get it that his family are still all ‘in’ and so he doesn’t want to start slagging the org off or anything, as they won’t want to hear it, but how can he just seem to not care at all that his family are involved in what is quite clearly a destructive cult?
The thing is though – and I ask myself this often and cannot answer it – why do I care so much? Why can’t I just let it go? Why do I visit these websites and feel justified in some way each time I read further proof that they are not really God’s people? Sometimes I think I even get a bit obsessive about it, then I’ll move on, but then at the next family gathering another comment will be made at me and I’ll be back straight to researching (i.e. obsessing) about it again.
Has anyone been in this situation and felt like this? My fiancé asks me too why I give a toss (when I let him know about the latest scandal I’ve found out about) and I can’t actually answer him. I know I’m angry about how I’ve been treated, but is that it?
Anyway – really interested to hear your thoughts and opinions !
Thanks :)