You're certainly entitled to your opinion, Sulla. A viewpoint you've reiterated many times on this discussion board.
To not much effect, I think.
My question is, what does it matter to you, really?
Well, I think a central task of a board like this one is to help xJWs move on from JW-ism to live a better life; JW-ism being pernicious in a great many ways. So, topics like education keep coming up here... topics like atheism, etc. You can't very well move forward without understanding what happened, it seems to me.
But that reflection doesn't happen very often, it seems to me. That can't be good. A woman who is in an abusive relationship may find it within herself, finally, to leave it much to her benefit. But if she doesn't understand how it happened and, crucially, how to identify what she did to place herself in an abusive relationship then she is quite likely to make the same dangerous choice again. She is genuinely a victim, of course, and it is right and just to review all the ways in which her partner is an ass. But there is hardly a shortage of abusive men out there and, if she doesn't do the hard self-analysis, she puts herself in danger again.
I think the metaphor is apt. Many people here selected JW-ism on their own. It should be obvious that the great majority of people are able to avoid this sort of disasterous decision, so how should we think about the error? How do we avoid it again? One response seems to be an aggressive and rather obnoxious atheism -- this sort of substitute God of scientism, which strikes me as a cringing response to the personal catastrophe we have all been through.
"Know thyself," we are advised, on good authority. This is part of that effort, I guess.
Do you hold a better opinion of those that choose a different faith than yours after exiting?
Not sure what you mean. I do have a general suspicion that the shallow atheism lots of xJWs fall in to is an unreflective response to JW-ism. That's because, as I have said before, atheism is really close to JW-ism; certainly JWs reject all the Christian teachings in favor of a pretty absurd, ersatz religion. You could argue that Catholicism is something like the opposite of JW-ism and that my response is simply a thoroughgoing rejection of the JWs than most other responses. That's possible. But at least it would represent a universal rejection of the entire JW approach to, well, everything.
So, if Jws have cognitive dissonance, it is worth asking whether xJWs also have it. But what if they don't have cognitive dissonance, and it is xJWs who are more likely to display it? It seems to me these are questions worth asking.