A question for Undercover and others

by tornapart 20 Replies latest social current

  • tornapart
    tornapart

    Undercover, I was interested in your last post and how you felt that believing in God is a delusion. I'm not interested in any debates over it but I saw you have been here for 10 years! That's some stay! I saw from your first post that you were a believer then still. So what I'm interested in is what changed your mind and when did it happen?

    Also there are many others here that have also stopped believing in God as well as the WTS. I'm just interested to know what it was that happened that made you stop you believing. This is merely out of curiosity and nothing else..

  • krejames
    krejames

    I'm still on my journey. I'm pretty much disconnected emotionally and mentally from the organisation (though I still attend meetings more often than not). However, I have woken up to the fact that I want to believe in God. I still have a certain kind of affection for my mental image of Jehovah and mind still turns towards him when I go to bed. But reason tells me, as a Gay born-in, that he surely can't exist or he would not have included the stuff about homosexuality in the Bible, whilst completely ignoring something as abhorrent as paedophilia. It's either that or he is an extremely cruel being that I would not want to worship or that it would be pointless to worship. but at the same time I have been doing lots of reading in scientific articles about evolution - while I can accept some of it to a degree, I still find a lot of it way too far fetched and still lean towards the involvement of some intelligent higher being. In summary: At this moment in time I guess I'm agnostic.

  • J. Hofer
    J. Hofer

    while my current account is pretty young, i've been visiting this site for more than 10 years. i've been a JW defender back then. tried to make sense of it all. i guess it was more of a try to defend the WT teachings to myself.

    things change. all my life i was made to believe that JWs are the only "true religion" - "the truth". from early age i knew that christendom was babylon the great whore. i knew that jehovah doesn't like images. i knew that christians don't participate in wars. and so on.

    so when you finally get your head out of that religion, what's left. some try to find a similar religion like the christadelphians or adventists or the like. but one thing the JWs got right, is that all religion is false. the only religion you still have to remove is theirs.

    i didn't go from JW straight to atheist. it was a journey. but once you start breaking fences, you might as well break all of them.

  • thinking_not_believing
    thinking_not_believing

    I am not highly educated (only a few years college)... but i do feel very strongly that there isnt a god. I used to question that universal sovereignty as a publisher... I am really? Aids, rape, daily murders, children dying at at birth (personal for me)... i mean go on and on thinking about the worst things here on earth. These exist because a talking snake (really!?) gave fruit to the very first woman and god is proving a point! 6,000 years of suffering? GTFO. I then noticed the many religions out there have one thing in common... an afterlife of some sort... So to me its pretty simple... the human race cannot accept its own mortality... so wheteher its reincarnation... nirvana... an eternal soul... going to heaven or a paradise earth... people just make shit up becomes it gives them hope. For me gimme my time to make a mark and enjoy my family and im good.

  • leavingwt
    leavingwt

    Please take 20 minutes and read this essay written in 1896. My reasons are contained within.

    http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/ingag.htm

  • Finkelstein
    Finkelstein

    For myself it was from a discovering span of knowledge about the WTS. it origins, its doctrines and basic ancient theology itself,

    as well the many sciences and of course human psychology.

  • still thinking
    still thinking

    I personally can't pinpoint one thing that changed my mind...there are so many reasons.

    But I can pin point the moment when I started to take all the reasons seriously instead of dismissing them because I knew god was real. And that was the day I admitted to myself that it was 'POSSIBLE' I could be wrong, and asked myself how I KNEW god was real? Personally, myself, not anyone else. And I didn't KNOW. I had just never questioned myself honestly like that.

    Even at that point though, its not like I lost all belief, I was just more open to really listening to both sides of the story for and against belief in a god. It was like my mind had been unshackled. I found nothing more than a desire for there to be a god. No evidence, nothing but an old book and people like me who WANTED to believe god was real.

    I then read up on evolution. NOT from the creationist point of view, but the REAL evolutionary theory. I asked people to help me understand that because I just wasn't getting it, my prevoncieved ideas of what it was got in the way of me seeing the reality of it. Once I understood the basics I started to really understand the books I was reading. It all made sense. There is so much evidence for evolution it CANNOT be denied. Unless you don't understand it properly.

    I have also discovered a love of learning about the universe. Everything I read about the universe, planets, stars and the earth leaves me in awe. The vastness of space makes our tiny planet seem insignificant. There is NOTHING like the universe to put life back into perspective.

    So, it really is a journey to non belief. I suppose some people might wake up one day and think to themselves 'I don't believe in god', but for me it was a process...and a personal search with a lot of honesty to MYSELF. Before I could even entertain the IDEA that god might not even exist. At times this process was very painful. I will not lie to you. I felt grief at the loss of my long held belief. But now, in hindsight, I see the grief was the loss of a dream. Not the loss of a god.

    The fact that previoisly I could not think that way, showed nothing but my personal bias towards a belief in god. It did not show that god was real. It is impossible to ask someone to look at that idea objectively when they do not comprehend it. But people will swear that they are and they do. It's hard to explain.

    And, my journey continues and is more exiciting than ever before in my life. I now have a love of learning. I have learnt that there is so much more that I don't know than I do know. I have a thirst for knowlegde. The knowlegde of reality. NOTHING outshines the reality of life and the universe we live in. There is wonder in this life.

  • NewChapter
    NewChapter

    Once I allowed myself to question the bible, the rest came easy. It was almost instantaneous, because my brain was working it out without my permission. The critical thinking kicked in and couldn't be turned off. I did not find fault with the JW's at that time. I concluded there was no god, and it had nothing to do with my religion or any other religion. I have a pretty diverse background and was exposed to many belief systems. I wasn't born in.

    When we look at the world as a whole, instead of through our narrow western view, it becomes clear that this particular god in this particular place at this particular time being the one true god is very unlikely. That's just a little bit.

  • whathappened
    whathappened

    Once I read "The Atheist's Book of Bible Stories" and realized that not only was the Watchtower Society not gods earthly visible organization but also the Bible was not really the word of God, it really didn't take too long. There just isn't any other realistic conclusion. In the beginning, when I would read atheist's posts on jen, I would bristle. Now I am one of them!

  • jam
    jam

    I don,t know how many times I was told, wait on Jehovah.

    If there is somthing you don,t understand, wait.

    Well I decided to take matters in my on hands. The type and

    anti-type, the different classes, new light (each new light it

    got darker). Why is God word so difficult to understand.

    After investigating and many hour of research it was obvious,

    a book of myths. Just think without the help of God,s spirit

    it became so clear.

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