by minimus 48 Replies latest jw friends
After being unimpressed by a few youtube apostates who just seemed like woe-is-me complainers (I would love to be able to find the videos I watched to compare how I would react now to how I reacted then... I wonder just how emotionally dishonest my reaction to them was)
So then I kinda felt like SupaDub, apostate logic crumbled beneath the weight of my faith, and found myself on jwfacts.com.
My faith did not survive that. Could not.
I know that I occasionally came across apostate info in places like Wikipedia, but I brushed it off. It seemed that all they wanted to talk about was 1975 and Rutherford. Who cares about that stuff, that was ages ago!, I thought. I can't clearly remember how I ended up on jwfacts.com years later, but there were simply too many solid facts there for me to argue with. I hadn't seen such powerful reasoning on the blood teaching before, and I had no idea about the organ transplant fiasco. A couple days of feverish reading there led me to the conclusion that the Society couldn't be God's organization.
So if it hadn't been for a plainly-stated, well-reasoned site like JWFacts, I don't know when I would have seen TTATT. I was far too wary of sites that just listed personal gripes or made ad hominem attacks or that pushed some other Christian theology or that looked like UFO conspiracy sites. Sadly, that sometimes seems to comprise the majority of apostate material.
I got DF'd after I had left my husband, because he asked me to tell him if I slept with somebody. So when I did after a short while I was honest with him and told him, so he would be free to remarry. I only wanted my freedom back, never wanted to limit his life in any way. Within five minutes after I left his house, he called the elders. Five minutes after that they called me to ask me if it was true and of course I admitted it, that was my promise to my ex. So that was the start of my exit. Two weeks later I was DF'd, but still believed that in a way they had the 'Truth'... I figured that it all made sense, I overstepped the boundaries and got what I deserved and lost my family, friends, social life, everything in the blink of an eye.
Three months later my ex told me the elders came to call on him, because they had seen me with our children, playful and laughing. They told him that was not appropriate, I was a danger to their spiritual health and he shouldn't allow them to see me for 'social contact' (our children stayed with their father after I left him, so they came to me every other weekend and whenever they wanted to be with me).
He showed them the door. He was grateful for what I did for him, giving him his freedom by being kicked out for adultery, and told them that regardless of my beliefs or feelings towards him, Jehovah or the religion, I would ALWAYS remain the mother of our children and he would not allow anyone to try and come between our children and their mother. He never ever set 1 foot back in a Kingdom Hall again, he had doubts for years and as a couple we had heard stories like this, about elders trying to put a wedge between parents and children, and we always told everybody that those stories were lies, such thing never happened, JW's would never do that... yeah right! They do... and tried it with us, taking advantage (at least attempting to) of the hurt and pain of a man who had just been left by his wife. But he stood up against them. When he told me, he said it was mainly because of how I treated him after I left. I never asked for a lot of money, let him and the children keep our house, we owned a company together but I let him have it to be able to keep his income safe... all I wanted was my freedom, out of the marriage and away from the pressure of the religion.
If I'd known beforehand that he would leave the cult himself within 3 months after I got DF'd and that he would have a 'wordly' girlfriend, I would have never done it the way I did! But at least I do have my freedom.
Anyway, his encounter with the elders, about the children visiting me, and his leaving the JW's right after, was the trigger for me to start looking on the internet. And there I found lots of information about what's really going on there and that it's just a cult. It took me a year to understand it all, and a year after they DF'd me I went to the KH for the Memorial Service and gave them a long letter I wrote, which boiled down to the fact that I wanted them to stay away from my children, and that I would NEVER return to this cult. So practically I'm DF'd and DA'd
Around that time I realised that I would die, just like anybody else... no 'destroying in Armageddon', just ordinary dying when my time comes...
Well that's my 'apostasy'-story in a nutshell.
I watched the 2002 Dateline program that featured Silent Lambs/Bill Bowen/Barbara Anderson regarding the official JW policy to not inform secular authorities about sexual abuse in congregations.
They were sincere in their motives. We were told from the platform not to watch this show. I did it anyway - and the content of the show really bothered me. Later I spoke with dozens of others and they watched the program as well - some of these folks faded out soon after.
It took ten years after seeing this 'eye opener' to finally get serious about researching my religion.
When the WT says not to view programs, read publications, visit websites or internet forums of 'apostates' because it will destroy your faith, they mean it.
Because it will destroy your faith - in the Organization and it's structure.
ginger
John_Mann wrote: "I still remember my head spinning and the nausea while reading the 2 chapters from CoC.."
me tooooo. I had to put it down. It made me too angry. But once you know, theres just no going back. As hurt and lied to as I felt, Im better off.
For me, it was simply my own thought processes.
More and more things failed to add up logically, or jive with the "facts on the ground".
I only ended up reading XJW stuff after I faded, simply to verify what I'd already concluded on my own.
Reading CoC and Captive to a Concept was all she wrote...
But when I was a hardcore pio-sneer years ago I was given anti-JW literature a couple times and I actually turned my head and tore it up over a dumpster and never even looked at it...I wish I had!!!
My first was after I had stopped attending altogether. I stumbled upon a book called 'The Watchtower Files' by Duane Mangini by accident in a used bookstore.
about 7 years ago I remember just finally asking myself why I was so "weak" spiritually. I figured I must have had lingering doubts my entire life and that I needed to prove the truth was real to myself or prove it wasn't. I saw my first video on an apostate myspace page. It was that video from the 80's that everyone has seen, the one with Ray Franz in it.
I remember shaking while watching it, literally trembling uncontrollabely, teeth chattering and everything. I was so freaked out. I was terrified of demons after too.
I decided to go about my journey reading the proclaimers book. I has also viewed some Wikipedia pages about the JW's and Charles Russel, Freddie and the Judge.
After seeing that many of the stories on Wiki were touched on in the proclaimers book I quickly found this site and within minutes I knew in my heart TTATT, within a few months I knew in my mind it was all a lie... 607 BCE, 1914, 1925, 1975, it was all a lie. I remember choking back tears at work, dealing with the pain of my new reality, which was/is in fact... reality.
I have come a long way mentally since then, mentally I am completely out however physically I am still inside the cult, living a lie everyday. Its a hard way to live but I am coming to terms with it. I have found ways to be happy with what I have in life. I also have freinds that have left the cult that I keep in touch with often, and JW friends that are in the same situation as me. this really helps.
I keep waiting for the "BIG" thing to happen that shakes my family out of the "truth". I don't know if it will ever happen, but lately I am holding my breath
