First off - for those lurkers who feel guilty just for being on this site and reading this (even if you don't read any further, as it is your right to choose that course) I want you to know that you're not alone in what you're going through or in what you are feeling. If you read on, I hope my experience may be of some small help to you.
This may be long, but I'll try to organize it in a way that doesn't make it painful to read. To start, I feel it is most beneficial if I'm upfront and honest with my goals from posting this, which are (in order of the degree to which they motivated me):
- To demonstrate to any others who may be where I was a few years (even a few weeks) ago that they are not alone in their feelings of doubt and the resultant fear and guilt that that brings with it.
- I feel that I need to vent, and this is the only place that I feel is safe to do so.
- A little encouragement from people who have been there never hurts, so if I get a little of that out of this, I won't complain
Some background, and a further note regarding my motivation:
I was 'born into the truth' as the saying goes, and am currently 29. My parents both converted in their late teens after their parents began studying. They were married young and are still married. I think my parents did a generally good job of raising me, and I'm in no way bitter that they raised me as a JW. They (like most inside and outside of the JWs) were doing what they thought was best with what they had. I have never been wronged by any JW that I've known. The only ones that I feel have wronged me are the anonymous 'brothers and sisters' that have knowingly lied to maintain the hold that the organization has on its adherents. And there's no point in being mad at people that I couldn't hope to identify, as I feel it is entirely possible some even on the Governing Body feel what they are doing is right and genuine. My point for saying this is to dispel any thought that I've come to my recent understanding out of anger, or really any emotion. I feel it is important to make this point due to the common perception of those (even myself as recently as a few weeks ago) in the organization toward those who 'turn apostate.' I always believed what I was told - those who leave and slander the organization are just bitter and doing so for selfish reasons. I am not bitter and my reasons for writing this are honestly recorded above.
How I came to believe that Jehovah's Witnesses do not have 'the truth'
Rampant logical fallacy
All the way through high school, I never really strayed too far from being a good witness with good witness thoughts. I was lucky, and my parents supported me in my interest in science, even when I wanted to go to college to get a degree in computer engineering. I always had a passing interest in the sound use of logic, and classes that I took covered the topic as it applies to computers. Using logic and deduction to prove something interested me, and I began reading up on the different common logical fallacies in an attempt to help me to make sound arguments and proofs of ideas in every day life, including my defense of my religion as a JW. Before long, however, I began to notice wide use of logical fallacy in the literature. This frustrated me, because I knew it was the truth, and if it was the truth you shouldn't need to resort to flawed logic to convey it. I let this go, however, because after all the literature was written by imperfect man, and they were still doing good things. Even if they got something wrong, surely this was the closest thing to the truth that was out there; why risk my relationship with Jehovah by picking nits.
Discouraging education and controlling the information that is 'acceptable'
Over time, the many logical fallacies started piling up and I found that I constantly had to restrain myself mentally from arguing over seemingly minor things that didn't add up. It seemed odd, for instance, that we were banned from reading any so-called 'apostate' literature. I found myself wondering "If this is the truth, wouldn't any apostate claims about our beliefs or the organization be easily disproven?" Since I assumed that all apostates were just bitter about something done to them unjustly by an imperfect person, I didn't bother seeking out any information because I'm not interested in petty drama like that.
Eventually the organization seemed to begin stressing that children not pursue higher education. I always remembered hearing this point made - people shouldn't go to college without an idea of what they wanted to do (I remember stories of people with PHDs in history, that worked in a library) as that could waste your valuable time. However, the message seemed to switch to: don't go to college because it’s a trap from satan and people only do it because they are puffed up with pride and want to put letters at the end of their name. Furthermore, no one graduating from college actually needed their degree to get a good job, as on-the-job training is always superior. I knew both assertions to be patently false in my case, and it upset me to see the choices that I made for good reasons (after all, I was able to get a job that could support a family, and allow my wife to not work so that she could pioneer, which she did, but only briefly) attacked from the stage with absolutely no concession that some could benefit from my course. My wife suggested, though, that people generally don't know what they want to do at 15 as I did, and many may accept only strong discouragement. I let that satisfy me because I'd seen people waste their time in college only to drop out or achieve a useless degree. Even so, it ate at me little by little that the organization so consistently seemed to demonize any attempt to get any information from any outside source, despite their reliance upon 'earthly scholars' for many cases made in the literature, especially on the topic of history and biology.
Hipocracy in the claim to have a better understanding than other religions.
When exploring some of my thoughts about creation, I ran into another problem - the big bang theory had a certain elegance and simplicity to it that made it more attractive to me than the explanation using god. It seemed to me that the argument "humans are so complex that they must have a designer" fell off when you consider that designer must have been still more complex, therefore he must himself have a designer. Where does it end? When questions like this were met with "humans just aren't capable of understanding" or "you have to have faith" it sounded to me a lot like "it's a mystery." "It's a mystery" was of course a common phrase attributed to leaders of other religions to demonstrate that they didn't "have the truth" because they don't fully understand bible doctrine. This struck me as very hypocritical. This was how just about any question on the bible's potential failings ended but in spite of this I continued to hear other religions derided for not being able to explain the trinity, or the books of daniel and revelation, etc.
Final straw
There were many, many, other "straws" but the one that finally broke the camel's back was the explanation of the overlapping generation. I must've missed it presented in 2008/10, but I heard about it discussed incidentally and in conversations with my Father-In-Law. I always assumed it wasn't explained properly since it didn't seem at all reasonable to me, but at this point I lacked the motivation to prove it to myself through research and just let it be. When it was recently revisited in the WT study, it was like a slap to the back of the head. I just couldn't make the leap. Yes, I agree that a generation could mean a group of people who's lives overlap during a given time period, but there was no interpretation that could convince me that the given time period during which this overlap occurred could be anything other than 1914. Certainly not some nebulous time period sometime after that, but before the people alive at 1914 died. After that, I began to think critically about the fact that this has been going on for a while. I knew of at least 2 prior occasions in which the date of armageddon had been pushed off a little. The first being 1914, and then in 1975 (and I've since found that it's happened many other times). At this point I couldn't help but lose all faith in any prediction made by the organization. There was simply no evidence of them ever getting anything right. The only exception was WWI starting in 1914, but the prediction never said that a big war would happen in 1914, it was that the world would end, so they didn't even really get that right, they just got lucky. If WWIII broke out in 1975 would I still be holding on to that as evidence? Since I knew that I'd immediately be in for a bunch of back room meetings if I brought any of this up, I instead looked for some anonymous way that I could find an explanation that would restore my faith. Instead I found this site and jwfacts. After a few days and lots of reading, I've come to the inescapable conclusion that this religion is, in fact, a harmful cult.
Aftermath...
Now I'm left with trying to figure out where to go from here. My wife is not very zealous, but she can get very emotional about JW stuff. I've often mentioned small holes in the org's logic, and usually she lets it slide but sometimes she gets emotional (especially when I don't feel like going to meetings or in service). I'm a bit lost as to where to go from here for that reason. She's very close to her family, and I rather like them myself but could be OK with them shunning me. Neither of us have any close friends outside, but I've never been very social and could be fine without my current friends and even my family who I'm not very close to. Really the only person I need is her, and now I'm terrified that I'm going to ruin that. I'm also scared that I might be acting selfishly in my desire for her to get 'out' with me, even though I know rationally it's the right thing.
Whew! That ended up long. Sorry about that....