Growing up as a Witness, a scripture that was used heavily by the Society began to puzzle me:
The heart is more treacherous than anything else and is desperate. Who can know it? --Jer. 17:9
There are a number of similar scriptures which the Society would also use, such as Prov. 3:5 ("do not lean upon your own understanding") and Jer. 10:23 ("it does not belong to man [...] to direct his own step"). The emphasis on these passages serves the purpose of discouraging Witnesses from thinking for themselves. For instance, it's frowned on if a JW is known to think deeply about doctrine and ask hard questions. And looking at the material written by ex-Witnesses is totally verboten. After all, you might be misled! You can't rely on your heart or your understanding of these things, because you're not wise and intelligent enough.
Well, it's true that it's hard to know what our own innermost thoughts are. And certainly we have imperfect judgment and incomplete knowledge. But here's what I started wondering: if my heart is so treacherous and unknowable -- then how can I trust my motivation for wanting to be a Witness? If my understanding is unreliable -- then how can I know it's the truth? And yet we were being encouraged to get baptized, as youths even. So does that mean that our hearts were in the right place at that point in time? Even with the inexperience of youth, our judgment was somehow sound, in that one way?
But yet, once we're dedicated, any outside, contrary reading material is strictly off-limits. So, if we were a convert, it was accepted that we would have searched different religions for the truth, and if we were a born-in, we were expected to make the truth our own -- but now we're supposed to stop looking at other beliefs, at contrary material, and stop thinking for ourself. So what does that mean? That we somehow made one right choice and now our heart is no longer trustworthy?
JWs often say that in order for people to recognize the truth, they need to have the right heart condition: they need to be honest, humble and hungry. Well, what happens at baptism that suddenly makes the formerly-right heart condition so dubious?