rebel writes:
I don't intend to offend anybody with this post, so please excuse me if I do.
Well con-frickin-gratulations, you have offended "anybody". There's no excuse for ignorance or judging others. Try to remember that people are responsible for their own accounting before God. If there is one. Just like you are responsible for your own accounting. Who are you to judge "anyone"?
I have often wondered why some people that leave the WT organisation go really weird. There is a couple near me who left a couple of years ago. Within days of DAing, they were putting up Christmas decorations all over the place - their house was the most decorated in town! Just because you leave the organisation, it doesn't automatically make some of the teachings wrong. If you believed Christmas was pagan a few months ago, why the big change? It isn't that I think Chrstmas is wrong, but these people really went over the top. What were they trying to prove?
Have you ever heard of someone trying to make up for lost time?? I missed 25 Christmasses during my time as a JW. Plus 25 birthdays. Plus the same for my brothers. You bet your sweet bippy I'm going to go to town now that I realize I was fooled into believing those things were "wrong". How dare you or anyone else try to shame us for the life we enjoy now!
I also know another sister who was DFed - she started taking drugs, going out to night clubs, and in the end was admitted to hospital after an overdose. A young couple I knew went really weird - the husband joined this weird culty movement and went off with another woman. She moved in with a guy 15 years younger than her daughter!
Again, people are responsible for their own actions. Do not concern yourselves with things that are none of your business. Sometimes people who get DFd and consequently are shunned by the only friends they ever knew, plus their own flesh and blood, feel that their life is not worth living anymore. Some feel that they have a better chance of ending up in the Paradise (if they still believe in that sort of thing...) by ending their life now.
As far as joining a weird culty movement.... some people just trade one weird culty movement for another one....
I can think of many other examples. Is it because we were so oppressed that, once free, we go beserk? I hope I don't go like that - the freedom after all those years of oppression does seem very tempting to me. Is it just that I have come across these cases and this isn't a common way to behave once you leave, or is it quite common?
Oppression has a lot to do with rebellion. So does discovering what options are available to you when you've been starved of opportunities all your life. Think of the child growing up in Ethiopia. No food, except for an occasional bowl of gruel. He gets told that he's been blessed with gruel and should be thankful for it. One day he finds a way to a country where famine is something that happens to other people. He is taken to a grocery store and sees all kinds of food in a variety that he's never imagined in his wildest dreams. Someone has to teach him how to peel a banana before he eats it. Someone else has to show him how to make scrambled eggs and toast. Another person shows him that you don't cook ice cream. Having never had anything but gruel before, is it strange that he would become fascinated by things he's never had before? Is it strange that he might like ice cream so much that he'd eat it twice a day, or think of scrambled eggs as such a delicacy that he'd offer them to guests for dinner?? Newly-found freedom and abundance can have that effect on a person who has been starved all their lives. Why is it so strange to you that someone who's been mentally oppressed for years wouldn't experience something similar when they come out of a cult like the JWs??
Love, Scully
Edited by - Scully on 13 December 2002 20:31:32
