by uncle_onion 20 Replies latest jw friends
I was intersted in what brought "you" out.
With me it was the 607 bce thing. I always followed the org and would have died for it but when I saw the fallacy of the 607 date that blew it for me. I am now on a quest to try and find something to feel comfortable with. My wife has become a Born again christian and attends church after all her life in the dubs.
UO
UncleOnion,
It was the same for me. The 607 dating thing opened my eyes to the dishonesty of the Society. It wasn't long until I realized that their FDS doctrine was hanging on by a thread of dishonesty. Once that thread was cut, there was no reason for me to see the Society as any type of authority figure. Fortunately my wife did some of the same research and she came to the same conclusion.
rem
Hello UO,
For me it was the changing of the baptism questions in 85'.I will never understand that!
H........
If you cant change your mind r you sure you have one?
Not one specific thing.
Several of the main factors were:
The administrative bureaucracy I saw at Bethel.
The 607 or 1914 thing that I investigated while I was pioneering.
But the main thing that made me leave was the illogic of Jehovah's supposed judging procedure.
People ignorant of him in Mongolia would die and be resurrected in a paradise earth where faith would no longer be required since Armageddon and their own resurrection would be proof that god did exist. I would therefore be better off being a Mongolian who had never heard of Jehovahs Witnesses.
Also, the impossibility of an equitable judging scenario. All tests are not equal. The circumstances around our tests are too dissimilar. The way we were treated by a judicial committee could vary from loving to inquisition. The witness that worked our territory could be inept at explaining their beliefs,etc, etc, etc.
Also, the immense difference in level of service by witnesses, some willing to live in poverty in order to pioneer while elders in the same congregation were millionaires. Some elders sending their kids to college while others were practically shunned for finishing high school.
As you can see, fairness is a main driver of mine. In the end unfairness made me decide that my fate lay in the hands of a power higher than the Watchtower BTS whether that power be Jehovah or simply a nonpersonal spirituality. So I left.
I certainly have my weaknesses. I certainly have made mistakes in my life and in the way I have treated others. I try to be kind, honest and fair and I think I succeed for the most part.
Now that I know "worldly" people personally, I see no determinable amount of difference in their general behavior patterns and that of witnesses. I therefore conclude that their faith or truth is no more evident that any other group.
hugs
Joel
hi uncle onion
for me it was that the cong i was in (ALL my life) as well as surrounding congs were not nice to one another. unless of course you belonged to the elite groups. anyone with depression or physical problems were left by the wayside. it was find when i could aux pio but when i couldnt any longer then i was segregated to the "lowly" group once again. this was a widespread problem in the congs that my friends were in too. so very un-christ-like. i figure if they cannot show even the simplest of christ-like attitudes and kindnesses then they could not be truly from god.
also, i know that they cover over severe abuses within the congs. they harbor sick, twisted child abusers amongst other things.
im a people person. i certainly do not claim to understand any of the prophecies or dates or whatever. never was interested. only studied it enough to answer at meetings. still dont care. probably never will. but showing the love of christ is so very important to me.
thanks for the question
Wounded Heart
UO
see the many posts about the "straw that broke that camels back"
For me it was discovering the Society's dishonesty in science-related things. It wasn't merely disagreeing with their interpretation of scientific observations, but finding that they so often misrepresented what scientists said. If they can't be honest in simple matters of quoting, which are easy to verify, then their interpretation might be out to lunch too. After doing lots of research on science topics, I found that their interpretations were ridiculous in many areas, even more so than their quoting practices.
As some readers know, I've written a detailed expose of the dishonest quoting and interpretation practices of the Society in regards to their 1985 Creation book. In the summer of 1997 I happened to be in New York, and so I took some time and went to Brooklyn Bethel to try to speak to the author of the book, one Harry Peloyan. Peloyan has been in the Writing Department for some 40 years, and happens also to be the chief editor of Awake! magazine. He came down to the lobby of the 25 Columbia Heights building (this is the one in which the Governing Body holds its official sessions every Wednesday) and we talked uneasily for about 45 minutes. He wasn't too happy about being confronted with my accusations of dishonest quoting practices, and mostly refused to discuss anything about it. But later in our discussion he allowed that perhaps one or two quotations might have been a bit off. As for the rest, he said, "Are the words quoted correct? Then that's all we need to worry about." I said, "That's not so. You have to make sure that you don't violate the author's intent. Otherwise you've misrepresented him." He didn't agree, so I said, "Ok, think of it this way: Suppose The Watchtower quoted an evolutionist who said, 'Evolution is true', and then I turned around and started telling people that the Society now says that 'evolution is true'. Would I be quoting The Watchtower fairly, even though the words I quoted were exactly correct?" He refused to answer. So I know that Peloyan and other WTS writers often know when they're being dishonest, or twisting statements to make them say different from the author's intent.
Once you discover that a religious authority is dishonest in relatively straightforward matters like science, you wonder about its honesty in religious matters such as interpreting the Bible, which are much more difficult to verify. Upon doing research in relatively straightforward matters such as the 607 question, and whether earthquakes and other disasters are far more common in the 20th century as the Society claims, I found exactly the same dishonesty as with science matters -- flat out misrepresentations of sources, marginal interpretations (excuses, really) of much material, generally poor argumentation, appeals to their own authority rather than to the facts, and so on.
When you discover that a religious authority you thought spoke for God is really a sham, you quit. At least, I would think that honest people would quit.
The 607 business is a classic example of the Society's using its own claimed spiritual authority to keep a teaching in place. JWs accept the WTS's version of "Bible chronology" because and only because the Society teaches it. If Brooklyn changed its mind today and acknowledged standard secular chronology, by next week the entire JW world would accept it too. Why? Because any JW who didn't would be disfellowshipped. So much for the intellectual honesty of Jehovah's Witnesses.
The problem is that the Society's leaders have really usurped the places of God and Jesus in the hearts of most JWs. By becoming the source of biblical interpretation, they have really become, in practice, God. Why? Because JWs in practice get all their information about God, and from 'God', from the Watchtower Society. This is because JWs who say that they accept their own interpretation of the Bible over the Society's are soon disfellowshipped for apostasy.
What all this results in is a form of the very nationalism that the Watchtower condemns: "my religion; may it always be in the right; but right or wrong, my religion". This is what I call The Fundamental Doctrine of Jehovah's Witnesses -- the emotionally based belief that Watchtower leaders directly speak for God, and no matter what facts get in the way, must be treated as God's special prophets.
AlanF
I think it started with gratuitous use of exclamations points. :) I began to be irritated by the writing style of the publications, finding it manipulative and altogether too reminiscent of the propaganda techniques I'd learned about in high school history classes.
Then it was a bunch of little things: the organ transplant fiasco, finding www.ajwrb.org and realizing that there were other ways of interpereting the blood scriptures (heck, a householder once told me that he'd always thought that "refrain from blood" was a prohibition on murder!), the way women were treated. Like AlanF so masterfully said, the scientific attempts of the publications were becoming woefully more pathetic to me also.
But what finally pushed me over the edge was thinking about disfellowshipping/disassociation. I decided that I hated the whole concept, hated how I was going to be treated when my decision to not be a witness was know, hated how I had treated DA'd/DF'd people when I'd been younger even though I'd thought that I was being as nice as I could be.
So I left.
-T.
I was just tired of it all. I was born into the religion (oh lucky me) and I was only 18 when I left. I had never gotten baptized (thank goodness) though the pressure was intense from the age of 11 on up. I was tired of all the meetings, (3 a week is just too much) tired of trudging to boring conventions instead of having real vacations, I always hated field service as I am intensely shy and was forced to make presentations at the door. It did nothing for my self esteem to have people slam the door in my face. I was sick of seeing children as young as babies hit for not being able to sit still like adults. I was sick of the cliques. Rich hung out with the rich and shunned the poorer JWs-that sort of thing. It made me sick to see my JW friend get raked over the coals by the elders for trying to leave her abusive marriage, but two elders daughters who both got themselves pregnant by worldly men were only privately reproved. Whatever. There was no "love", sure there was wonderful people that I met-but I am sure they would have been just as loving and wonderful if they were not JW. I also had been a physically, mentally and sexually abused child-the elders knew and did nothing. Instead they sided with my abuser. I am glad to be out of there.
