Intresting Gamalieil, and how commes that you leave us if you was so devoted, myself never was so sure tahat this was the only thruth, but If I must bee in some religion, JW suit mee fine.
happy man,
I take it from this and some others of your posts that you are still hanging in there, although you have issues, perhaps, with the JW handling of pedophilia, certain blood issues, UN involvement, etc. When I left, I didn't know about pedophilia or the UN issue, although I was against the method of handling the blood issue and some other medical issues. It wasn't why I left, however. (I once sat in Brother Rusk's office for an hour listening to him handle a call that got transferred up from Service to help someone understand the specifics of how to set up an operation that re-used their own blood without "pouring it out." I realized we were no better than the Pharisees that the Bible taught us to make fun of. Since then, I've learned that even many of the Pharisees were more apt to be loving and lenient in some situations than Jehovah's Witnesses would ever be.)
I'm too longwinded to make my story short. But basically I still wanted to stay in even after I had known about some of our JW false doctrines for several years. By my 4th year at Bethel I had already been given an "inside" view of a dozen more false teachings and literally hundreds of serious organizational mistakes. But for as long as I was allowed to remain "honest," I thought I should stay.
Maybe it should have been, but it wasn't the many doctrinal errors that made me leave. I just thought, either naively or self-righteously, that I could do more good from the inside, in spite of knowing the problems. Several of my good friends were still on the inside until recently, still thinking they can accomplish some good from within. It's now 20 years later since I've been out, and I think very little has really changed in those 20 years. I'm really here on this forum, finally, because my last good friend on the inside has been going through a tough time in the last few months. He just got disfellowshipped, but he's keeping an appeal going. He just wrote the Society again this morning, but he says his heart isn't in it anymore. He didn't realize just how relieved he'd feel at finally being out. He just thought it was his Christian duty to try to do some good in the "ministry" or "station" where he was at.
I knew that if I was loyal to the organization and to Jehovah that I had teach truthfully. This became more and more difficult as I was continually being assigned talks (common around 1980) that promoted a kind of loyalty to the organization that wasn't compatible with my conscience. I could live with misdirected motives and even mistakes in doctrine, but when I realized that we (friends in "high" positions) were purposely promoting errors it made it more difficult to stay. I finally tried to leave quietly but was hunted by some at Bethel who sought their own glory, or the praise of men, at the expense of truth. ("A Man For All Seasons" has remained my favorite move since a fellow Bethelite recommended it to me at the time.)
I could go into pages of detail on specifics of things that were wrong, but I'd say a big turning point was hearing with my own ears from two still-living GB members, Bert Schroeder and Lyman Swingle, about their own measure of disbelief or dissatisfaction with some of what we promoted as JWs. I have stayed silent on the specifics for 20 years out of respect for the wishes of one of them. Not that there was anything salacious in the admission; it was fairly common knowledge in some circles. It's just that knowing that GB members (and friends in Writing) had doubts changes your perspective. In fact it wasn't even doubts with them, it was knowledge that certain things were dead-wrong. (It's only "doubts" if we little people wondered about these issues.) Even Ciro Aulicino, the man who supposedly got the WTS in hot water over the UN issue, knows intimately the current and historical problems of the WTS. If the "witch hunters" who went after so many of us in the 1980's had known how to phrase their questions a little more pointedly, even Ciro could not have answered them without being disfellowshipped. The powerlessness of folks like that to make real changes, made it very difficult for me to believe I should try so very hard to hang in there.
So when the "witch hunt" came for me, I dodged it the first few times, but when I could no longer feel I was being truthful to myself, I wrote a letter of disassociation.
Thanks for asking,
Gamaliel
Edited by - Gamaliel on 3 February 2003 18:44:48
