Chapter 50
Life after death
Since I had been in a religion that was focused on death. It was now time to focus on life.
The wonderful line from Shawshank redemption says it so well. “Get busy living or get busy dying!”
I had spent my whole life in a religion that focus on a war that was coming any day. The ultimate war between god and man.
It was a time to rethink everything.
It was just like my analogy. I had gotten out of the van in New York City and was walking around in a daze. I had found a new freedom though. I walked down the street and looked at all the people walking pass me. Something had changed. I looked more closely now. Many of the people had smiling faces. Had they changed? No, I had changed. I now saw the world completely differently. It’s not a world controlled by Satan and his demons. It’s just a stage with many different players on it. A world full of endless possibilities.
I wasn’t going the same way as Jim Olson, Robert Stillman, Robert Bryant and thousands of others who tried to leave The Watchtower Bible and Tract Society. People who found there was no existence outside their world. People who had found death their only real option from the Hell their life had become.
Though I’m sure the society would have loved if I had taken myself out, after my article in The Oregonian. That wasn’t going to happen.
I love the last line in the movie Papillon. “I’m still here you bastards!”
One of the many reasons I’m still here is the fact that I had found some new friends, years before I had lost all my Jehovah’s Witnesses friends. My new friends are Gary Zukav, Neale Walsh, Marianne Williamson, Deepak Chopra, Wayne Dyer, Carolyn Myss and Erchart Tolle. These friends were able to help me leave the mind controlled environment, I had been dealing with for over fifty years.
These new friends have helped me make my transition into the real world. The world where there doesn’t have to be “us and them.” It seems the planet has been suffering from this illusion for a long time.
These new friends have showed me the meaning of something called “Unconditional love.” This is what I would call the purist of all loves.
This is a love a mother gives its child. Does a baby get this kind of love from its mother because of its performance? Of course not. That mother gives that child unconditional love no matter what. Are we not all god’s children?
Whereas religions believe in “conditional” love. Their love is based on your performance and what you can do for them and their god.
Unconditional love is just that, unconditional.
I’m not here trying to sell a new thought system. I don’t need people to think the same way as me anymore. I went from door to door for decades trying to peddle my thought system to other people. So that is not going to happen.
We should be here to help and support each other.
They say in life that all your activities revolve around one of two things. Whatever you do, you are either helping yourself or you’re helping others.
For many years I hosted the ex-Jehovah’s Witness meet up group. I heard a lot of sad stories about what people had lost trying to get away from the Jehovah’s Witnesses. There were whole families that were wiped out. Not usually by shot guns but by but by the devastation of shunning.
When I did host the ex-Jehovah’s Witness meet up group I got a very sad and interesting phone call from a woman one afternoon.
She called me to ask if there was anything she could do to stop her husband from getting re-baptized this coming Saturday. It was just a few days away.
I said. “Probably not, why?”
She had told me how she had fell in love with a man who was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness. He had been out of the organization for many years. They were now married and were expecting their first child together. She did have a daughter from a previous marriage. She told me how everything was wonderful, until his parents started pressuring him to going back to all the meetings.
She also told me how her parents had hated her from the beginning of their marriage, because she was a “worldly person.” His parents even went so far to encourage him to leave her, even though she was pregnant, so he could eventually get with a good Jehovah’s Witness girl. Of course there would be no repercussions to him, since he was already dis-fellowshipped!
She was desperate and wanted to know what she could do to stop him from rejoining this group.
I told her it was probably too late, since he was getting baptized in just a few days. I told her this was something that had to be in the making for many months if not years.
I felt I had to tell her what she could expect now he was going back in. It was not going to be easy for her, because she had no desire to become a Jehovah’s Witness.
I had mentioned to her of possible problems and difficulties she might have to endure, now that her husband rejoining his old church. Little did I know at the time, that she would soon be going through something that would be ten times worse than anything I could have ever imagined.
Soon she and her husband would be in Witness Hell.
If she ever had any desire to join this church it would soon be gone forever!
I would enter the Twilight Zone with her a few months later. She was crying and I could barely understand her. I really didn’t know what she needed or wanted. Maybe she needed a shoulder to cry on. I told her we could meet her for a cup of coffee. What she told me I had no words for.
We met a few hours later at a busy restaurant. I wish you could have seen the look of bewilderment on this poor woman’s face.
As we set there to told me about what had transpired over the last few months since we talked earlier on the phone.
Of course her husband had got baptized as he promised. Being re-baptized he became a zealot once again in his old faith. He spent less and less time with his pregnant wife.
Finally the baby came. However there was a big problem and complications at birth. It would be life or death, for the child unless the baby got a blood transfusion. She was of course in favor of this. He was definitely was not.
There was many heated arguments about this. The elders got involved. They informed her husband that he could not waver. There was no way he could give in on this matter. It was more than just a matter of life and death it was a matter of faith.
She fought her husband to the bitter end. She said he hated her and her stance against him and his faith.
There was no time left and a decision had to be made. He hung his head in shame and told the doctors to go ahead and give the child a blood transfusion.
The elders found out who gave the order for the blood transfusion and they were furious with him. They told him there would be grave repercussions from this decision.
Two days later the child died.
The elders actually told her husband they were not surprised about the child’s death. In a sense implying this was a punishment directly from god himself. This was because he had actually disobeyed god’s commandment on this issue.
He told the elders he was wrong and blamed his “worldly wife” for the pressure she had put one him. He begged them for their forgiveness.
There was nothing I could say to comfort her after that story.
Are they still together? I would doubt it.
So two things here.
First did god kill the baby because it got a blood transfusion to drive the point home to the disobedient husband?
The second thing here is. This woman will obviously never become a Jehovah’s Witness in her life. Can you blame her?
So how can Jehovah judge her everlasting life by not being a Jehovah’s Witness by the fact that his people tried to get her husband to leave her. Plus god supposedly killed her baby because her husband disobeyed him.
I guess she could always say. “Yeah that’s the church I want to join, sign me up! I love this loving god and his loving people!”
Yes my friends once more, “By their love.”