Let's Be Honest - You or One of Your Ancestors Was an Idiot (page 3)

Divergent

Simon:

Are you an idiot or the offspring of past idiots?

I hate to call my parents idiots, but unfortunately they are brainwashed to such an extent that I have no choice but to agree with the statement above

Xanthippe

I wonder though about the people who unlike my family had a good education. Doctors, teachers, architects who I've known personally. Intellectually they were not idiots but they became JWs.

I suspect it was the same as everyone else who joined, either a traumatic event or a chronic situation in their lives that made them psychologically vulnerable to love bombing.

Ding

We both started slacking off by the late seventies, but neither of us knew about the other's doubts.

More evidence of how powerful the WT's fear and guilt techniques can be.

Spouses can't even be honest with each other about their own doubts.

If you are born in, it is all you know, and you are sheltered from reality, so you stay. You believe you are special...receiver of a chosen blessed place in humanity. You put up with the ridiculous things and the hypocrisies and blame it on interlopers who will be removed from the ranks in due time....but eventually the cognitive dissonance and sheer intellect override the lunacy and you get out. If you are a convert...you may be honestly searching for a spirituality you feel missing and the idea of truth is appealing. Or you may have had serious problems that overwhelmed you and the paradise escape appealed. Whatever, not to be disparaged...simply human error and wishful thinking....

Slidin Fast

I am still a baptised serving member. I am unwilling, trapped and seeing no alternative to token, slightly subversive membership.

I had cognitive dissonance from a young age without being able to put a label on it or understand what it was. One example: I remember seeing classic U shaped valleys with moraines similar evidence caused by the ice age and trying to harmonise them with the flood.

I remember as a young, wet behind the ears MS serving in poverty as a pioneer where the need is great trying to get my head round public talks on prophecy. I couldn't make them fit and stood reciting crap I could neither understand or explain thinking it was my fault. I hadn't got the necessary spiritual insight, it was my fault I thought.

Looking back it was at that point I had the only viable opportunity to disappear. It was the early seventies, I was lonely, living in poverty and wouldn't have survived without the support of lovely people (despite their JW religion) in the part of the UK I was living. My mum had been a witness for 20 odd years, she was very bright but totally indoctrinated. She like others mentioned had had an emotionally awful early life and had found what for her was the absolute and only truth. She had friends and acquaintances at the ver top of the org. She had been in a terrible state after my dad cleared off but was now re-married. I could have escaped then.

So, what did I do? My "negative" thoughts were sublimated. I got a girl friend and soon I was married. The die was cast and the opportunity was lost.

It is hard to shake off the years of investment in what all those around you view as certainty. The close knit warp and weft of family is hard to untangle. For me it everything. I can't envision a life separated from my own flesh and blood. So yes, they have me at least in body. I have to compromise my real beliefs every day of my life and yes, you could describe me as an idiot or at least a hypocrite.

I would say though that I am happier than I have been for years. I have no bad conscience about all the ways I am unfaithful to the JW cause because I have no faith or commitment to it. I relish every negative thing I see or hear about the org. I am now approaching 70, my wife knows exactly how I feel and I think agrees. So we bumble along having done quite well in life, travel, enjoy retirement and wait for the day when the JW ship sinks and our whole family is free.

I just wish the kettle had been whistling or my parents had been out shopping when someone knocked on our door.

Good thought provoking thread bye the way.

DATA-DOG

What are the odds of being a "born-in" of the JW cult? This question has often dominated my thinking. The odds must be incredibly small, yet it happened to me. Why?

Some Dub came through a small town in the USA, where conventional Xianity ruled for 100 years. He preached about the corruption of "false religion." My ancestors, who were just simple Farmers and Ranchers, good honest people, were bamboozled. END OF STORY.

DD

blondie

Bible Students called on my grandparents right after losing a son to diphtheria. Their Lutheran and Catholic relatives said he would not go to heaven because he had not been baptized (besides being conceived outside wedlock) but remain in purgatory or similar state.

The message of resurrection of their son helped them get past the cruel judgment of their family. But after the takeover by Rutherford and his cruel changes, they became inactive and their children did not become jws till they became adults over the 1950's. My siblings and cousins were exposed to the teachings but only half were baptized, but only 2 are officially still in, and they pick and choose.

no password

"People who know nothing about cults besides the horrors of Jim Jones and Charles Manson will wonder: What kind of parents give up their daughter in the first place? The two cult experts I spoke to — New York psychotherapist Daniel Shaw, who has counseled former cult members for over 20 years, and Dr. Marc Galanter, professor of psychiatry at NYU Langone Medical Center — were saddened by the story of River Road, but not surprised. Anyone can fall into a cult under the right circumstances.

“Nobody joins a cult,” Shaw said. “You join a community that you believe will have positive benefits and goals.” Galanter agreed, noting people who feel vulnerable, displaced, or unhappy are at the highest risk of joining a cult — they’re searching for a lost connection.

For many members of River Road, this was true: They first knew Barnard as a fellow member of the Way International, a nondenominational Christian sect that fell apart in the mid-1980s, after the group’s founder and his successor were both accused of brainwashing and having sex with female followers. When Barnard founded River Road years later, he promised them it would be different. He lied.

Barnard developed trademark signs of a religious cult leader, whom Shaw defines as a “traumatic narcissist”: He claimed perfection and that he was one with the divine (“Jesus Christ in the flesh”) and considered himself exempt from the group’s social and moral standards. These were all red flags, but few seemed to notice the dangers of Barnard’s ascent.

“They’d stick around because they loved him,” an ex-member told me of the people who stayed. Another woman argued it wasn’t so simple. “I can’t say to somebody this is how we got tricked,” she said. “He’s using people’s faith and their pain and their suffering and their longing for comfort — he’s using all of that.”

River Road members’ blind dependency on Barnard could have been mutual, according to Shaw: The cult leader — deluded, psychotic, and highly functioning — comes to rely on followers to worship him and validate his supposed perfection. Often, people decide to leave cults only after their sense of self is destroyed. “It’s not just because you’ve come to know information about the leader,” Shaw explained. “It’s more because you have reached a point of utter despair and emptiness. You’ve been abused to a point where you can’t take it anymore.” That moment came around 2008, when a group of husbands confronted Barnard about his affairs with their wives and approached the local sheriff.

River Road soon unraveled, though John Carlson, who was Pine County’s attorney at the time, declined to press charges. “The sad truth is, these individuals admit they were essentially ‘brainwashed’ by Barnard and readily and willingly did what he wanted them to do,” he wrote. Reports of child sexual abuse were deemed “merely suspicion.” Many followers eventually left the cult, including C and B, amid rumors of bankruptcy and Barnard’s sexual exploits. Dozens of others moved with Barnard to Washington State.

C and B came forward in 2012, accusing Barnard of sexually assaulting them for years. At the time, both of their mothers were reportedly in denial. Approached by an investigator, B’s mother “did not want to hear it.” C later recalled telling her parents that Barnard raped her: “My mom said the blood of the lamb covers it all,” she told Fox 9. “Jesus Christ forgives.” C and B waited two years for the county to finally charge Barnard, after Fox 9 investigative reporter Tom Lyden produced an award-winning segmentthat exposed Barnard’s crimes. “How in the world could you pass on this case?” Lyden told me, referring to the county attorney. “This kind of story doesn’t exist.”

http://nymag.com/thecut/2016/10/rape-victims-minnesota-cult-leader-victor-barnard-sexual-assault.html

scratchme1010

JeffT is a perfect example of my point. One thing is people's intelligence and a different one is how people feel. I have a problem with labeling people or blaming them for making a foolish decision.

Normally people who join do so for a number of reasons, none of them having anything to do with their level of intelligence. Many experts who study negative influence and brainwashing have determined that the reasons for people who join is because the organization appeals to either people's emotions (ranging from depression to their own ego) or timing (people encountering the WT at a time when they are about to make an important decision, at a time when they have experienced loss, or at a time when they want to make a significant change in their lives).

None of those things have anything to do with a person's intelligence. Is joining an idiotic decision? Maybe. Dire consequences? Definitely. Should people be blamed or labeled as if there's something wrong with them for it? Absolutely not.

Vidiot

Don't wanna be a Watchtower idiot...

Let's Be Honest - You or One of Your Ancestors Was an Idiot