At the beginning of 1993, leaving the JWs was the furthest thing from my mind. I was the stereotypical True Believer™. Mr Scully and I hosted a Congregation Book Study™ and Field Service Meeting™ in our home; we never missed a Meeting™ or Service™. We had 2 young children and another on the way. Within the year, all of that came crashing down around us. By the end of 1994, we had decided that as of January 1, 1995 we would never set foot in that Kingdom Hall™ again. It's a long story, and I've dispersed bits and pieces here and there on JWD over the past 15 years that I've been a member here.
What I will tell you is this: with a True Believer™ you must SLOW DOWN. It's only natural to want to share everything you find, all at once in a massive memory dump, thinking that you know your spouse and that she would never betray you or your doubts. But that is exactly what will happen if she feels overwhelmed with information. She will literally freak out, if not overtly, she will keep it to herself and feel like the life she knows has ended.
The key to a successful fade, with your relationship intact, is to slow things down.
The final straw for Mr Scully and me (as I mentioned recently on another thread) was to read the discussion in the Insight and Aid books on the topic of lying.
Lying generally involves saying something false to a person who is entitled to know the truth and doing so with the intent to deceive or to injure him or another person.
and then further on:
While malicious lying is definitely condemned in the Bible, this does not mean that a person is under obligation to divulge truthful information to people who are not entitled to it.
It really started to bother me that Theocratic Warfare™ - the manipulation of information intended to deceive someone who is not entitled to truthful information - might be directed at JWs by the GB. With this being part of the foundation of its teachings, how exactly could I be sure that I wasn't being lied to by the Organization™? What if that was its entire modus operandi? I remembered the hype around 1975, and it was bugging the living $h!t out of me to see how the history had been rewritten, blaming "overzealous" individuals for raising our hopes. Well, who was responsible for publishing those Watchtower and Awake articles telling people that Armageddon™ was no more than "mere months" away? Or that this was the time to sell your homes and Move to Where the Need Is Great™? And then there was the gradual shifting of The Generation™ from being those who saw the events of 1914 and would have been able to discern their meaning, to those who were merely alive in 1914... what was the purpose of those subtle changes if not to keep JWs (and their donations) from jumping ship? And now this whole new teaching around overlapping generations?? I was actually cynical enough to say to Mr Scully toward the end of '94 that The Society™ would have to come up with something in the near future because we had just crossed the 80-year mark since 1914, and sure enough, a year later, this overlapping generation nonsense came out.
Anyway, what I did with those little blurbs in the Insight book, was to ask my True Believer™ former Catholic-JW-convert husband to help me understand who had the authority to decide who was "entitled" to truthful information, and who was not. What would be a proper motive for withholding truthful information? Moreover, did I have the right to withhold truthful information from someone I felt was not entitled to it, or was that privilege just reserved for the GB in Brooklyn? What if the GB decided that JWs weren't entitled to honesty? How would we know if or when they were lying to us by withholding information, when everything they tell us is called The Truth™? How could we, in good conscience, go Door-to-Door™ while wondering if the message we were trying to spread was untrue on any level?
He couldn't answer me. The more he thought about it, the more disturbed he got. We started skipping Meetings™ in favour of doing fun stuff with our kids. I would spend the Book Study™ upstairs in my room with the new baby, listening in via baby monitor (or not). In short order, the group was moved elsewhere, and we never bothered going after the first Meeting™ at the new place.
We've been *done* with the JWs for almost 22 years, and above all the other scandals and such that you'll come to learn about if you spend any amount of time here, it was the thought that the Organization™ regards its membership as not deserving of truth that decimated my desire to have any further part of it.
