A long time elder told me that it is easy to pick-out the doubters in the Organization.
That statement alone underlines how tenuously the organisation has its followers in its grips. There is no allowance for shades of belief, or diversity of belief, and any hint of scepticism or cyncism is regarded as a monumental threat, as if one person's awakening might snap the whole congregation out of its spell.
As a consequence, Witnesses are cowed into silence, afraid to discuss their concerns for fear of being "outed" as an apostate. The real outcome is an organisation of pretenders, which is one of the things that really began to turn my stomach about being a Witness. People were pretending to be pious, pretending to be zealous, pretending to be nice, pretending to be friendly, pretending to believe. In the end I couldn't pretend any longer.
At the 2006 district convention, I decided to listen carefully, take notes and try to work out if I was learning anything new at all. In the opening Friday talk the speaker told us we should be excited to listen out during the convention for a "fresh thought" about 2 Peter 3:13. So I did. In the final Sunday talk it finally lobbed: the "fresh thought" was that the new world could be even better than we had imagined. Wow. That's it? I felt cheated. At the close of the session I asked one of the self-righteous, judgmental pricks we hung around with what he thought of the "new thought". Naturally he hadn't even noticed it. I asked him what the highlight of the convention was. He ummed and ahhed, then he asked me what the highlight was for me. I told him, "The closing song. I was just glad it was all over."
I went home that night angry as hell and began writing a diary about how much I hated being a JW. Weirdly, it wasn't for another two years that we finally made the decision to quit attending meetings. I'm sure that by then we had long been marked as "doubters".
