by rain 32 Replies latest jw friends
hi all!
Something i thought of as i was reading through the posts:
I have read through various posts where it has been said that some feel that JWs are not the organisation or people of god.
Therefore, has anyone after leaving the JWs joined another religion? If so why?
Sorry if this has been asked before., i was just wondering?
There are alot of people on this board who have found other religions. The reason why is simple, they still feel as though Jesus is their lord and savior and the JW heiarchy is being blasphemous when it acts as though it is a savior.
My experience has been this. Being a Jehovah's Witness is like falling in love with your soul mate and living a life of extreme bliss in a honeymoon state and then having a terrible falling out and a divorce. No other woman can take the place of your one true love! Nobody measures up to her standard of perfection! All you can see are the flaws.
What is wrong with the above? It ignores reality and embraces a mindless wishful-thinking.
The state of mind it takes to fall in love with Jehovah and his organization is a state of mind that substitutes reality with a false reality. Something better than the "real world" is offered. Something better than living and dying is offered. Something better than the chaos of a world that makes no sense is offered. A make-believe HYPER-REALITY dims the real one by comparison.
Who wouldn't want to live in a Paradise? Duh!
Who wouldn't want all injustice to cease and a perfect government to grant our every righteous wish? Duh!
Who wouldn't want evil to vanish and peace to reign? Duh!
Who wouldn't want to be perfect and live eternally in bliss? Duh!
Get the picture? The offer is irresistible because IT IDEALIZES our wishful-thinking and gives us a fantasy escape from the __real__world of reality.
Once we buy in to this make-believe, we get to live, as it were, in the Magic Kingdom. It is like taking your child to Disneyland and letting them live there! It is all hyper-wonderful! The colors are brighter than the real world. The characters are more interesting than the real world. The distractions are more fun and more exciting than the real world. It is a non-stop vacation from the mundane and the ordinary life that seems so drab and colorless by comparison.
Leaving Disneyland can be a bummer! What child doesn't cry and throw a hissy fit when it comes time to leave? Who wouldn't want the fantasy to continue???
The problem then becomes this. How much less than Disneyland can we settle for?
Can we actually let go of the happy-think? Can we go back to everyday reality that is chaotic and doesn't make sense like a Disney cartoon? IT IS DAMNED DIFFICULT to live in the real world once you've live in Disneyland!!
So, for most ex-JW's, it is almost impossible to accept a poor substitute. Some are able to do so and join another, less dynamic fantasy just to hold on to the happy-ending aspect of the reward. For others---it is a real bummer; a downer, a depressing time of pure hellish surfacing from a great depth with nitrogen bubbles bursting in our veins as we rise to the top of reality.
Let's face it--Jehovah's Witnesses have Disneyland and everything else is just a carnival side-show by comparison! We don't want to give up Mickey and Goofey and the 7 Dwarfs and Sleeping Beauty and Alice for the oridinary everyday world of Bill and Fred and Jack and Mary.
But--if we are honest with ourselves...if we have the courage to actually start thinking again....if we can face the Real World for what it is......if we can stand the pain of investigating what went wrong with our cartoon life.....WE CAN LIVE IN THE REAL WORLD and regain our identity.
RELIGION is a drug induced coma that is a real high....until you start coming down. Because down is much much lower than we can imagine. The higher you go up....the farther you fall to the ground.
I have not joined another religion. I have joined the human race. I have explored the undiscovered country: my true self. The path I have taken is by means of the only guide I can trust now, my rational mind. I test everything. I am skeptical. I am not cynical; I am careful. I am ready to be wrong. I am eager for disagreement and crticism and argument from others because it may mean I'm off course and debate or controversy is the only way to get right again.
Isn't that what is great about the JWD? We keep each other straight.
Terry:
That argumentation was really gripping WTS-style stuff
"The WTS is totally irrational, ergo ALL religion must be..."
Doesn't that concept just close the mind to looking at religion objectively?
Your subjectivity may be showing
Terry - Once again, "here here". (Or is it "hear hear"? Can some kind Brit or Aussie please illuminate me?) Yes, it's really, really hard to leave Disneyland and get much of a thrill out of "Waldo's World's Biggest Snake Farm and Bar Bee Que". But there is much more to it than the fairyland ending (it is interesting, but National Lampoon did a lampoon of the WT & Awake and the WT they did was pretty much along the same lines as you), as Jesus' apostles said after Jesus shocked everybody with his discussion on his blood, "Where shall we go away to?"
I could never find anyone that even remotely approached the exceptional thinking and clarity of expression about the Bible. Yeah, sure, there were/are rough spots, kinda mish-mashy, but I haven't found a perfect Caluclus course yet either. I got an engineering degree (yes, I was a card carrying JW at the time) from a Jesuit University. If you're not familiar with the Jesuits, historically, they are the SS of the Catholic Church, and, above and beyond anything else, YOU WILL TAKE 6 HOURS OF RELIGION or you will not graduate! I tried everything to get out of it, but to no avail. Anyhow, the most interesting thing was that when I went into the class the stupidity of the whole thing almost doubled me over in laughter. The instructor was a Rabbi! Here I am, a JW in a Catholic school being taught religion by a Rabbi. Talk about a cosmic joke! (I managed one class and then dropped out because I found out that the university had started offering the class via the internet and that was fine with me.) If you'd like, I can give you details on my stay in the class, it is uproariously funny.
But what I left with was the realization of how completely, totally, absolutely and without question dumb people are about religion, God, it's history, it's purposes, anything! No wonder the likes of David Koresh can get these people to live in a hole outside of Waco, Texas. There were about a dozen other students in my class and they all reputed to be "Christian" (the instructor made each of us say what religion we belonged to, or had belonged to if that were the case) and I marveled at this scene. These people were all my age (>30), adult, with jobs and families, and they were sitting here learning religion from a high up officer in the organization that had killed their god. What a chuckle.
rain- to answer your question: No. I have not even looked at another religion, what would be the point? Terry's description of the soul-mate is a literal description of what happened to me, both with my wife and the religion. I have tried to find another woman, but, so far, have been unable. Although I have no doubt that my search will, eventually, be successful. But religion? I attended one church religious service in Naples, Fla. (ironically, it was while I was on a vacation to Disneyworld) with a fiancee (we were visiting her cousin) and I think it was Presbyterian or Methodist or something or other. After the 25 minutes of Broadway level production of gospel singing, solos, arias, dance numbers, all being shown on 3 (not 2, not 1) stadium sized flat screens (one of which will cost as much as your average KH), the "Pastor" came out and whirled through a 10 minute fussilade of name dropping about all of the celebrities he had spoken with (Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and a few others, mostly politicians however) and how beautiful the world was. He cited two or three scriptures real fast, I don't think there was a Bible in the building, but it didn't matter, those people were not there for a religious experience. Then the Pastor introduced a younger man who was, I assumed, a rising star, who spoke for about 5 minutes which turned out to be an introduction to this really nice looking, big tittied bleach blonde woman with a really low cut gown (or robe or whatever they call those things that the choir wears) who sang her little tushie off. This, of course, spawned another 15 minutes of gospel music, dance, inspiration slide show, lights, camera, action and - fade to black. It's hard to describe how much closer to God I felt after watching that blondes tits heave and fall and jiggle while she did her number, let me tell you! As we were leaving the place I turned to my fiancee and asked, "What the hell was that all about?", but she just elbowed me in the ribs and smiled at her frowning cousin.
Leaving Disneyland can be a bummer! What child doesn't cry and throw a hissy fit when it comes time to leave? Who wouldn't want the fantasy to continue???
God, I thought I was the only kid to ever cry leaving Disney World!! Terry, you summed up the situation beautfully.......I still go to the Hall sometimes, (am doing the slow fade). I can't imagine not having any religion in my life, so I know I'll try to find something else eventually. I've tried a few of the mainstream churches but it's not my cup of tea. The Trinity doctrine really bothers me..........I'd like to find a Christian religion a bit closer to the Jewish faith.....maybe Reform Judaism. I don't believe Jesus ever intended to start a new religion; he simply wanted reform within the Jewish faith and that's probably the way I'll end up going.
Terry:That argumentation was really gripping WTS-style stuff
"The WTS is totally irrational, ergo ALL religion must be..."
Doesn't that concept just close the mind to looking at religion objectively?
Your subjectivity may be showing
________________________________________________________________________________
LittleToe, you are treading on thin ice comparing me with the WATCHTOWER. Be warned! :)
Seriously though, as I've demonstrated in other posts, RELIGION peddles only one product and that is a cure for the very diseases they end up describing:
DEATH, HELL, PURGATORY, ARMAGEDDON, DEMONIC ATTACK, INVISIBLE FOES.....
The price you pay to belong to a religion is the loss of your ability to think for yourself.
IS THAT A GOOD THING?
Show me a religious person in good standing with their local congregation who is free to disagree by thinking individual thoughts? Priests are defrocked, JW's are disfellowshipped, Pastors are split off into sects for thinking individually. They have an evil badge to pin on a thinking person: APOSTATE!
If Religion is really warm and fuzzy with butterflies and sunshine and rainbows, why is there so much simmering anger ready to be unleashed on those who disagree? Gays are shunned, alternate lifestyles are condemned, abortion doctors are murdered, wars are launched all in the name of God and Good.
I'd really love to hear you tell me what it is that Religion offers that isn't make-believe and fear-inducing?
As Ross Perot once said, "I'm all ears". (And he was too).
Terry:
LOL
(S'ok, I'm laughing with ya, not at ya )
My position would be that it's a human complaint, not limited to religion.
How do political candidates encourage you to vote for them?
When war is the course of action to be entered into, how is propaganda used?
Solely demonizing religion is not helpful, IMHO.
BUt that's just my 2p
Terry:LOL
(S'ok, I'm laughing with ya, not at ya )
My position would be that it's a human complaint, not limited to religion.
How do political candidates encourage you to vote for them?
When war is the course of action to be entered into, how is propaganda used?
Solely demonizing religion is not helpful, IMHO.
BUt that's just my 2p
________________________________________________________________________________
LittleToe,
I thought religion INVENTED DEMONIZING!
Besides, we don't excuse bad behavior by pointing to worse behavior do we? What politicians do they have done throughout history in concert with religion! When you sleep in the same bed you learn the same tricks.
I didn't hear you offer an apologia for religion; just a claim of unfairness for singling religion out. But, does that mean nobody can criticise something destructive unless the list includes ALL things destructive?
Perspiring minds want to know.
I consider myself a secular humanist. I have not joined another religion, and never will. If in fact there is a God, I believe that he doesn't need you to gather together and worship him according to a specific set or rules/beliefs/doctrine. Being a good person should be good enough.
Terry & LT-
I'm enjoying your dialogue. I hope you keep it up. It helps others see two sides.
