Were you still a "believer" when you left?

by pennycandy 22 Replies latest jw friends

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  nowisee

  my separation from wts was a gradual process over approx. 10 years or so. i officially left in 1976 when i da'd. but the last meeting i attended was probably sometime in early 1975. when i left i had huge question marks about what the real deal was, and decided i was just too stupid to figure it out. i know that with every passing month in 1975 i exhaled a bit more and when 1975 turned into 1976 i was hugely relieved.

  over the years i read various books, notably coc. but i think i finally became thoroughly convinced that the wts was not the truth after i came here about a year and a half ago.

  best wishes, NOWisee
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  Undecided

  I believed it for years but thought it wasn't worth the price to receive the prize. After CofC I woke up to the real truth about the truth. Have no problem with conscience and the borg now.

  Ken P.
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  willyloman

  I knew there was something smelly in paradise long before I left, but only left when I became convinced "Jehovah's organization" was just a man-made concept.

  This was increasingly obvious over the years, but when you are surrounded by the "theocratic" drumbeat it's hard to hear any other music.

  Two things happened to make it easier to leave:

  1. I started lurking here, reading everything on this and other linked sites

  2. Due to some illness in the family, we missed several weeks of meetings in a row (and field service, too), and clarity marched right in and filled the void.
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  OICU8it2

  I stopped attendance but still believed it was my fault- I was weak, etc. Waiting for the bomb to drop. Got new wife and started thinking differently even though still badgered her with truth rhetoric. Saw a tv late nite thing on JWs over at her place one night. Started thinking about what was related concerning failure of prophecy. Finally got here and that was all she wrote. Read all the stuff, CoC, Gentile Times, etc. When you take the info on this site and research the history of the org. one sees how ridiculous their claims were. Once it is determined they are not the faithful and discreet slave their whole house of cards collapses. Just sorry about the twenty years I gave 'em.
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  garybuss

  
  
  I was a believer but I did not like being a Witness, I was angry at being lied to about 1975, and I thought the Witness people were mean and back biters.
  
  I was raised as a Witness and associated until I was 30, and when I left I did not have one Witness friend to care. No Witness bothered to ask me why I left and no Witness bothered to contact me for 10 years after I left.
  
  I lived for 18 years with a sense of impending doom. I felt like I was a failure for not having the stomach to stay and accept the demoralizing abuse dished out by the Witness people. It never occurred to me that I was okay and they were the ones messed up, but in time and with help, I came to be able to see that indeed was the fact.
  
  It was easy for me to leave. It was hard to purge a lifetime of Witness education from my brain. The people were easy to live without. When I went public I got a lot of messages from Witnesses I knew. Their almost unanimous message to me was, "We didn't like you when you were a Witness!.". My mother told me she wish she had put me in a foster home as a child. That was all consistent with my feelings and confirmed in a big way that I had made the right decision when I quit the group.
  
  My biggest mistake was marrying a Witness woman and having children with her. I pay for that every day.
  
  
  
  
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  flower

  I believed...hook line and sinker.
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  hillbilly

  I seem to fit just about everything that Gary said... but my son never bought into the Watchma (new word gang, that's short for "watchtower dogma".)

  Took a while to figure out they were in left feild on some of the theology... but I left cause I was tired of being used... woke up one day and realized I was the guy who always made the phone calls, etc. Never had any true* freinds... it was all a matter of their convienece and my ability to *do* for them or the "cause".

  ---Hill

  * not exactly true..but the one or two I did have are too scared to contact me... bad association I guess.
• 

  DanTheMan

  I was a believer but I did not like being a Witness

  That pretty much sums up how I too came to feel about being in da troof.

  I smelled a skunk, especially after the Korah drama presented at the 2001 DC, but the APOSTATE indoctrination kept me very fearful of doing a full-on investigation of my beliefs.

  Taking a 5 month break from the meetings during the fall of 2001 and winter of 2002 was gave me the distance and perspective I needed to finally get the courage to find out just what those bad-ol' apostates were saying about the org. What I found was not at all what I expected, and it took maybe one day of web-surfing for my already very rickety JW foundations to crumble completely.
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  Mulan

  We left after a long, slow fade. At the time we finally were able to get out, I absolutely believed that JW's had very little truth. Today I believe they have none of it.

  It was still the hardest thing I've ever been through.
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  jws

  For the most part I still believed. I became irregular because of different things, work schedule, a move to a new area, etc. I can't say I really liked being a JW. It was a chore. I may have been skeptical of some things, but still believed the JWs were the best religion out there. I was going to get back to it when I could. But in the meantime, I watched a show on TV about JWs. I had always been curious as to exactly what the 'apostates' had to say. On that show, they talked about Crisis of Conscience. I ordered it from an address at the end of the show and after reading it, I no longer believed in the JWs. After that however, I still believed a lot of what they taught, like no-blood, one-God, etc. - the main topics. I just didn't believe in the JWs as God's organization. Over time I have changed my mind on several teachings.