by bigboi 16 Replies latest jw friends
Hey Larc:
They don't know who it is now, at least last time I checked. They weren't sure if it was going to be China or what. I believe there's an article on it in the Nov1&15 1993 issues of the Watchtower. Oh and there's the new Daniel publication. I have that around here somewhere. I'll get back with you.
ONE....
bigboi
"it ain't what ya do. it's how you do it" quote from the song "True Honeybunz" by Bahamadia
Bigboi,
Was it before you left or after you left and what promtped your investigation?
It's a long story, but I began to investigate after I was wrongly (imo and based on the words of one of the JC elders) disfellowshipped. In the past, others have commented that it takes a tragic event in the lives of most people to to shake us from our lethargy relative to the WTS. They're prolly right.
For me, I had the advantage of Randy's website as well as several others, including Kent's, but the most important source of all, though, was probably Ray's books. His insider info and his total absence of malice toward the Society were important in my believing the truth of what he said.
A funny thing, though, that I'll never forget:
After reading it and having it hit me to the core, I thought of a couple of people who I thought would benefit almost as much as me, if not more. One of these was a friend who had not been to a meeting in six years. Even so, after I gave it to him he read it alright, but not with the paper jacket on it. So profound was the Society's hold on him that he didn't want anyone to know what he was reading. And this, considering that virtually everyone he hung out with either was never a JW or were exes like him who hated it as much as he did.
Mind you, in corporate America he is an unqualified success... is CEO and Prez of a business he started from scratch... earns in the top 5% tax bracket... lives in a six or seven hundred thousand dollar house in an exclusive addition...
But with all that, he was still afraid to let others know that he was reading Ray's book. The hold the org. has on people is real, and observing him close up is one example.
holla
Btw, [b]Jayhawk,
Winning that "beard/no beard" argument is easy, as you know. If someone is one-half of a bible student they will readily acknowledge that facial hair is no indicator of godliness ("spiritual maturity"... whatever...), especially in view of the fact that it can be proven scripturally (and even from the pages of the wt) that The Man Himself had one. Duh.
So, I've proudly sported a goatee ever since coming to a knowledge of the truth about "the truth." Hey, I'd rather have a clean face, truth be told, but to give onlookers an outward sign I'm doing the "brother" thang and that their little mind games don't play over here....
Since then, only one person (not a single elder or "man" with any authority), a sister who views herself as my big sister (even tho she's younger than I am), has challenged me about it. She meant well and we're still friends, so much a friend that I ALMOST accompanied my wife to see her this past weekend. She's good people.
peace,
todd ~ [I]
I'd been df'd for years, but still 'loyal' <gag> thought it was all my fault. Then I got my first computer, looked up Jehovah's Witnesses, and got Freeminds.
Thanks, Randy, you're a lifesaver!
Life is a roller coaster. Get in, sit down, shut up and hang on!
Well I had had doubts all along, but the C of C really did the trick for me.
Just like larc, our departure predated computers. I'm just so darned proud of me and hubby for seeing thru it without any assistance from anyone. It took many years of sitting thru every meeting and getting mad about some of the ignorance biggotary and stupidity. Eventually I told my husband how I was feeling and instead of him disagreeing with me, he added a whole new list of doubts to mine. We both instantly doubled our doubts by chatting with each. There was a lot of months of talking and confusion and procrastination on our part, but once we started to see the light, there was no closing it out. The only real problem was breaking the habit of ten years of WT routine. We told people that something about our teachings didn't sit right with us - that we were acting on our gut feelings. It was like a set of scales where the level of doubts was far outweighing the level of belief. We went thru the motions for a fair while after we were pretty sure it was wrong - so when we finally stopped, we were very sure of ourselves.
That was in 1979!!!! We got on line in 1996 and immediately looked up JWs. Wow - we then learnt the extent of the WT con.
Marilyn
Marilyn
I started my investigation about a year after I stopped going. I originally stopped going at age 16, because I didn't like the way I was being treated by the people in my congregation. I told my mother that I would rather hang out with the friends I had from school would tell me to my face if they didn't like me than to smile and do a happy dance in my face, and then trash me behind my back the way the witnesses do. Then, my mother kept pressuring me to go back, and I thought about it a lot bcuz life was getting tough, and I thought that maybe Jehovah was trying to show me that I should go back. I went to a dinner with my mother over a family member's house, who is born again christian. My mother went over there because she was convinced that eventually she would turn them to Jehovah. (a born again? yeah, right.) Anyway, there was a man there who was a deacon in my cousin's church...they all started talking about the bible, and I was in the other room, because I hate when my mother starts talking...she gets loud, and misquotes and it is just embarrasing. But, I was listening in, and I heard them talking about some subject in which they were all wrong. I felt compelled to go out there and explain the subject and scripture to them. The deacon guy was very impressed with my extensive knowledge of the bible, at such a young age. (you don't really do much else as a Jdub kid) We then began a discussion, and he told me some things that were hard to swallow as truth, because of what I had ingrained in my head for so many years. But I did what he said, and for the first time, I actually wanted to read the bible. I couldn't put it down. With every book, I was finding missquotes and incorrect interpretations by the JW's. I investigated quite a lot of thier doctrines, which are false, and then I wrote a letter DA'ng myself, because "I didn;t think that I should belong to a organization who held beliefs that I was not certain are true". And the rest is history.
My Regards,
Joanne
