Have any of you who were ever "raised in the truth" really traced your doubts back to as early as you remember? I would be interested in hearing what they were.
I started tracing my path of doubts. Here they are:
Doubts as a child:
Warnings in the literature that the "the devil transforms himself into an angel of light" and can appear like the truth. I used to think - "well, that might mean Satan could be posing as Jehovah's Witnesses too."
The age-old fallacy: How do we know the Bible is from God? Because it says so in the Bible! (I didn't even know what fallacies were back then ...)
Birthdays and minor holidays like mothers day, fathers day, etc. Beards too.
My mom and the congregation telling me my dad is really Satan trying to turn me away from Jehovah.
Constant pressure to conform by using guilt.
Doubts While at Bethel (19 yrs old):
General obsession with money and position by almost all at Bethel - especially the higher-up ones.
The Society's fascination with their buildings, and their constant bragging about them (anyone who has been on a Bethel tour knows what I am talking about)
The creature worship of the Governing Body by Bethelites and visitors..
You move move ahead ENTIRELY by who you know and who you make alliances with.
Very high up and longtime brothers at Bethel who seemed very unhappy - and downright rude and mean.
Told by a brother in writing department under his breath, that they had a UN membership and would go to the UN to research - trying to identify the King of the North - and to listen in on meetings to see if anything would tip them off to the Great Tribulation.
Told by a brother in Writing Dept that the reason they came out with another Creation book so soon after the other one was because they were threatened with lawsuits because of the misquotes.
Learning from brothers in writing and service departments that often the articles written in the magazines and talks at the conventions are meant to address specific problems - and the problem isn't usually readily apparent in the title or general subject of the talk/article.
Doubts After Bethel. Married - Without Kids:
Going out in service and meeting a pastor at the door. He calmly set us down and did some "seed-planting", methodically showing me and my wife how the New World Translation twisted texts to fit their doctrine by blatantly adding to scripture (or leaving stuff out). Rendering the same word differently in different places. His final words to me were - "If you don't listen to ANYTHING I tell you, listen to this - PLEASE go back and study the original Greek."
Generation change in 1995,1996. This is the main thing that HAD kept me going in the truth - based on the Awake! masthead - a promise from Jehovah. A prophesy from the Society in Jehovah's name. Once they admitted they were wrong on this - I thought to myself - they could be wrong on everything! I realized at that moment I would die in this system. I lamented not going to college.
My parents divorce - my dad had an "apostate" lawyer. This apostate lawyer (I now realize in hindsight) also used this opportunity as seed-planting. He basically went through the entire range of JW teachings - with the apostate slant - in the court papers. Our whole family read these papers. These affected me greatly, and certain points from these papers would come back to me from time to time.
Also during my parents divorce, the Society provided us with a booklet that detailed "How" to respond to questioning in court. I remember being a little disturbed at how the responses we were to give weren't entirely truthful.
About the same time as the divorce I started going to college (now that the Society had given the OK). One of the first classes I took was called "Logic and Reasoning". We spent the whole semester learning about fallacies. At first I applied them to the apostate arguments in the court papers from my parents' divorce. But over the years I began to identify them in the Society's literature.
A bible study my wife and I conducted with a young, but very Christian family. The husband - very nice and sincere - said that with all honesty that he could (and had) read the entire New Testament (multiple times) and felt that the Trinity was very clearly taught in scripture. I was annoyed with him because I took the WT line that "anyone who reads the bible with an open mind could not POSSIBLY come to the conclusion that Jesus was God.
Off and on I would make lists of things that bothered me I wanted to research. For various reasons (WT scant revealing of quotes, date inconsistencies I blamed on myself being unable to figure out, feelings of guilt that I was being presumptuous or nitpicking) I gave up. This happened probably a dozen times.
After Bethel & Married - With Kids:
Generation thing continued to gnaw at me.
Wife pregnant with first child. Was not fully convinced in my mind that "no blood" was something I wanted to commit to. She had to actually break the ice with the doctor regarding the blood issue.
UN Scandal
Pedophile scandal
Recognizing more faulty reasoning in the magazines - fallacies.
Increasing frequency of Circuit Overseers (in the congregation) and Bethel speakers (at assemblies) saying, "Even if what the Faithful Discreet Slave says does not make a bit of sense to you, just DO WHAT THEY SAY. THEY are the CHOSEN channel."
A bethel speaker at an assembly said, "Apostates and other opposers of truth will attempt to use LOGIC to persuade you that this isn't the Truth."
More and more articles, and talks from CO's encouraged getting baptized very young. Without saying a SPECIFIC AGE - they still said if a kid is in high school, they should have been baptized. I felt this is wrong - and even voiced as much to my wife. Baptism talks always state that "this is one of the most important decisions in your life". If that is so, and they are old enough to make a decision that affects their whole life - then they should also be able to get married, and make many other life-altering decisions. To me it felt like recruitement - "Get em while they're young and lock em in so that if they leave they would also lose their whole family."
My oldest daughter got to school age and my own feelings as a child of not eating a cupcake on the day of someone's birthday came flooding back to me. I began to regret what my daughter was going to have to go through in school.
Off and on I would make lists of things that bothered me I wanted to research. For various reasons (WT scant revealing of quotes, date inconsistencies I blamed on myself being unable to figure out, feelings of guilt that I was being presumptuous or nitpicking) I gave up.
10-year wedding anniversary was 6 months away. I realized that my doubts had gradually increased over the years to the point that my wife and I would not talk about longer-term goals for our family. Our communication got less and less - and in fact, probably never really was. I looked back over the past ten years and really examined what it was that caused the communication rift. It was my doubts. Plain and simple. I did not want our next ten years to lack this kind of communication.
So I began to research ... and here I am.
-ithinkisee