Reservations, here is my more complete reply.
There are many good ideas and recommendations expressed in a number of the posts in this topic thread. In this post I make some comments about the following quotes from this thread.
- "people wake up when they are ready to, often for personal reasons rather than anything doctrinal or organizational"
- " I think the best you can do , is to observe , and maybe if you know some jw who was questioning about jw / WT problem to show where to find more information"
- "They are happy believing what they do, otherwise they would have left a long time ago. You only have one life to live---why waste it on trying to help people who are not asking for your help. Let them live their own life and you live your own life. If they want to wake up they will."
- "As far as getting other Jobos to wake up, it's a vain wish. I have to be realistic not
idealistic here."
- "I now conclude that it is harder to convince a believing JW of the falsehood of their way than it is to convince a worldly person to accept JW beliefs. ow I respect their right to believe it if they want , they can see all that I can see."
- "... encourage people to do research, drop the names of a few non Witness sources, you can usually get away with it if it's historical stuff, try Edersheim."
- "... trying to wake up those in the congregation is a futile thing to do. ...So please don`t waste your life trying to wake people up , they wont do so until they themselves are ready to be woken up."
Some very active JWs (though they might be a very small percentage) though not appearing to be unhappy with the religion, are actually very unhappy with some aspects of religion. People (at least some them) in that category are active because the WT (and along with the Bible) convinced them it is their duty to Jehovah God to be active in the JW religion, even if they strongly dislike being active. But, they are active anyway because they believe it is the right thing to do, no matter how boring or unpleasant it is. I know that because I was one of them and I never expressed my unhappiness about such within the congregation, except for very few times with my mother (a JW). I kept my unhappiness about WT drudgery to myself. I was a regular pioneer for virtually three full years, and that was because of a sense of duty/obligation to Jehovah God, but it was a drudgery for me. I stopped pioneering because I couldn't take the drudgery any more and because I had obtained a Bachelor of Science college degree in Business Administration and I wanted to more fully pursue a career (instead of only working part-time).
I wish someone (whether inside the religion or outside of it) had offered to present reliable information and ideas that would have helped me to see problems with the JW religion (including with the Bible itself). I wish such had been presented to me during my teens or 20s. By the time I was was 31 years old I started having serious doubts (and started getting onto the internet and using a web browser soon after web browsers began being distributed) and had dropped down to about 1 hour to 3 hours of field service per month while still a ministerial servant). At about age 35-37 years old I basically stopped attending Kingdom Hall meetings, but I wish I had become inactive (or nearly inactive) in my early 20s, or especially in my teens. Though in my younger years I didn't have many doubts (though I had some), I was still open minded enough that I would have listened to good evidence (such as statements in old WT literature that show the weird false teachings the WT taught back then) and good arguments (even if initially only I only listened with the intent to disprove them).
However, I was afraid to read certain things (primarily books promoting atheism) for fear I might become an atheist and thus loose my prospect of salvation (if Jehovah God really does exist). I didn't want to become deceived into believing there is no god, if there really is a god. For periods of time I had an interest in reading science books about evolution (and I did read some science magazine articles about them), but in my teens I was afraid to read them due to fearing I might would be deceived.
Though I loved the idea of living forever in a peaceful paradise Earth, I very strongly disliked going out in field service, spending so many hours attending JW meetings, and being expected to study so such for the meetings. When considering giving comments/answers to questions in WT publications, I didn't like being expected to only make statements repeating the ideas in those publications. I wanted the freedom to think critically about what the WT literature says and to express ideas I might have that disagree with what the literature says is the correct answer. As a result, answering questions in the JW meetings was too routine and thus boring and a drag.
It would have been helpful if someone had personally encouraged me to read sources of quotes, with me being told that doing so would help me to get a clearer and deeper understanding of what the sources were saying. Furthermore, it would have been helpful if I had been told that doing such could potentially deepen my confidence in the Bible by seeing more fully what the historical and scientific sources said. You might be able to get away with saying such to select JWs, since the phrasing is stated in a reassuring way. At the same time, if people did check sources, in response to such encouragement, they would likely discover ideas that would cause them to see some problems with the WT's teaching.