Hi Vienna,
I thought this was a pretty good question actually. Sometimes we really need to smack ourselves across the side of the head to make sure we are not just drifting in the sea of mental enculturation. So, just briefly, my two cents worth...
I was raised from birth into the JW ideology. My parents, grandparents, sisters, and entire extended family were at that time (a little over 40 years ago) 2nd generation JW's. Went through the typical miserable primary school upbringing as the "unwanted JW" and it was drummed into me that the entire world was a horrible and hostile place (outside of JW land.) After graduating high school (with the absolute minimal grade point average) I did the pioneering trip and got into the ideology big time. Had long talks with God (one way of course) both day and night, bought the whole ball of wax, hook, line and sinker.
Probably the first crack that appeared in this rosy conceptual reality was the refusal of a bible study I had to really accept the existence of God in his own life which of course led me into trying to prove to him that there was ample evidence that God existed. Well, this guy was an ex-school teacher and gently showed me one by one that my arguements were a pile of B.S. and eventually I started asking the elders and other pioneers in my local congregation some hard questions which in turn caused the hair on the back of their necks to stand up. I was told in no uncertain terms, to drop this study immediately and dismiss any doubts about God's existence and that we didn't need any intellectual proof to know this and that higher knowledge was simply a trick of the Devil's to get people away from the Bible.
This didn't make sense at all to me from what I knew of the Bible and the hypocracy of it all was disgusting. In time, I started to do more thinking, asking more questions and started getting more visits from the elders telling me that I was walking on thin ice for having any doubts and pursuing worldly knowledge in my efforts to prove God existed.
The first big bomb shell that fell on me was when I discovered the big coverup the of Society to hide the extent of the mental illness among JW's after the prophetic disconfirmation in 1975. I had photocopied several articles about the epidemic of JW's suffering from mental illness in the late 1970's (even some people in our own congregation went off the deep end and started showing up at the Kingdom Hall naked) and when I showed the elders this, not only did they tear up the copies into little pieces and return them, they went to the local college library and destroyed and defaced the books and journals I had photocopied them from (I know this was true because I went back to the college library to recopy them and found every reference I used before either torn out or the book was missing.) When I confronted the elders by this, they told me it was better to hang a millstone around your neck than to stumble your brother and it was necessary to do this to keep anyone in the congregation from finding out about this and being stumbled.
All of this dissappointed me but I just wrote it off as "human imperfection" always assuming that things would get better in time (fat chance of that.) Things went downhill from that point in the congregation as I was removed from being a M.S. and pioneer for having a negative attitude (i.e. having doubts) and also because I made some negative comments during the Watchtower study about the statement back then that the human heart actually could "think" just like the brain (a former JW belief that was later changed by new light when it became apparent how absurd it was).
I was disfellowshipped though without any commitee meeting for later writing to the Society and telling them that I had discovered that the JW membership growth matched the sunspot cycle. Letters were sent to various congregations that I had visited with before, warning them that I was a dangerous apostate and should not even be allowed in the Kingdom Hall. So, that brought an end to the JW days. However, I decided to go to college after this and was determined to find evidence to support God's existance and after three years of the sciences I began to realize that I couldn't find the slightest shread of evidence for God's existance and that causative events and natural laws explained things far more effectively than any intelligent creator meme.
The only thing I could say though is that while I was mentally 100% sure (oh, well maybe more like 95% sure) I was right, I was deeply sad over the whole thing. My dreams of living in a paradise earth, were only that; I really got depressed about the idea of getting nuked in a much more real chance of a nuclear war; I lost my entire family, friends, way of life and realized I had been wasting years of my life in a stupid memetic nightmare.
On the bright side, I learned that wordly people are not all evil, even some very religious ones are really cool; that there is truly a lot of wonderful things we can learn about the universe and ourselves (this is why I became a scientist later) and how great sex could be!
So, it wasn't a case of sour grapes that led me to being an Athiest. I don't have a grudge to grind with anyone, nor do I have a need to prove this paradigm to anyone else. In fact, I'm still rather skeptical of my own beliefs and I think all of us should be. We humans get so full of it sometimes and we just need to do some mental house keeping to get rid of the useless and destructive stuff and concentrate on things that will not only enrich our lives but also help us help others to make a better world. Something you can believe in without any Watchtower showing you the way.
Skipper
