7 years of attending for me and it's surprising how the lectures not to look at 'apostate' literature become insidiously ingrained.
Only thanks to all of the good souls out there who posted scan's of ORIGINAL Bible & Tract society publications - and hungrily searched the web for all of the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of watchtower literature and Bible and Tract society literature, did I finally see the truth.
When it clicked that Charles Taze Russell was a mason then I knew I had to warn my JW friends that Jehovah's organisation is into the occult - numerology and pyramidology. When I realised that the witnesses say that we are not son's of God but now grandchildren, through the 'anointed brothers', I thought this goes against the words of Jesus that we all know so well, that we may be children of our Father which is in heaven.
But Charles Russell while misguided is light reading compared to the vitriol of Joseph Rutherford and the now anonymous lecturing of the Governing Body.
But when we leave the witnesses for what we don't like, we ought to retain the dignity to retain our own principles which drew us there in the first place.
Just because the Governing Body continue with hallucinations of Charles Russell - enforcing them, and enforcing lies of Joseph Rutherford, such as the '144,000 anointed brother's of Christ', doesn't mean that I am going to reject everything that the watchtower said just because they said it.
As a man who was sexually abused as a child by an older male neighbour, and later catastrophically duped into a Vipassana meditation cult which demanded complete surrender to the teacher and left me out of my mind and spaced out, only to be 'befriended' by another male and deceived into engaging in homosexual behaviour, I can say that we should never ever forget the principles which attracted us to join the Jehovah's witnesses in teh first place.
From catastrophic personal experience I believe that oral and anal sex is degrading to both participants. I also believe it is degrading to human dignity to so deal with the male seminal fluid which has the power to give human life. We should no more take these male fluid's within our digestive tracts than we would eat female menstrual fluids. It is to me the same thing. The Governing Body said it and I agree with them on this, but not by submission or surrender to their views, but simply because I am in agreement with those views.
So now even though I know that the Governing Body lies to us about the anointed, I still believe personally that there is no such thing as a homosexual identity, and that encouraging this identification only cements certain damaging behaviours which are later regretted.
Daniel Taylor