by JH 14 Replies latest jw friends
In french we use the word "naïf", which means to believe anything that's said without proof of it being true. I think that gullible is the english translation.
I was very gullible in my early JW years. I guess it's not faith that one needs to be a good JW, but gullibility...
Gullible is the word often used when people find out my husband is a jw. Usually they are suprised 'he is so gullible'. Or, 'oh, that's too bad, I thought he was smarter than that'. This is coming from people who do not understand or even know much about mind control and/or thought reform, etc...
Did you know gullible is not in the dictionary?
Well, I guess most of those who, like me, joined the wts as adults allowed ourselves to be fooled by the love bombing at meetings and the indoctrination tecniques used in our bible study, so gullible would be an accurate way to describe us.
Here is what I think works best with Jehovah's Witnesses.
1.Most people assume certain fundamental "truths" about God, religion and the Bible which JW's are able to debunk.
2.Disillusioned by the JW's ability to debunk a rock-solid belief in their own world view, the neophyte becomes vulnerable to
whatever else the JW tells them.
3.A healthy skepticism invigorates a desire to learn. By becoming skeptical of everything they had always been taught about God, religion and the Bible the neophyte plunges into an indoctrination program that erases previous beliefs and substitutes the rhetoric and propaganda of JW -dom.
4.The new person at the Kingdom Hall learns to bond with the insular social system of JW's and exclude everybody and everything ELSE.
5.By insultation themselves from ALL OTHER FORMS OF INFORMATION the new JW becomes a religious clone whose sole purpose is to create new clones.
Is this being gullible?
NO!
The first stage debunking is a valuable service provided by JW's!
The horrible second stage is the atrocity to human intelligence.
It is like knocking somebody senseless and then taking them wherever you decide to take them.
JW's destroy the foundation on which people's lives have been erroneously built (false belief systems). They substitute another false system in its place.
It is not gullible to change your world view from strong belief to disbelief. It is gullible, however, to abandon one set of beliefs without a cooling off period and re-education program before embracing a new set of beliefs.
Gullible as hell. Or perhaps a recent victim of a frontal lobotomy.
cab.
You would definitely have to be gullible, naive, vulnerable, or lonely. Or all of these. My dear Mother is a sweet, gullible woman who immediately believes everything she reads in the newspaper, or any magazine. If she reads about a new health fad, vitamin or herb, she tries it right away, because she read it will do wonders for you! Imagine what putty she is if it's printed in the Watchtower!
She lives in her own innocent little world and does not really want to know the truth about the truth. She grew up a naive, lonely farm girl, teased in school, and the Dubs made her feel special. She soaked it up like a sponge, even when they convinced her letting her Mother die from refusing blood was the right thing to do. After an investment like that, she seems to have her feet stuck in Watchtower cement, so to speak. So sad, and frustrating.
For me it all started out as an attempt to please my mother, who was studying with the JWs. I was young at the time, so gullibility is a given. I've always been a science nerd, even when I was really young, so I always wound up being called on at meetings to explain things like why evolution is wrong or why the big-bang couldn't possibly have been true. At one point, my mother had even managed to convince me to throw away any career I could have in the sciences and go to a local college and do something where I wouldn't have to learn about evolution and things. Eventually, I just had to give up; I couldn't take it any more. I couldn't just accept that the big-bang was incorrect without actually studying cosmology and I walked away. So I think part of being a good JW is being pretty gullible, but even with my natural desire to question things and look for answers it took me years before I could leave. So gullability is definitely not the be all end all. There's a lot of pressure that can keep you in the JWs even after your solid supports have been kicked out from under you.
JH, the English word with the same root is simply a French loan word--the feminine "naïve."
I while back I posted a thread referring to recent research that people who have had hard lives are more likely to be gullible. I think the reason Witnesses are so successful among the lower classes (and I say that without a trace of classism--I myself come from a solidly blue-collar background) is because often these folks who are "sighing and crying" have been induced by their lives to be more gullible.
It's sad, really--these people are searching for answers, their lives suck, they will believe whoever comes along and promises them a rose garden, and they get snapped up by the JW's.
Gullible and the word Virgochick used; vulnerable.
My mother was very vulnerable. She had a horrid childhood, very low self esteem, an abusive husband, and a friend who seemed to have the life she wished she had.
Of course that friend was a JW.
I agree with under_believer. It does seem to be pretty successful amongst the lower classes of people, and that's sad in and of itself because a lot of these people are looking for some sort of meaning or hope in life. And then the Watchtower does whatever it possibly can to keep these people naive and to keep them in the lower classes (i.e. telling them not to go to college, not to get educated) because they know that if they become less naive and have more knowledge, they will leave!
