Its all about
control
and guilt, fault, and blame.
Jehovah Witnesses are not brainwashed...
by thecarpenter 24 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
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jgnat
You are left feeling like if you were really devoted, you would be doing more.
We get this a lot in the evangelical churches, too. After all, the harvest is white ready for harvest, and the laborers are few. Always, always, the sense of urgency. I eagerly responded to every call, doing my darndest. Then one day I realized that the preacher was preaching to the converted. It wasn't US that needed to hear the message, do more, do more. We were THERE.
See, the best of us can be duped. The sensible ones wake up one day saying, "Never again."
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M.J.
Its a slippery slope that any organization can be vulnerable to, given the right conditions. Just observe how self-absorbed an organization is. This is a good indicator of how far down this path it has gone.
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avengers
Re: Jehovah Witnesses are not brainwashed...
It's a form of hypnosis.
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thecarpenter
That also reminds me,
Part of their mind control is they make you think you are as close to happy as you can get
That was how I felt. I really thought the same level of happiness I had as a jw couldn't possibly exist anywhere else, so for most of my time in the org I never considered looking elsewhere for happiness. Of course, the wts endorsed this by telling us those who leave become very sad individuals, because they have left the source of ultimate happiness, and most of us, including me, believed it.
Lo-ru-hamah and fullofdoubtnow this is another one of the warnings that Steven Hassan gave in his book. Essentially he mentioned how cults like to paint up a fantasy world, a illusion of what it is like to serve and be in their organization. They constantly speak of the joys they have now as opposed to what it is like on the outside. I remember how the organization used to stress the joys of our spiritual paradise and pioneering over and over again.
When I was pioneering, I remember thinking to myself, where is this joy that pioneers are supposed to have, I'm miserable. Also, there was the constant drivel of a spiritual paradise that we have because we are part of the bOrg collective. Honestly, I did feel happy for a little while until I started realizing that things were not going the way the organization said they would. Problems started cropping up that were getting tougher and tougher to deal with. Interestingly, if plain common sense was used and the organizational rhetoric ignored, many of these problems would have been taken care of before they became problems. But obviously, organization concerns such as selling their magazines and books concerning their interpretations of the bible must take precedence.