A doctor I visited is married to a dub from my old hall. He is one of those husbands who was never baptized but comes to some meetings and "talks the talk," or at least some of it and professes belief but never goes all in.
I acquired him as part of a surgical team and only found out he was on that team when I went in for surgery. He's been handling my follow up visits. We have not talked at all about dubdom but he is aware I stored my own blood prior to the surgery, in the event there was significant blood loss, and he's never challenged me about it.
Making conversation after we discussed my xrays, I asked how his wife was. He informed me they were getting a divorce. I made the usual "sorry" noises but he said, hey, it's for the best. He said sometimes people are happier not married to each other and he said that was definitely the situation here. Then I asked if the break up of the marriage was in any way due to the Witness lifestyle.
Not knowing where I was coming from (and presuming I was still an active dub elder), he expressed concern about her spirituality and said she had "pulled away" from the organization and how sad that was. I decided to go for broke and said, "You weren't exactly a fully committed witness yourself, as I recall. Has that changed?" He laughed and said, "No, you're right, I never was fully committed. But I worship Christ and I love Jehovah and I know who He is." I knew if I asked him why he was holding back, he'd think I was going all elder on him and he'd offer up what he thought I wanted to hear. So I told him we were no longer going to meetings and had left the organization three years ago.
He looked at me for some seconds and said, "May I ask why?"
So I gave him the short version, mentioning corruption, hypocrisy, judgmentalism and nagging doubts that we could not stifle or explain away. "We had a long talk with ourselves and realized we could no longer support a belief system that was the opposite of what our hearts told us, and we walked."
This opened up the floodgates and he spent 10 minutes summarizing the doubts and misgivings he'd always had about the Witness religion. We talked about the blood issue and agreed the Society was extremely disingenuous with the rank and file on that subject and that the average dub knew little to nothing about what the organization currently taught about blood use. As a doctor, it really bothered him that dubs are told they can take fractions and accept organ transplants - some of which contain their original blood - but still are not allowed to donate blood (or, in his opinion, other organs) from which such fractions and transplants come.
At the end he gave me abroad smile and a warm handshake and pronounced us "brothers in Christ" and said he hoped we could talk some more. He also said, "It took great courage to do what you guys did. I'm very impressed." It pretty much made my day.
Looking back, it just confirms what I always knew: A whole bunch of people are sitting the the average kingdom hall harboring serious doubts about what's being spewed from the platform. But they are held there by family (or business) ties and can't get up and walk out. But they'd like to.