*summer*, I have just finished reading Crisis of Conscience (4th. edition, 2004), and I would highly recommend it. Everyone should read it - even active JWs! Especially them, I suppose. If they still believe in the organization as God's only channel after that, then... I guess they deserve to be there.
Raymond Franz continued to believe in the Bible and its God after he left, and dedicates quite some space in his book talking about that.
I did not.
However, initially it wasn't so much because of what I had been taught or had experienced with the JWs. I actually kept on believing in Jehovah for a while after fading out of the JWs. Organized religion was out the window for me, though. But I thought at least I could continue believing in God on my own. Started reading the Bible without my JW glasses on, after that tried to get some insight into other religions' beliefs (why exclude them?), but after a while, instead of getting stronger in faith, I felt I couldn't believe at all. Or - I would have to settle for a God "floating around" out there that I couldn't really get to know, but had created the universe and life, and more or less left it to its own devices.
Started looking into scientific explanations, but when they contradicted my now dwindling beliefs, I would search for answers from Christian 'scientists' that could "calm me down" and confirm what I hoped was right (I wanted to believe, after all). At the time, I had no idea what Creationism or Intelligent Design was, other than that I thought the latter idea was a good one, and one I could support. Little did I know that Intelligent Design is more or less not an idea, but a group of people pretending to do scientific work to see if evidence for a Creator exists, but in reality when you get right down to it, they're Christians with a "refined" and "modernized" version of Creationism, who wants Jesus into the science classes, more or less. When I finally "gathered the strength" to do so, I started looking into scientific explanations without running them through a religious and - as it turned out - often misleading and sometimes outright lying filter.
I don't believe science has all the answers, but science and logical reasoning has at least removed any 'institutionalized' gods from my universe (and beyond). Jehovah (YHWH) is a biblical concept, and armageddon is a mostly Christian and - as we know it - JW concept, so I've dismissed them both, because I have for the most part dismissed the Bible. By all means - there's a lot of great things written in the Bible (as in many ancient works), and I'm sure some of the principles found there can give people a richer and better life, but the inspired Word of the Creator of the universe? I didn't see that in it. Too much twisting, interpretation and dismissal of certain passages is needed for that to be even remotely likely in my opinion. And then it's no longer likely (!).
A lot of people remain Christian or religious in general after leaving JWs though - we'll all have to come to our own conclusions based on our own research, findings and experiences.
I'm not leading a life that should warrant a death penalty (not even by Christian standards) should there indeed be a God out there, and if that God finds it necessary to give only a few people eternal life based on a very narrow set of beliefs ('one in a million' quite literally), then I guess I don't want to be in that God's "club".
