by lavendar 25 Replies latest jw friends
#2 or a version of #2. It either happens to them or their family or friend.
They see the elders circling the wagons around the organization and not
helping the member, probably see them actually attack a member or themself.
#1 is all we have to help them, though. We usually can't make something happen.
Sometimes we can point out the injustice in our own circumstance to a family member.
I have long observed that most of the people I know who have left the organization have seldom done so because of doubts over doctrine. Instead, many of them have simply become bored out of their skulls with the dreariness of the JW lifestyle. In New Zealand, as with other modern, industrialized countries, apathy is the first and biggest enemy of the Watchtower Society, with apostasy way, way down the list of threats to its survivial.
It's not active brains that leads to most people drifting away from the organization...but bored brains.
Until there is some personal disillusion (#2), the hold of the cult mentality usually prevents evaluation of the "truth" (#1).
Everything unpleasant is easily ignored until an emotion is engaged.
The question can be put like this: do people leave the WTS for intellectual or emotional reasons? Most require an emotional kick to start things off.
2...then 1...
Very well said, Quentin. I think you were once an elder. You're a philosopher.
Me personally, it was intellectual-which lead to emotional problems. That was real rough.
I think a lot of dubs get exposed on the net and the wheels start turning. (It did for me) Even if they do not do anything right away, the seed is planted in the back of their minds.
Burn
#2 because nobody can be told what The Matrix is, you have to see it for yourself.
-ootb
Neither 1 nor 2 - hope I can explain this properly
I kind of see it as a switching of mental tracks and it could be ANYTHING that triggers one's mental train (of thought) into moving onto a 'new' mental track that eventually leads OUT OF the WTS.
Just an example: Seeing a new hospital being built in an area where there has been a ton of immigration in the last 30 years and mentally realizing that if everyone thought as the JWs do (that the end is just around the corner and Jehovah will fix everything including sickness and death), there would have been no hospitals built in the last 30 years. Then thinking that THANK GOD there are governments/people who are planning for a FUTURE for all of us IN THIS SYSTEM OF THINGS while the new system keeps DELAYING or we could all be floundering without medical assistance...Hope that makes sense...
Years ago, I heard a brother at an assembly talking about all the 'old worldly people' just literally 'rocking their lives away on the front porch' while 'our elderly ones were BIZZY in Jehovah's service' and my B*lls%&t meter went over the top, knowing this was absolute tripe to be spouting from the platform - it was such a generalized comment that did not fit the REALITY that I knew - that was just one of the things that didn't add up. The total convoluted blood mess didn't help either. So I guess it's just starting to THINK on your own, mentally evaluating what is going on in the organization that I think is starting more and more people on this EXIT. I think we starting to see a veritable flood of newbies because the blinders are starting to come off....
Sorry for how long this is, hope it makes sense...
yes man perfect sense, u got it right on the bullseye, that bull**** meter of urs shifted out the s**t piece by piece, and discussion such as this is the off ramp to a religious freedom...now to do away with organized mass worship altogether...(ill work on getting $$$ in the meantime)
Sorry for how long this is, hope it makes sense...
No need to apologise! Your post wasn't long and it made perfect sense to me. The elders and other JWs have made so many appalling generalizations about "worldy" people that it's so easy to see how inaccurate and ill-informed those generalizations are.
Arrogant 1:
"off-ramp to religious freedom" - absolutely love it - that should be COPYRIGHTED
