Left the WT but why the loss of your faith in God?

by Luo bou to 65 Replies latest jw friends

  • AllTimeJeff
    AllTimeJeff
    Sure the WT deceived you with its claim to be God's channel but why for so many is there a subsequent loss of faith in God ? It puzzles me and makes me wonder why they were JW's in the first place.

    Whenever I come across a question like this, I point to a couple of things. All Christian religions come from the same manipulated book, the bible. Jesus as a god comes from the bible. I don't discount the possibility that a historical person who came to be known as Jesus walked the earth at some point, roughly around the time the NT points to. But to worship him? I can't do that.

    The one thing the bible reports on is that Jesus died. The religious leaders who put him to death were worried that the disciples of Jesus would steal his body and claim he was resurrected. I wonder who won that one?

    It has been commented on several times on this board that YHWH, (or "Bible god") is a prick not worth worshipping.

    Now for the one that might make your head hurt, I allow for the possibility that someone/thing might have started life here, or started evolution. Why not, I can't disprove it?

    I also acknowledge that for many, "worship" allows them to live happier, healthier lives. "Faith" helps them to make it through the day. Why would I take that away and begrudge someone that? I don't. And for myself, I can see that there is a quality of life that I must replace. Spirituality is something that intrigues me, and it makes me a better person. Not worshipping people or gods. Not superstition appeasement of a heretofore invisible and non-present entity. But what makes me a better person and the community I live in better.

    If I believe in an invisible, heretofore non-present entity, I would certainly be the last person to advertise that, or suggest that others should do the same, as some others on this board do. For anyone who leaves JW's, they need to learn to think critically first and get their brain back, instead of jumping into another superstitious tradition.

    Faith is a dangerous thing. It takes away intellectual honesty. Theists are still wont to insist as to the certainty of their god, invisible and heretofore not present as being the right one. Not one can prove that she is there. I don't like the fact that faith in god leads to so many turning off their brains and in some cases, becoming a liar.

  • quietlyleaving
    quietlyleaving

    Sure the WT deceived you with its claim to be God's channel but why for so many is there a subsequent loss of faith in God ? It puzzles me and makes me wonder why they were JW's in the first place.

    I think it depends on what faith actually means in practice and what it means to you. To me Jesus, for example, seems to depict faith in the way it functions and as a dynamism rather than as something you attain once and for all and that then remains the same and that therefore can be lost or found. His imageryof faith moving mountains is an example of what I mean

  • Luo bou to
    Luo bou to

    Love your work Gary For my part faith in God and faith in the WT were not one and the same.

    PS Thanks for the offer re the oceanfront property in Arizona but No thanks I'm not a JW anymore.

  • WTWizard
    WTWizard

    Usually, it all starts when you find one thing wrong with the Washtowel Slaveholdery that does not fit the Bible. Then you start questioning other things, and pretty soon you realize that they do not abide by the Bible as they claim to.

    So you start studying the Bible independently. And, when you see all the mayhem that God is directly responsible for throughout the whole Old Testament, it sickens you. You also see God gave the Christians 4 years to flee without giving them any way of knowing it would be 4 years. Had they known, they could have moved their stuff to a safe location, instead of wasting it all. You see discrepancies between what Jesus himself taught and what Paul said. By the time you are finished, you either don't believe in God at all, or you hate Him thoroughly.

  • leavingwt
    leavingwt

    What garybuss said.

    MANY have discarded beliefs only AFTER investigating them.

    MANY cling to beliefs that they have NEVER investigated.

    Ain't freedom of religion a wonderful thing?

  • I quit!
    I quit!

    A JW's belief in God is actually a belief in an organization and it can be a very superficial and mechanical faith. It is base on going to meeting, time cards, dressing a certain way, numbers and dates, doing things to make you stand out a JW. There really isn't much spiritual about it so when the belief in the WT goes there really isn't much of a belief in God left for a lot of people. For a long time I have been of the opinion that many JWs don't really believe in God but are just going through the motion because it is all they know or are afraid to leave so they just keep trying to force themselves to believe, I guess hoping at some point it will happen.

  • recovering
    recovering

    I think that you loose your faith in god due to being brainwashed while in the witnesses. They have told you all the flaws in other religions. This leads to you not trusting any other faith. When you discover the flaws in the witness faith you are left with very little to believe in.

  • Quirky1
    Quirky1

    Ptior to becomming a during my time as a JW I belived in a supreme being, a creator. Now, after I hove done my research I no longer can fathom such a belief.

    I wish I would have done my research first.

  • Olin Moyles Ghost
    Olin Moyles Ghost

    Lots of good comments on this thread--in particular, those of GaryBuss and Iquit.

    This may sound strange, and it certainly doesn't apply to every JW, but I think that a lot of Witnesses are actually not very religious. I know I wasn't, and the same with most of my JW friends. JW-ism is much more like a job than a religion. You attend business meetings, make sales calls, and turn in monthly time sheets. (GaryBuss points this out quite often on his threads). There's lots of office politics, and you get "promoted" if you have good numbers...and brown-nosing the bosses helps, too.

    And when it comes to theology, lots of Witnesses self-identify based on what they don't believe (trinity, hell, soul) than what they do believe. JWs (at least the ones I know) love to mock "born-agains" and ridicule their teachings as stupid and contradictory (e.g., how can Jesus be his own Father?). This leaves former JWs primed to become secular humanists. To paraphrase Richard Dawkins, the JWs were already atheists about lots of gods (including the Trinitarian god of Christendom)...now they're just going one god further.

  • outofthebox
    outofthebox

    I do believe there is something (someone) bigger than us little humans, but I don't think is the God of the Bible or any other religious book.

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