wow....i gotta get over this shit!.....i must post here way too many times a day..(sorry)....geeze i have only been here about a year?????......i wish i was more balanced than you others....but hope i am not here in three years or so.........oomps
10 years since I've been online - how the JW community has changed
by truthseeker 19 Replies latest jw friends
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villabolo
I'm beginning to feel prehistoric though I'm not much older then you guys. I was df'd in late 1980 and soon discovered an apostate "telephone tree" which meant we basically call each other on the phone. I remember linking up with James Penton and arranging for him to be a guest on a local radio show called Religion on the Line. He wanted to recruit me as a spy visiting the Mexican congregations and finding out anything I could on the military bribing issue. I reluctantly declined because my spanish was very heavily accented and may have raised suspicions to paranoid witnesses. There was Richard Rawee from Oregon I believe and I even spoke to Ray Franz, before his book came out. Ray was very reticent to speak to anyone in those days.
In any case, I live amongst witnesses in a large apartment complex and just by looking at them I can tell that nothing really changes deep inside of them.
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willyloman
I agree it's been an amazing ten years and your post makes it clear that the JWs have had a very shaky decade, probably one of the most significant in their history. My own personal opinion is that when they look back over the life of the organization someday, they will see that its demise began in 1975, for obvious reasons and, after a brief rally, took another turn for the worse in 1995 - two years in which they were forced to change their entire story and then tried to pretend they hadn't. What we are seeing now is the last throes of the old organization. What will emerge from the decay is anyone's guess.
In 1999, I would not have even thought of visiting an "apostate" web site (and in fact barely knew what a website was). I started lurking here in 2002 and was so fascinated I went back through the pages and eventually read every single post and each reply. Of course, in those days there weren't that many. It has been amazing to watch the internet grow.
By 2003 I created an excuse to "step down" as an elder (I know, "aside" is preferred) and developed an exit plan and started moving out of the borg. I took my family with me. We have no regrets. There is life after the Watchtower.
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cabasilas
Back in 1992 or so, I would log on to Prodigy to talk with other JWs. We wouldn't use the religion section because it was full of naughty apostates. Instead we would post somewhere in the Home/Life (?) section...
I remember the old Prodigy days. I think the section the JWs posted to was "Just Among Friends" or something like that. I was an ex-JW even then and joined in some of the discussions, though I thought that sometimes some of us ex-JWs were a bit over the top.
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ziddina
Aw, "mouthy", with a comment like "I havent left the truth though I got kicked out of the Lie..", you're one of the smartest ones here!!
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ziddina
Good grief, I'm feeling positively prehistoric after reading "Villalobo's" post - I was dragged into the religion kicking and screaming by my parents in the 1950's!!! [BTW, this is going to be a looong post...]
Saw a lot of crap go down. Girl children weren't considered of any value, so often I got to be the proverbial fly on the wall. I remember being 5 years old, taken to a KH by my grandparents (who lived in the Black Hills of SD at the time) and standing in a brightly lit KH, looking at the darkness outside and having an utterly overwhelming urge to just run into that dark night and disappear - forever!
I remember hearing about ol' Moses receiving the 10 commandments and recognizing that it was actually a volcanic eruption that apparently the Israelites and their god were too stupid or ignorant to figure out, and wondering why none of the supposedly intelligent adults around me recognized the clear description of a natural phenomenon. Sodom and Gomorrah's destruction was probably also a volcanic eruption/pyroclastic flow; spotted that one right away, too. Some of the 10 plagues of Egypt also fit volcanic phenomena.
Then there was Abraham. When gawd asked him to kill his kid, he just simpered and said, "O-K, YHWH! Whatever you want!" Even as a child I knew that wasn't right - in fact, it really freaked me out. It wasn't until recently that I found out why Abraham agreed so quickly. Seems the Phoenicians used to live in the land of Canaan, and seems that they eventually made an exodus of their own to Carthage in North Africa. Seems that the Romans, in their usual rumor-mongering way, claimed that the Phoenicians were into child sacrifice.... So guess who ol' Abraham must have been hanging around with, to have so quickly and easily agreed to kill his only kid? Nice slither out of it, though. "Uh, fellow Canaanites/future Phoenicians, a new gawd told me I wasn't supposed to kill my kid, so now I'll have a real lineage and become a nation with enough men to form a military force! But "GAWD" told me to spare my kid...."
Then there were the beatings/kickings during the "family Bible study". Get this; my dad, who was prone to depression, joined this religion to escape his depressions! [He was manic-depressive, actually...] So here we have an adult male wearing his steel-toed work boots kicking a little nine-year-old girl in the shins every time she slumped, slouched, or didn't answer enthusiastically enough to please him. I saw a lot of child beatings in the JW KHs... I remember when I was seventeen I had to pull a little blond girl (12 years old) off of the throat of her little black girl (12 years old) best friend. She had a double-handed throatlock on the other kid and was slamming her head into a support pillar of the KH. Mind you, there were many adults standing around chattering after the meeting which had just closed, but they were totally oblivious to what was going on. Immediately after I separated them and asked the little black girl if she was alright, I hear my mother's totally clueless voice shrilling behind me, "And here's [my name], playing with the little kids again!" That experience taught me quite a bit about the mind-numbing effects of WTBTS mind control - apparently all the adults were pretending it wasn't happening!!! That little blond girl was third-generation JW, by the way - her grandmother had gone around all the doors with the phonograph player running the recording by ol' Drunk Judge Rutherford in the '30's. Her daughter, the child's mother, had briefly come to her senses and left the religion, but Grandmomsy apparently guilted her back in. Then she tried to get her unbelieving hubby into the religion and beat her own kids. No wonder the blond kid snapped...
Then there were the examples that some of the JW adults set... When I was around 7-9, somewhere in that age range, some JW bimbo in the little town of Evergreen, Colorado, decided that she needed to obey some new light issued by the WTBTS, I guess?? What this nitwit did was have an affair with another JW, a boy about ten years younger than her (she had two children that weren't much younger than myself) and then told her non-believing Sherriff's deputy husband about it. I'm guessing that she asked for a 'Scriptural' divorce at the same time. Needless to say, the guy pulled a gun and blew her brains out. I can't remember whether he got the boyfriend too; maybe he caught them "in flagrante delicto". Anyway, I clearly remember cringing when I went to school for about 3 months while this whole scandal erupted in the newspapers. Good Ol' Rocky Mountain News! The editorial staff of that newspaper HATED the JWs, and whenever a JW did something stupid or illegal, you can bet the Rocky reported it. They were a good source for the REAL DIRT that the WTBTS would see swept under the rug, otherwise.
Around that time, I heard about William H. Whalen's book "Armageddon Around the Corner", and decided to read it. His descriptions of the WTBTS as an organization that "discouraged marriage" rang true with me, and many other unflattering things in the book about the WTBTS, too. But being just a kid, I couldn't leave the family and strike out on my own. I remember when I was 12, running into a man at the door who told me that "That organization's just using you!" Instead of defending the organization as a good little brainwashed JW should, I practically grabbed the man's hand and begged him to tell me what he meant by that. But I was out in 'service' with an adult, and he gave her a sideways glance and shut up. Apparently she was giving him the 'evil' eye... But I knew that something was definitely wrong - just too much physical violence at home for me to get my head clear long enough to come up with good solutions - or even find a non-JW adult that I could trust and confide in.
Somewhere around the age of 17 the indoctrination kicked in - or, as George Carlin put it, "No sense in getting the crap beat out of you every day!" I caved and got baptised, which made my vicious, petty-minded parents very happy and me thoroughly miserable. I turned down an unbelieving aunt's gift of a thousand dollars to go to college on, which astonished my parents. (These were the same people who, as Christmas rolled around, would drive us around to look at all of the pretty lights because THEY were nostalgic about their childhood Xmas's, and buy us "non"Xmas presents sometime in December. I always told them to buy the DAMM things in January when they'd be on SALE!)
But by that time the WTBTS indoctrination had kicked in, and then there was my parents' nasty, vicious belittlement of my existence (Dad's frequent denigrations of women in general and me in particular; he really relished that Middle Eastern Male attitude of the WTBTS...) had drastically reduced my level of self-confidence. I even married the first JW twit that proposed to me, and spent nine horrible years married to him. Then, in order to get out of that marriage (it was that or suicide, and I had too strong a survival instinct for that!) I played by the WTBTS rules and had a couple of "one-night stands" to get out of the marriage. Looking back on it, I should'a just lied about that - claimed I'd slept with someone and deluded the elders - but I was still playing the WTBTS game.
Around about that time (late '70's to early 1980's) secular information began coming out about child-beatings. Thanks to the good old Rocky Mountain News (again!) for printing the real truth about things (!!), I recognized my father's vicious behavior in the articles in the news. Then the WTBTS installed new Printing Presses at Bethel! And guess what?? The call went out through the congregations - and I can still remember their exact words.... "We are seeking people who can program computers, and they must have received a COLLEGE EDUCATION IN COMPUTER PROGRAMMING, not self-taught..."
I hit the roof!!! How dare they discourage ME from getting a college education and then ask for help only from people who received the very thing they've been condemning for 20 - 40 years or more!!! Then - two parents in some congregation out in Aurora beat their child to death, and were put on public reproof because, as the elders put it, "the police had to be called in". In other words, if this had somehow been hushed up, without bringing in the authorities, there would have been no "public reproof". That's when I realized that if my dad had beaten me to death when I was a child (he knocked me unconscious at one point) the JWs and the WTBTS wouldn't have given a spit!! That was in the early 1980's; I walked out and never looked back. But I had made several conscious choices through the years that had prepared me to leave: 1. I never had children by the JW hubby, 2. I had made 'worldly' friends and 3. I obtained enough training in accounting (not a degree, though that would have been nice) to be gainfully employed and self-supporting. Many poor JW girls and women never even get this far.
Long post; sorry 'bout that. I'll shut up now. Zid
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truthseeker
Ziddina,
Wow, what a story - incredible read!!!
I've never heard of William H. Whalen's book "Armageddon Around the Corner", can you tell us more about it? What year was it written?
Glad you disconnected yourself from the hive mind of Jehovah's Witnesses
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truthseeker
Willyloman,
It has been an amazing ten years hasn't it - who knows where we'd be if the Internet wasn't around. Would the WT have made so many changes?
What will the next 5 years bring? I say five, because the pace of WT changes leaves me breathless - in just two years look at the changes they have made.
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ziddina
Hi, truthseeker and everyone else reading this! About my story - the incredible thing is that it's not so unusual, and in fact I've run into people who have had much worse experiences, especially regarding the beating/battering aspects of their parents' zeal to bring their children into the religion. I'm going to a support group in my area that includes Brenda Lee who wrote "Out of the Cocoon" and she went through much more than I did! So did Daniel Clark, who wrote "I, Witness". Be that as it may.... We're all glad that we got out, natch! but sad about those still left in the religion. (I am glad I'm no longer hearing from my parents who tended to attack me every time we had contact - verbally, if not physically.)
William (Joseph - just looked it up...) Whalen is/was a Catholic layman who wrote a series of books regarding small Christian sects in America in the early to mid-60's. He also wrote "The Latter Day Saints in the Modern Day World" which accurately described many of the unusual and controversial practices of the Mormons long before they began to be published in the popular press.
If you want to read any of his books, your best bet is to contact your local library and have them search for it through the library system. "Armageddon Around the Corner" was published in 1962 in New York by J. Day Co., and is available in this area at Colorado State U and UC - Boulder. We have a search system here called "Prospector" through which a library patron can request books from just about any library in the West - I've gotten books from as far away as Wyoming and California.
I actually never fully accepted the JW teachings - even tho I joined and tried to do things their way for about 16 years. I was always innately Pagan; always drawn to the full moon even while a JW and very inclined towards feminism - the non-imitation-male version, that is. I suspect that there are many, many JW children who were born into the religion who would leave it in a heartbeat if given the chance. I wish I could create some sort of 'Underground Railroad' for such people!
Well, this is my last allowed post for today, so I won't be posting until tomorrow sometime. I really enjoy reading your - all of you posters - posts! If any of you want to email me directly, my address is: [email protected]. Bye!
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jws
"We are seeking people who can program computers, and they must have received a COLLEGE EDUCATION IN COMPUTER PROGRAMMING, not self-taught..."
I think I remember that and maybe that's why my parents didn't mind me going to college. I wasn't entirely self taught. I also had about 2 computer classes/day in high school. I was getting national awards in computer concepts/programming contests for the high schools. I went to some college, but they didn't really teach me anything I didn't know. Maybe a few obscure syntaxes and a different OS.
I remember actually considering that offer after high school. I was told Bethel service counted like field service and I thought that if I went there, I could please my parents, not have to go in service, and perhaps find a comfortable niche within the religion (because I wasn't too pleased with it). But, they had that college requirement and before I even finished high school I was working as a programmer. After high school, I started to drift away from the JWs and was happy with the job I had. I've always been very successful and have always become they guy they go to for the most challeging apps. It was definitely their loss. And my gain. Glad my life veered in the direction it did. Bethel and life as a JW would have sucked.
Actually, I think I did ask about going anyway and my local elders told me I had to pioneer first. Not sure that was right. Maybe for standard Bethel service. But if they're looking for a specific skilled position, I don't think they were going to wait for a pioneer.