I’ve posted on this before, but I figured I should lay my thoughts out again on the subject. There are some in the ex-JW community who are saddened because the Watchtower organization has turned me and others like me “off to God.” I understand why they feel that way. The Watchtower attacks and debunks other religions on a regular basis, often giving us the sense that if the Watchtower is wrong, then there can’t be a God. It’s either their way or the highway.
With this in mind, it is admittedly easy to think that just by debunking the Watchtower means that a Jehovah’s Witness will become an atheist. Naturally, this is not always the case. Ray Franz, a prominent figure in the ex-JW community, is still a bible-believing Christian as are many others of his generation. So why am I and other ex-JWs atheists?
Before I answer that question, I want to make mention of some attitudes I’ve perceived in still-religious ex-JWs I’ve encountered. The first one is that it seems hard for some to fathom that atheism can be a rational conclusion, having nothing to do with a bad experience with religion. I understand how hard it can be for a devoted Christian to recognize this. He or she may feel that accepting the atheist position as a rational one is to denounce Christianity as irrational. But that still doesn’t mean that I haven’t done my homework.
Atheists and Christians really aren’t that different. I, like most Christians, reject 99.9999% of all the Gods man has ever worshipped. I don’t believe that Apollo tows the sun across the sky in a golden chariot. I don’t believe that dying in honorable combat will reap rewards for me in Valhalla. I don’t believe that if my corpse is mummified in the proper 70-day ritual it will become reanimated each night and I will get to have sex with the goddess of the sky.
On all of these possibilities and many more I take the exact same position as many Christians do: they’re ridiculous and I don’t believe in them. The only difference is that I simply go one God further. I don’t see any reason to believe the Bible over any other of these ancient mythologies. I am simply treating it as I believe it should be treated, and not accepting simply because of the completely improbable accident that I was born in a Christian household in the USA. In other words, I look at the Bible as objectively as I can, without using any form of apologetics or “that scripture doesn’t really mean what it says” rigomoroll. I simply do not accept the Bible as the Word of any God.
That is why I left the Witnesses. Not because I had a bad experience or got in a fight with someone, but because when I looked at the Bible with an unbiased mindset, I was not convinced of its divine authorship. Since I didn’t believe the Bible to be what the Witnesses claimed, their specific doctrinal points ceased to matter. It didn’t really matter to me whether or not 1914 was an accurate calculation. It didn’t matter whether or not Birthdays and the holidays were wrong. It didn’t matter whether or not Paul’s words about blood included transfusions or not.
Basically, I didn’t deconvert from Jehovah’s Witnesses and decide there was nowhere else to go. I deconverted from Christianity as a whole, and it wouldn’t have mattered if I was a Jehovah’s Witness or a Mormon or a Lutheran or a Catholic. I stopped believing in the supernatural. Did the Watchtower have a role in my development as a skeptical person? Perhaps, but I still took it further than what even the Watchtower intended, and didn’t find the Bible as convincing as others have.
That’s why I almost find it insulting when other claim it was the Watchtower who turned me off to God. To me, it’s implying that I didn’t put any thought into it whatsoever, that it was an emotional response and I’m still under the spell of Watchtower reasoning. Atheists come from every religion and every denomination, not just the Witnesses, and the idea that no one can read the Bible without becoming convinced its the word of God is, pardon my bluntness, quite arrogant I think.