T33AP80C- Good questions Don. Thanks for asking them. I too would like to see solid evidence of why we should doubt what Ray Franz says. I believe no such solid evidence exists
Ray Franz Views of "Information Control" by WT Society Agree with Hassan
by flipper 49 Replies latest jw friends
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The Almighty Homer
In the mindset of every indoctrinated JWS there is put in the suggestion that the JWS is the only true religion
guided by god's holy spirit. Its the very reason why when a JW asks about a certain person is he or she in " The Truth " ?
When that structured belief gets broken apart its a tail spinning experience, which for a person that was situated at the top
of this belief system, must have developed an enormous amount of emotional turmoil. Acclimating the fact that he was tossed out
of closely devised social environment, lost all his prestige and personal stature that he had obtained, then its not unreasonable
to perceive that he really had something to express and get off his chest.
Hey I'm sure he's written his books to sell and make some money off them, but also to tell his story
of his own life with an organization that wasn't really telling " The Truth " after all, can't really fault a guy for doing that can we now ?
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flipper
ALMIGHTY HOMER - A good point you make that Franz had so much to lose by exiting the organization. His family, friends, status, postion, and reputation within the JW community. So I feel it makes him EVEN MORE believable in reading his books as he sacrificed SO MUCH just to get the information out there to help inform people. To me- it adds to his credibility a lot
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The Almighty Homer
To be honest and realistic though every religious organization operates on a premise of information control,
the Catholics, Mormons, Baptists, Scientologists they all are structure and maintained on self information.
Where the human folly comes in is when people start to believe that these men really have some sort of direct
connection to some sort a powerful omniscient deity and therefore should rightfully have control over
us mortal humans, then tragedies will prevail and become apparent. Does this ring a bell ?
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HappyGuy
This post is in response to flipper's comment "yet she just wanted to know what led to you exiting the cult. What your thought process in leaving, that's all."
I have said some of this before, but I will repeat it because I am not sure who has/has not read those other posts. I'm not trying to toot my own horn, just answering Flipper and Baba Yaga's question.
This isn't easy for me.
I had a very difficult childhood. My father was very...not sure what the right word is...emotionally, mentally, and spirituallly abusive to an unbelievable degree. Physically too but that part I could handle.
I loved God ever since I can remember. I don't remember a lot about my childhood before the age of 9. My aunts have told me that my mind did that to protect me from things that were done to me. I don't know for sure.
I started reading the Bible at the age of 9. my mother had one of those big King James family Bibles, leather bound with engraved gold lettering. She bought it in 1957 for $50, can you imagine? Anyway, I read the Bible constantly, and in there I found a friend my father could not keep from me (I was not allowed to have friends), Jesus.
I loved God very much and searched for Him. I went to a few churches, went to some Campus Crusade for Christ retreats, didn't find God there.
When I was 15 I had a near death experience after being shot in the head (I shot myself) and on the same day there was an invitation to the Memorial on the coffee table. I hitchiked to the KH.
Of coruse the JWs "love bombed" me and I was in a very fragile state emotionally. I desperately needed someone to love me and I needed to find God.
I was baptized 3 months later, I was 15. I was very zealous, I witnessed to the entire school, 1 on 1. I had been a well known thug before getting baptized so it was easy for me to get people to listen to me. LOL. Also the principle of the school let me witness about my transformation at the school assembly.
I am gregarious, senstive (flipper says overly so, perhaps), big hearted, generous, and empathetic. Seeing others in trouble or seeing injustice done bothers me a lot.
I preached a different message than the WTBTS, I preached God's love. I refused to sell magazines or ask for money in service. I usually just took a Bible. I gave a lot of Bibles away.
The top down power structure always bothered me. As did the pecking order, someone explained this beautifully: R&F JWs at the bottom, then MS, then elders, then the PO, then the CO, then the DO, then the branch people, then the Governing Body. This always bothered me.
My grandfather gave my favorite cousin the full set of Studies in the Scriptures when we were 12. I read them constantly and loved those books.
I had seen the lack of love so many times and this always bothered me. Once I went to a book study meeting with double pneumonia because I had been working very hard and missing meetings and I needed encouragement and I took my middle daughter with me, a sweet, loving child, she was 5. My daughter was squirming a lot, she was sitting in my lap, and climbing all over me and the chair. I am easy going so I didn't care. I also had double pneumonia so I was just trying not to fall out of the chair. The book study conductor stopped the meeting, glared at me and said very sternly "BROTHER XXXXX, can you PLEASE make your daughter behave?" I started to explain that I had double pneumonia but my daughter got upset and I couldn't beleive that ANYONE would be so ignorant to a sick person, so I said "I'll fix the problem, we will leave".&nbs
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HappyGuy
My car was blocked in and no one would let us out so we sat in the car for about 45 minutes, my daugther kept asking me if she had done something wrong. I said "No sweetheart". When the meeting ended I went to the door and asked for people to move to let us out. No one did. At the next meeting the elders asked to see me to discuss my "behavior" and I told them no, if they needed to examine someone's behavior it was the book study conductor's and read them scriptures as to why an ill person should be helped with their child and not berated. I told the brother in question I would never step foot in his house again.
I had seen many examples of dishonesty in the WTBTS. Remember the convention parking scam? The convention facilities tell renters that they do not have to charge for parking but if they DO charge for parking then the facility gets a cut. The WTBTS started the parking ticket "arrangement" to avoid having to pay the cut of the parking fees to the convention facilities, telling them the lie that they don't "charge" for parking. I sing and I know the manager of a convention hall who was stumbled over this fraud. I asked him why he would not let the JWs use the convention hall any more and he explained the parking scam to me. I knew about the parking tickets of course but I always thought they did that for "efficiency", that is what the WTBTS always said anyway. I learned that any time you hear the word "arrangement" you can know that a fraud is being committed on someone.
Then they announced the new "arrangement" in paying for the literature. No longer would we pay for it at the counter, but everyone would make a donation. That sounded fine, then they said "you are required to make a donation to cover the cost of the literature using the same prices you would have paid for it at the counter". HUH? A "mandatory voluntary" donation? Also, they said that we were required to ask householders to make a voluntary donation to the "worldwide work" after telling them that the literature was free. HUH? Guilt the sheep into donating money "voluntarily"? Are you on crack?
I had felt guilty for years because I really wanted to demonstrate my love for God and really wanted to be a spiritual person but I felt like I could never meet the standards that the WTBTS set for me. I always felt deficient.
After the initial love bombing I never saw what I considered to be real love. For me love was epitomized by the story of the leper and Jesus. The leper reaches up and touches an Orthodox Jew (Jesus) and says "If you want to, you can make me clean", and Jesus says "I WANT TO, be made clean". Most Orthodox Jews would have run away screaming but Jesus with tears in his eyes touches the man and heals his leprosy. For me this is what love is. I never saw that from the WTBTS.
I learned that the motivation behind the "Mandatory, voluntary" donation "arrangement" was the new ruling that literature sales would be taxed and not the "efficiency" that the WTBTS claimed. I also learned that the WTBTS filed as a friend of the plaintiff in a court case brought by a prominent member of Christendom over the tax issue. HUH? I believe that was Tony Alamo, but I don't remember for sure.
Anyway, I suffered a shipwreck of faith and it pained me to my core. I cried constantly, my heart was so broken my body physically ached. So, I thought that maybe I was wrong and I started studying the Bible to renew my faith. I figured if the WTBTS really had the truth then I would see it in the Bible and could restore my faith.
I bought severl interlinears and c -
HappyGuy
I bought severl interlinears and concordances and foreign language dictionaries and started studying. I read mythology and history and anything relevant.
Needless to say I only convinced myself that the WTBTS organization is a fraud. I also convinced myself that the Bible is not the word of "God" and that the creator is not the creature described in the Bible and Christian teaching. I know these last two points are controversial and I don't want to argue about it, I am explaining how I feel about it and what I came to believe. If anyone wants to know what I believe you can PM me and I will try to explain. But briefly I came to the conclusion that humans cannot understand the nature of the creator because the creator is outside our universe and we are within the universe and we have no frame of reference to understand what the creator is. The claim by some that they can describe to me in detail who and what the creator is I find presumptuous. To use an illustration, it is like asking a line to explain a cube to you. The line cannot comprehend the cube because the line is 2 dimensional and the cube is 3 dimensional. How can the line understand that which is in another dimension?
Some think that the creator is zero dimensional. I tend to agree with that. Because no matter what number dimension you assign to the creator there is another dimension higher than that so you have a paradox that cannot be resolved. Zero dimension is a strange place but if the creator is zero dimensional then all other dimensions can spring from the creator. The math behind this is a bit esoteric and I don't want to argue about it but it makes sense to me.
In my studies, when trying to reestablish my faith, I found some very interesting books about the ancients, how they were matriarchal and the women were the spiritual leaders and the healers and the community leaders and the men did everything external to the community like trade and hunting and diplomacy and warfare. I also read that women have a layer of brain cells that men do not have and these brain cells give women their empathy, nurturing, and healing abilities, along with their innate spiritual abilties. I believe now that male / female in humans is not gender but species. I think that women are a higher species than men. Anyway, if you read the stories in the OT where the warfare against the Goddess worshippers is described and you see the genocide committed against the priestesses and the Goddess worshippers, what the OT is describing is the end of the matriarchal world and the usurpation of the female led spirituality by a patriarchal world and a male led religion. The Yahwehists were despicable people, guilty of sins that to this day make my skin crawl. I believe now that the OT was an attempt to rewrite history to cast the Yahwehists in a new light to justify their horrible crimes.
After two years of pretty much non stop studying and praying with my wife and children and a lot fo soul searching I realized that the reason I never found the love that Jesus showed for the leper in the WTBTS organization was that their organization is not based on love but is based on conformity to a man made rigid power structure. And the reason that I felt guilty was because I could never be "spiritual" because the WTBTS does not teach us how to be spiritual, it only teaches us how to be Watchtowercratic (the WTBTS calls it "theocratic" but it is actually Watchtowercratic).
It was EXTREMELY painful to come to the realization that all the major decisions in my life had been based on lies. It was more painful to realize that "God" is not what the Bible and the Christians claim.
So, I left the WTBTS. M -
HappyGuy
So, I left the WTBTS. My children had been raised from birth and they were devestated that daddy was no longer taking them to meetings. My ex wife tried to continue but it is hard with smalll children.
I lost my marriage and my family and myself. I don't blame my ex for this. I kind of lost my mind and did very terrible things. I have no idea why I did them. Recounting them now it is like describing a movie of someone else's life. I became someone I do not know, nor do I wish to know. My heart is deeply hurt to this day over this.
It is funny, but it was my father who helped me find myself. I remember being at my parent's house crying saying "I dont' know who I am" and my father had tears in his eyes and hugged me and said "We know who you are, stay here with us for a while". I was 46 at the time. My father, the stern, autocratic, unfeeling man who gave me such a hard life is the one who helped me find myself, my true self.
My father died not long ago and we made peace with each other before that. My father explained some things to me that now that I know them I think differently about my childhood. My dad was a Marine and he was tough on me because he knew I was very senstiive and my father believed that the war in Vietnam was never going to end and he did not want me to die in Vietnam and he was toughening me up so that I coudl survive it. My father told me that just before he died. It makes sense now that I think about things that happened, knowing that. Vietnam ended before I turned 18, so my father was wrong about the war never ending but I don't think he could foreee that a General Abrams would come along and with the war.
The WTBTS stole my childhood from me and tore me from my family. I spent all my time with my "brothers and sisters" at the KH instead of with my parents and siblings. I really regret that. I am very curious about things and I love to study and learn and read and I never got an education thanks to the WTBTS and I resent them for that. So many decisions that I made were made to "put Jehovah first" and the decisions were bad for me and my family and we all suffered for them and i despise the WTBTS for that.
Anyway, that is my lame attempt at explaining my thought process in leaving the WTBTS organization. -
BabaYaga
There are so many things to say and no words to say them.
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boyzone
Thank you for telling your story HappyGuy. Many of us can relate to what you went through and I truly hope that you really are on your way to being the happy guy you want to be.