how long in truth,,,what was the final "straw"

by peaches 51 Replies latest jw friends

• 

  finallysomepride

  Born in, but never really believed, suffered the guilt complexes tho.

  Baptised at 23 in April 1982, due to pressure from friends & elder uncle, never felt I had holy spirit visit me when I got baptised as other said they had.

  Last time in field service Nov 1982, never had a study, never converted anyone........really glad of that.

  Married in April 1983 and from that date on started to decrease my meeting attendance, going from 5 meeting per week to may be 1 per fortnight within weeks of being married. Was not allowed to marry in KH as my wife to be was unbaptised & never did get baptised.

  Last meeting attended was memorial 2002, never again will I attend.

  Will now only attend the KH for funerals & weddings (own family only)

  I really wish that I could say that my final straw was the pediphile problem, but I can't as I only learnt about it in the last 2 years, as that is what really pevs me the most.

  The final straw I suppose would be I really just had enough of the crap & boredom.
• 

  LongHairGal

  Was active a little over 20 years. Hated a lot of it and now that I look back there were more negatives than positives. There were a handful of nice people I remember and a few good times and for that I am sad, along with the broken dreams. I guess we aren't going to walk into the new system hand in hand with our heads up like christian soldiers! There are a lot of things I had to wipe out of my brain.

  There was a laundry list of things that didn't sit well with me but the 1995 generation bombshell teaching left me feeling sucker-punched. This was the beginning of the end for me. Although, it took five years 'til I found out the religion's hidden past and scandals on the internet.

  So, in 2000 I began my 'fade' and walked away because I could no longer in good conscience go around knocking on people's doors and telling them this was 'truth'.
• 

  sd-7

  Raised in, baptized in '95. Always had little moments of: "Hmm, it sounds like they're guessing," or that whisper, "Why does that seem to be the opposite of what this scripture says?" or "You know, odds are that the original Christianity wasn't anything like this religion."

  Observed gossip, dirty jokes, slander and hypocrisy in my time growing up. If you went out in field service with the wrong people, it could get so bad that you'd leave disgusted and discouraged rather than upbuilt. (Some of them are pioneers, at that...)

  But the final straw was when I spent 3 years waiting for the woman I loved to get reinstated, and then was told I still couldn't talk to her on the phone and should minimize my contact with her. I had trouble reconciling that with scripture. I finally said to myself, "Something's wrong with this religion."

  I typed in that fateful year in a Google search bar: 1914. And the rest was history... Once you read Crisis of Conscience, it's all over. That book was the point of no return for me. Opening up the fantastic machine only to see bodies being crushed and ground into nothing inside it....you feel a sense of disgust and horror. It became easy to completely detach from the 'organizational' mindset.

  Understanding mind control soon made me see the Bible in a completely different way and realize that much of the key doctrinal structure was about maintaining power instead of about truth.

  I'd probably already left the religion when I typed '1914' into Google. I think I knew it all along. I just needed to know why. Those answers were so horrible...you just want to close your eyes, but you can't anymore.

  Sorry, getting carried away...
• 

  White Dove

  I was born-in and stayed in because of pressure from family and also trying to do the right thing for my kids. Was in it for 37 years. Left in 2005.
• 

  SacrificialLoon

  One day I found out in my congregation that someone had decided that they were part of the 144,000. I went up to and asked this brother one day after a meeting how he found out he was part of the 144,000 he said something to the effect of he prayed on it, talked with the elders, and so he was part of the last remnant. For some reason I found this answer lacking and it raised more questions about the 144,000 like how do they know when they've got 144,000? How many christians were there in the 'early church'? When was the cutoff point for christianity in general? And so on. The obvious answer was that it was all guided by holy spirit, and to "trust in Jehovah", but this time I couldn't accept that. This was the breeze that knocked the house of cards down so to speak. I became disillusioned, stopped going to meetings, and eventually moved out of state, but I hadn't quite left mentally. I would always say "Well I'm a Jehovah's Witness, but I dont go to the meetings anymore." if the topic of religion came up (how pathetic is that?). One day I did an internet search on JWs and came across all the crazy stuff about miracle wheat, Beth-Sarim, and whatnot which was the final mental straw

  Then I could finally say that I was a Jehovah's Witness, but am no longer.
• 

  cantleave

  Being appointed an elder and seeing that the organisation is not at all spirit directed. The final final straw was the realisation that my mediator was the FDS and not Jesus.

  Born in left at 42
• 

  WuzLovesDubs

  Looking back of course I realise that this was just the final straw, every other straw, from 1914/1919 and silly explanations that a bible prophecy was fulfilled at some fart-arse assembly at Cedar Bloody Point Friggin Ohio,etc etc, was adding to a burden that I could no longer carry.

  Wobble you may not have meant that to be funny but it made me laugh out loud so thanks LOL! Succinctly put my friend.

  God peeps...what were we thinking??? I was a lonely, secluded divorcee, going on 30 coming out of an extremely physically emotionally spiritually and verbally abusive marriage and saw this group as an answer to my social black hole prayers. And for awhile they were. They occupied my lonely weekdays and there was always a big group to party with every single weekend. It was great. I enjoyed the assemblies in those days in 1984...BEFORE they told me that if I didnt get baptised they couldnt associate with me any more. I was like WHAT??? So my choice was memorize a bunch of stuff and answer 130 questions and get dunked...or be back to being alone again. It SEEMED like a no brainer because I guarantee you I did NOT understand the consequences of my doing that and the full impact of what would happen if I changed my mind. The irony was I got baptized on June 1, 1985. Do you remember what happened that day? THE NEW BAPTISMAL QUESTIONS TOOK AFFECT. So I committed myself TO THE ORGANIZATION. Who now owned my soul.

  I hated field service. HATED IT......did I mention I HATED IT??? Gawd...what a fucking waste of time and a fucking humiliation and a fucking guilt trip every month to REPORT on that fucking activity and to have to fucking LIE about what I didnt want to do and HAD to do to remain "in good standing." Or face ostracism and internal shunning by these so called FRIENDS I had accumulated for 13 years in deference to every worldly person I had ever known and in deference to my neighbors or physical family ALL of who were better morally than the idiots in my congregation that I was forced to spend 5 hours and more a week with.

  Seriously...we became robots. We became chattel. We became a source of funds for the bastards in Brooklyn Heights and we were no more than that to them. They could NOT care less about us. Never did and never will. They owned our thoughts. They owned our families and our friends and our time and our education and our careers and our homes and our money and our children....they fucking OWNED us and they knew it and they STILL know it. All they have to do is threaten to take it all away in a one hour judicial committee meeting and we succumb to them and we suck what we need to suck to stay in and keep our families.

  I think I actually realized that in 1985. And I pushed it back and pushed it back like a wife who knows her husband is having an affair but wont admit it to herself....and it took until January of 1997 and marriage to a JW and three kids later...to grow the balls to DA myself to save my children from this cult.

  And I have not looked back.
• 

  out4good3

  6 months after baptism in 1991 I could sense that something had gone awry, but I just couldn't put my finger on it yet.

  I remember about a year later, I was out in service with my wife, and we went to this door. The guy calmly invited us in sat down with us and after his presentation started asking us questions. In retrospect, this guy was asking questions that was leading to the exposure of the organization.

  Well....it had gotten to the point where being newly baptised I couldn't answer some of his questions so I promised him I'd get the group overseer to stop by his house. Well when talking to the elder group leader about the questions they man was asking and getting nowhere in getting him to go by the guys house to talk to him,my eyebrows went up. If I remember correctly, that was probably the last time I went out in service.

  Two years later, I'm sporadic at the meetings and beginning to drown in debt holding on to basically a burger flipping job and I decide I'm going back to school. The reaction I got from my wife, who wasn't working at the time, was as if I'd turned my head 360 degrees, started spitting pea soup, and spiderwalked down the stairs. I had two elders in my home every other weekend after that decision telling me that I was wasting my time, that I'd only be able to get a near minimum wage job with a degree, and that my time would be better served by being out in service.

  I realized then that these spiritual shepherds were nothing of the sort.

  But, I would have to say that the defining "straw breaking the camel's back" moment was later an argument I was having with the wife and she was ragging on me about not going to meetings and wanting to know why,all the while downplayhing the reasons I was giving her, the stress of the moment got so bad that my body went into full revolt and I started throwing up.

  After I'd finished "hugging the bowl" and walked out of the bathroom vomit streaming down my chest.......what did she do?

  Picked up right where she left off.

  It was an epiphanous moment where I realized that if this is the t ype of character this religion turns people into, I would have nothing to do with it.
• 

  WuzLovesDubs

  Out4good....I believe you did start throwing up. With me it was finding myself in a fetal position in my bedroom with my husband yelling at me that I "didnt love the friends" and "didnt love Jehovah" any more. I think that is what it takes, like an exorcism, to get it out of you and arguing about your reasons with a braindead JW creates these primal gut reactions in us.

  And the reaction that the JWs give us when we TELL them we dont believe it any more? Fucking Jekyl and Hyde. They become unrecognizable.
• 

  jaguarbass

  I was in 31 years.

  I graduated in 71 and pioneered instead of going to college.

  When 76 came I got a wake up call.

  By 83 I was having a hard time making a living.

  The society put out the vibe that one could carry a gun.

  I knew an elder who was a deputy sheriff.

  I got a job as a Deputy Sherriff, then the strobe light got brighter or vacilated

  and they said you could not carry a gun.

  Thats when I crawled out of the tower.