Do you remember the moment that you stopped believing that it was "The Truth"?

freeflyingfaerie

Was there one incident or epiphany that struck you hard? Or was it a slow...gradual awakening (no pun)?

My coming out of the JW Coma (as I like to call it) began at a family rendezvous in the beautiful Florida Gulf coast. It was to me a metaphor

for life. Pretty much my entire JW family and myself and my faeries were there together, surrounded by beauty and at my father's urging mostly (an elder) we still had a little sunday family study and managed to get to a meeting by the beach. How figity I was! Somehow the watchtower seemed so cerebral and detached from humanness and took the joy away. It felt like we were being obligated to not ever 'take a brake' from being JW's . and it was starting to get to me. And my parents seemed fanatical and zealous like never before.

Something about that trip made me question if we were all wasting our lives by being so religious, when opportunities and simple pleasures lie right in front of us...a metaphor for life.

And that began for me the change from "I am a humble servant, I believe anything and everything you tell me..keep feeding me more guilt, fear, and lies" to "is this for real?" and "what if ...just what if we have all been duped"?!

Your curious fellow ex-dubby,

Amie' (friend in French)

penny2

I remember clearly the moment I realised it wasn't "the truth" and I wasn't going to die in Armageddon. A family member told me he expected to "grow old". I'd already been "fading" for a few years and leading a bit of a double life. But having that conversation, I realised he was trying to tell me something and the penny dropped.

Black Sheep

Born in, but never baptised. When I was 52 years old my father sat at my table and informed me that I had better hurry up and get in now because the generation of 1914 was getting pretty old now........ for the umptydozenth time. The penny finaly dropped. God wasn't going to kill me for not being a fecking Dubbie. The Dubbies were all nuts.

When he left I Googled 'jehovah's witnesses false prophets'. Within minutes I knew that the prophesy the old goat had just tried to scare me with had been cancelled by the old farts in Brooklyn seven years earlier.

I joined JWN a few days later.

The next time I saw him I picked up an encyclopedia off his coffee table and used it to ask him a question. He is still avoiding answering it.

Cheers

Chris

designs

LA Arena 1974, listening to F. Franz explain that what he had said wasn't really what he said.

Olin Moyles Ghost

Like most of us, mine was a gradual awakening, over a period of years. Certain events, showing the legalistic nature of the organization, hastened its progress. But the thing that forced me to realize that the WT organization was not "The Truth" was the Society's press release regarding the child abuse settlements in late 2007.

I'm sure many of you have seen it; for those that have not, it is here: http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/Sections/TVNews/Nightly%20News/2007/11-Nov/statement.pdf .

The deception in that statement appalled me. In particular, the Society seemed to be minimizing the problem of child sex abuse in the congregations by only mentioning *civil* lawsuits (as opposed to criminal charges) against *elders,* not MS, pioneers, and the like. Child sex abuse is a *criminal* matter, and most victims don't even report the crime to the police, and of those that do, most don't file civil lawsuits. Further, as a lifelong JW, I realize that the culture of not wanting to "drag Jehovah's name through the mud" and fear of being DF'd for slander or immorality has silenced many victims. Thus, the Society was taking advantage of the results of its explicit and/or implicit policies to make itself look good. This is not what "true religion" does.

I could not fathom how God's One True Organization could be so coldly and calculatingly deceptive. And, of course, the press release had its intended effect. The few witnesses that even know about the settlements use the press release and the October 2007 Awake to reassure themselves that the Society and Organization are "clean."

designs

Olin, the Society has there own version of the Catholic's College of Cardinals, it is all about containment and damage control and only when the public outrage is fierce enough will they step forward and apologize.

Nellie

This is the moment that I realized it was okay to not believe it was the truth.

I was trying to follow the Watchtower's command - "Thou shall not practice fellatio" and conscientiously did not understand the prohibition. So I did what any good Dub would do - I went to an elder and asked about it. His told me that White people were much more uptight about things like this and Blacks and Latinos were much more comfortable. He said if it felt natural and didn't feel like I was doing wrong or going against God, then I should just disregard what the Watchtower said and "handle my business."

The idea that an elder told me to disregard what the Watchtower said - especially since it said it was pornea - was mind-altering! The seed was planted . . . (hubby was happy) and I began to open my mind to other things that didn't sit right with me.

Do you remember the moment that you stopped believing that it was "The Truth"?

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