Speaking just for myself and my own personal experience, I can honestly say I was not under mind control, but I wasn’t totally free of mental interference. I can also say I was not entirely responsible for what happened to me while a Witness even though I was mostly free to make the choices I did.
True, I chose to be a Witness. But being a Witness did something for me. You see, I wanted to have answers. I liked being able to know ‘what God was thinking,’ so to speak. I liked the feeling that I was special, that I had tapped into the one source for understanding the Bible whereas the rest of the world was blind to its message. Though I am naturally humble, I am never without my darker side. And joining the Watchtower was a slyly designed egotistical trip that made these problematic desires of mine seem “okay.”
Well over a decade has passed since I was a Witness. Now I know it’s not healthy to try to have all the answers. It’s okay to want them, and it would be nice to have them, but to pursue them and make claim to know “the” truth regarding “life, the universe, and everything” (as Adams so comically put it in his Hitchhiker book series) is not a good thing…at least not for me.
No one knows all the answers or is 100% sure about everything they accept. Life has mysteries. The scientific method and human reason can’t be used to prove all that is real. And faith and religion is an exercise in truths not facts. That’s life. I had to embrace that, but I wasn’t comfortable with the voids this reality leaves and which others live with everyday.
We can’t compartmentalize the world and gods and science into a form which we can easily take ownership and control of. These things are far greater than us. We can hardly wield them conceptually let alone claim to have discovered the final word on such things.
Sure, the JWs claim that one can know “the” truth about practically everything, and that God’s reality and personality cannot be something outside the grasp of human reason. They claim to have solved and conquered the great mysteries of the world and unlocked centuries of puzzlement others have about Scripture. They teach it is okay to want to have these things answered, that it is only natural, that it is healthy. But it isn’t.
Life isn’t black and white. As soon as we think we understand our universe, something will happen to make us have to rewrite everything we thought we knew. Good things will happen to those who do evil and evil things will happen to those who do good. And we will never be able to measure other religions by the stick the Witnesses have taught us to use. It only applies to them and works with them. Others don’t measure by it because the Witness religion is an orange in a sea of apples.
People don’t choose their philosophy or religion the way we chose to become a Jehovah’s Witness. It’s not a search for “facts” or being able to find “proof texts.” But I was a person who found such an approach appealing, and the Witnesses not only used that desire of mine to my own ruin, they encouraged this unhealthy demand I was making on reality.
Today I can say I believe in God, but I can’t say I know “all about God” the way the Witnesses claim they do. Their knowledge gives them a god they can control, because their Jehovah never acts in a way that defies what they have learned about him. The only constant I now accept about God is the total opposite: God will always surprise me and always be more then I can learn about him.
I belong to a religion, but not because it gave me the answers I was looking for. I’m here because of emotional attraction to God and a literally feeling of vocation, if you will, to be where I am. I don’t have the all the answers to why or how come? I have little evidence or proof that I can put on a table. And what I can show others as to why I have done what I have, well, it defies complete comprehension when people see it. This is totally opposite of the JW-way.
I don’t believe that those with different faiths or even contrary philosophies like atheists are evil or doomed. One of my dearest friends and his family are atheists. Myself and my religion and my concept of God, we love them just as they are. Again, very different from the Witness way.
I can’t say your way r anyone’s else will be like mine and include a religion. Your path may be one far different. But none of us will find what we are looking for or where we need to be if we keep trying to make things fit how we need them to fit or if we demand that they make sense out of life for us.
We have to stop using the Watchtower measure for finding our path in life. We also need to stop believing that we aren’t where we should be now when that is possible too.
We don’t need to have all the answers. We can live with mystery. We don’t need to be able to provide empirical evidence for every choice we make in life. We are good enough being good enough, being what we are already.
And nothing, not religion or philosophy or any type of conviction needs to measure up to some standard or provide a certain type of proof before we make it our own or adopt it. This type of decision is made not with the mind or our reason, but is a decision of the heart.
