my story so far

by jerome 5 Replies latest jw experiences

• 

  jerome

  this is the story of how i came to join this board.

  i can tell you straight of that this story isnt as sad as probally any of yours so dont expect any tears.

  first let me say that i am not now nor have i ever been a jehovah witness.

  then why am i here then?

  well the next obvious anwser would be that a loved one or close
  friend is involved in this organisation.

  well actually its my girl friend.

  so how did i manage to get involved with a jw girl?
  well i have found out that my situation is more common that i would have thought that is because i am aware of another witness non-witness couple but that relationship didnt last. i now can only assume that the guy [the nonwitness] broke it off because there was no future in that rlationship, she is still an active witness - nice girl though.

  so let me take you back a while.

  when i was very little and we were standing at attention one of my friends always had to leave - i never new why really but that his parents told him that when we were saying the anthem or a prayer or somehing he had to leave. i was just a few years into understanding but this never bothered me. we then went to different schools.

  well i moved up into a higher level in school and at assembly people were always excused from assembly - i later found out that it as because of their religious beliefs that theycould not stay for the anthem prayers etc...

  when i was about tweleve a jw man came to my house and started talking to me my parents dident object he started to talk about columbus or something i cant rember all the details. but what i do remember thought is that he told me that the cross was pagan and that the catholics or who ever borrowed it from some PAGAN religion and that the cross used to be like a mans genitila and that they modified it into its present form he also started to talk about evolution and that the bible dident support such a claim.
  i having little knowledge of the topics was very suprised to find out that the cross was bad and that evulotion was wrong. i remember how convivced he sounded when he was talkig like he was 100% certain. i listened.
  he got me to but some book on evolution from him - all that i can remeber about it was that it said that evulotion was impossible because that for every improvement man got by evolving he would have lost out on so many other advantages so it was scientifically unsound. and for the past 6 nearly 7 years i beleived what that book told me and when i would watch television programmes about evolution i would think that they were wrong. even though in the back of my mind i alwayse wondered why if man lost out on so much during evolution how did he manage to come out on top.
  and i wondered why the church would use the cross if it was PAGAN.
  i never saw him again. thah was my first incounter with the jws.

  so for the first 18+ years this is what i knew of jws practically nothing.

  at school i met this girl, well i had been checking her out for a while and then i finally got the look. you know what look i mean.
  so we started talking and i found out that she was a jw.
  she gave me this book on questions for teenagers and after i recieved it she then asked me if i would like to make a donation. i felt so swindeled. and then i thought that she only wanted to talk to me so she could sell the bood and raise funds for what ever. but after that she continued to talk to me so i decided to forget it. she then would keep asking me if i wanted to discuss the book with her and would keep setting dates but we never got around to it. i started to talk to her on a more personal level and she responded nicely.

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  someting was up.

  i noticed that when ever i talked to her that the discussion would always lead into some deep religious matter
  i realised that she had some radical view on lots matters and she started to lead me to believe that alot of things i thought were correct were wrong.
  not only that she would get offended by words like birthday
  christmas easter etc etc
  so then i decided to check them out for myself.

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  i went on the internet and i typed the word jehovah witness into a search engine. the search results i got were un expected.
  80% of the results were from anticult ministries.

  i had been told that they were a CULT by many people and a relative of mine who was baptized into orthodox christianity told my that when they came to his house that he was ready for them. i never new what he ment untill now. they really take advantage of the bibically ignorant. and i was certainly most ignorant of the bible.

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  sorry for my bad spelling and grammer i have to go back through it.

  this story isnt finished.

  please stay tuned.
• 

  Gopher

  Welcome here Jerome,

  and thanks for telling us a little about yourself. It helps put your other posts in context!!

  Now what channel should I "stay tuned" to, and what time??

  GopherWhy shouldn't truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense.
  Mark Twain (1835-1910)
• 

  jerome

  i clicked on one of the anticult links i think by this time we were already a couple that means i left out quite a bit
  but it wasent really nothing. she was going through something personal and she confided in me and we came out of it with each
  other. i now know why i was able to catch the eye of a jw girl. i doubt if it wasent for that that we would have gotten togeather- but then i could be wrong but it certainly did help.

  now what i found on the anticult thing was very suprising to me.

  more false prophesy than any other religion mentioned,
  the WRONG jesus,
  coverups and scanlals
  the NWT

  and alot of others.

  well i went back to her and i asked if she knew about the false prophesy thing and she asked me

  "you really dident know that people call us false prophets?"

  and i left it there for a while.

  i started a discussion with one of her jw friends regarding the trinity. previously i had asked one of my friends what was the main difference between the jws and orthodox christianity. he told me that the jws reduced the status of Jesus from God to a god. and he gave me some verses in the bible to show the jw girl to prove Jesus was God. i later found out that this was utterly fruitless because everywhere i looked in their bible the wording was different and that i could not prove that jesus was God using their bible so i soon gave that up. now i find out that the only people who defend that bible in its totality are witnesses themselves and that watchtower frequently misquotes many scholars to prove their own vadility there was alot of intelectual dishonesty involved.

  this story is not finished.

  i will have to continue it later.

  the bible is a two edged sword
  weild it the wrong way and it you WILL cut yourself!
• 

  Adonai438

  That's some journey jerome! Can't wait to hear more!
  Sounds so similar to me in a way-- I was the Jw girl out to convert my young boyfriend. Problem was my boyfriend knew the Bible well, was a Christian, and wound up converting me--
  Not for him though- because the Bible is truly right and JWs are truly mistaken. Feel free to e-mail me to chat/vent/talk or info on the Bible-- I'll stay tuned for the next installment
  catch ya later-- <>< Angie
• 

  ghenrymt

  Hi Jerome,

  You are obviously a very caring and somewhat analytical person, going to all this trouble to learn about your girlfriend's religion.

  In your other post you asked about Crisis of Conscience. Seems to me it would be a good book to pry a JW loose (a little or a lot) from their faith, IF they allowed themselves to read it with a halfway open mind. I have stated elsewhere that my impression of Ray Franz is that "he has more integrity in his little finger than most Witnesses have in their entire bodies," and I think this is a point that HAS TO impress anyone who reads the book, if they are concerned about such things.

  In my case, I started decisively moving away from the harmful Watchtower cult (as I now view it) when I reviewed my life and realized how much harm and how little real benefit being a Witness had caused me. That was after over 30 years of association. Smarter people tend to realize this sooner.

  I also read a book (Fuzzy Thinking, by Bart Kosko) - that has nothing in particular to do with religion, but that proves that both sides of a contradiction can be uequally true, or true in a meaningful sense. And when I say "proves," I mean my view of the world underwent a fundamental paradigm shift because of this book, and after I finished it, I realized that the Witnesses' idea that they have the "one true religion" is just stupid, for lack of a better word. It's part of a very narrow, dunderheaded, and mnot particularly useful view of reality.

  You have to realize that in many ways, the WTS is sill living intellectually in the 19th century. Their approach to Biblical exegesis and hermeneutics is very 19th-century, following reasoning methods that owe more to philosophers like Aristotle and Descartes than anything truly Biblical.

  The most they can do to justify their approach is point to some instances where Jesus and Paul (and others?) used multiple proof texts to estabilish a doctrinal point. The Society appears to think that every question must have an answer, and they squeeze and crumple the Bible to no end to try to extract one. No wonder the answers they come up with are so often so bizarre and distorted!

  I have run out of time, have to run to an appointment. I hope this helps just a bit.

  Love and regards,
  George
• 

  jerome

  Well at this time me and my gf were starting to get a little closer.

  I still continued to talk with her jw friend sister j on many varing biblical issues, we could never seem to come to an agreement on anything doctrinal.

  This was because i was only concerned with proving her (sister j ) wrong and you know where jw doctrinal issues lead you.

  But if i did somehow manage to prove her wrong then their religion would be surely false. This dident happen. I couldent prove a thing.

  I had this crazy logic that if they had the truth i could never prove her wrong so i took the offensive.

  We could not even agree to disagree.

  One day i printed out a mind controll document from a former Mennonite and gave it to sister j and she read three three lines of it and came back to me and put it on the table.

  I asked her why she did that and she told me that she dident need to read that because her mind was not being controlled by anyone, she knew exactly what she was doing and i should have it back.

  I then decided to spend the next 3 hours reading through it with her to make sure she got what i ment and let me tell you this. I skipped a class and missed lunch as the discussion was so intence.

  She did not buy a single word of it nothing.

  No matter how i tried to explain that the possibilty that she might be in the process of being decieved, none of it mattered, no matter how logical sister j just dismissed it.

  The main point that i was trying to make was that they lacked the possibility to come to logical conclusions on maters pertaining to religion because she did not have proper reasoning skills.

  Now that i tink about it who was i exactaly to bring such an argument to her that was so arogant of me. But i thought i was doing the right thing because if i was right that she had to hear this.
  Well she heard it but she never listened.

  I am still amazed at how you can spend so much time with someone tying to prove a FACTUAL point and end up worse off than you started.

  Around this time i remember my gf telling me that to please never meet her family.
  That i just shouldent. She wouldent elabourate as to why. At this time i was unaware of how jw parents veiw such witness non-witness relationships and that i would never get approval.

  Later i invited my gf to meet my parents and she agreed. Well i rember that day, i had lots of fun.
  My parents greeted her and that was it. No questions nothing. They just got her name and left us to ourselves.

  I should note that my parents trust me to make responsible decisions o they probally decided to interrorgate her later. They probally had other reasons to i dont know. She stayed over for the whole day.
  Two 18 year old alone. I know what your thinking but i am still a virgin. That would expain my stupidity behind this girl. But its more than physical if not i wouldent be going through this much trouble.

  I remember that i gave her a diskette with some information about the 1975 failed prophecy and some of the Douglas Walsh trial transcript before she left- up untill this point she told me that she had heard of it

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  but that the 1975 thing wasent A BIG DEAL.

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  This was the first time that i realized that she might not know as much that was going in the organisation as she should have.

  I rember she even told me that the elders dident get any books that they couldent show to anyone! I was puzzeled. Were the apostates lying?

  She took the mateial i gave her home. I doubt she really everrevised it.
  Pobally just skimmed it over or dident even bother to read it at all.

  At this time i beagn to check myself.

  Was the 1975 thing not really a big thing? And were thoes nasty apostates as they call them just making a mountain out of a mole hill?

  What if the jws were right about apostates?

  What is all those quotations were wrong, and were fake? Just propaganda ment to mislead people and defame Gods organisation?

  For this to be true then it seemed that the whole world would have been trying to mislead people with respect to the jws.

  I even considerd it an actuall possibility for while because i oildent prove the trinity and i couldent find much evidence against jw claims that would stick. They always had an excuse for every discreprency in their theology. This troubled me for a while. It would mean that half of what i knew about the world was wrong. How could this be? How could this happen?

  But how could ALL other churches be wrong and have no backing from God?

  But this seemed very unlikely when i really thought about it. But the thought was still there?
  Sounds silly huh.

  But anyway i persisted in recieving information from these alleged deamons known as apostaes.

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  I just wanted to show this girl that she was in a cult so that we could move on from there, and that there would be a possibility of a future with her. WIthout the possibility of a future, the relationship would be pointless and i just couldent accept that.

  ------------------------

  The above statement just about sums up the situation up till now.

  I really want his matter setteled so i can move on.

  At first i went about this the wrong way and now i see that i should have never tried to rush her into changing anything or

  could i even convince her of anything unless she wanted to be.

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  I had absolutely no idea of what i was up against.

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  I thought at first that it was just like anyother christian denomination. When i learned more i found out that some mind controll tactakes are involved.

  But i had no idea this mind controll was anywhere near as strong as this.
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  Who was i to think that i could convert a jw born int the organisatin with just a few simple facts of their history [which i even did not understand fully] and limated knowledge of th bible.

  I had no idea that i would have to deal with the back lash of her leaving the org even if i some how managed to susceed.
  i had no idea of how hard it is fo witnesses to leave th organisation because the usually loose all their family.

  How could i be equipped to deal with that. Talk about being ignorant and stupid. Well very stupid.

  What have i gotten myself into?

  --------------------------------

  This wasnt easy to deal with then nor do i ever think that it wil be easy in the future...

  But i still have hope.

  --------------------------------------------------

  While still thinking that i knew it all and coild quickly resolve the problem i persisted.

  I remembered my jw friend from when i was younger and i decided to pay his dad a visit.
  He was a very nice man to me anytime i passed he would always acknowledge me.
  I went by his house one evening and i told him i wanted to talk to him about something.
  He was surprised that i was comming directly to him as i had never done that before.

  My real goal was to sharpen my skills at reasoning with jws. So that i could win any discussions with sister j and my gf.

  I was very surprised to findout that he was an elder!

  He tried to be modest about it. No big thing.

  When i told him that i was talking to a witness at school he told me that he could spare some time.

  I told him about how i typed the phrase 'jehovah witness' in a search engine and that 80% of the results were from anticult ministries.

  He then got this funny look on this face that showed that he wasent all the friendly anymore and he then started to explain why i would find so much apostate liturature on the net.

  He told me not to pay any attention to the evil apostate liturature but that if i had any questions that, he said and i quote:

  "Don't worry, I can deal with you." [>:)]exact words.

  How he said it it was like he knew i wanted to prove something that i wasent one of his unsuspecting vitcim/new recruit.

  So i showed him an our kingdom ministery clipping which encouraged people to sell their homes and that persuing higher education would be dangerous.

  He responded by saying that i could find a statement like that up to today and that it was not unique to pre 1975. He told me that it was refering to special pioneers who put in lots of feild service.

  He told me that he was busy and that i could come back later.

  I decided to go back he told me in the next two days.

  -----------------------------------------

  Next post meeting with the elder.

  the bible is a two edged sword
  wield it the wrong way and it you WILL cut yourself!