by ilikecheese 36 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
When my daghter was born, I immediately knew I would never deny blood to her if she needed it. Then, I stumbled across an ancient history class in college that casually listed the wrong date for Jerusalem's fall. I spent the next dozen hours searching for anyone who would even consider 607 as the right date.
That's is: 1) I can't be a JW, 2) JW-ism is a lie.
It would astound a fully believing JW to read athread such as this and realise that there was SO MUCH wrong with the religion. I had doubts about the stuff that worried Cedars for years, and used to say so out loud, but it was finally for me realising 1914 was just not in the Bible in any way that stopped me preaching.
Researching this led me to this site, and the whole thing crashed in no time, reading JWfacts.com was a great help too.
Everybody has a final trigger that makes them realise something is badly wrong, then they go on to examine it all, and WHoosh ! the curtain is swept aside, like it was for Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, and all is revealed as a cruel trick.
I think we all look back in amazement that we, intelligent people, could have been trapped mentally (and physically really) for so long by such arrant nonsense as the WT's teachings.
Their hypocrisy, coverups and lies about the UN/NGO thing. It was an avalanche after that. Now I'd say almost everything I used to believe that was uniquely JW is wrong.
I do still believe in the so-called "Golden Rule". You know, do unto others as you'd have them do unto you. (Matthew 7:12).
Obviously the leadership of the WTBTS only give lip service to that scripture, ... yet ANOTHER reason I left!
The belief in being anointed I still could not understand that. I used to ask so many questions regarding that.
I'm surprised no one has brought up the Creation/Evolution issue - anyway, my turn.
I was actually at the tipping point, I had read, read and re-read the orange brochure TheOrigin of Life: 5 Questions Worth Asking. It's arguments made sense to me, but I was amazed at how all these scientists were so blind to 'the truth'. Then I stumbled on an anonymous paper which you'll probably find on here somewhere, called Weighed and found Wanting. It completely answered every open-ended question and quote-mine the WT threw at evolutionary theory. I came on here looking for some rebuttals, as I pretty much knew WT had nothing of any substance to say on the subject. I didn't find any.
I continued to research into other subjects. As many have already said, once you spot a problem within the borg/doctrine, the whole thing seems to unravel before your eyes. The Genesis account, The Flood, 607 and the failed predictions/new light. By the end it was so obvious.
The main ones were the flip flops on the blood doctrine, i.e. "blood is bad but fractions are okay," the overlapping generation bullsh*t, their non-biblical things like women can't wear pants to the meetings or any other dub function except the RBC or that beards or goatees are wrong, shunning, marking talks, having to report field service time to someone when to me it's only God who should know and also it should be about quality and not quantity, disfellowshipping for smoking, calling people apostates who become Christians or really any other religion or the fact that my father's side of the family shuns me as an apostate even though I was never df'd, the baptism of very young minors, disfellowshipping and subsquent shunning of minors, being shunned for not going to meetings, the fact that they're ashamed of Jesus and that they (at least some) don't believe Jesus is coming again when he clearly says in the Bible multiple times "Behold I am coming quickly", other non-Biblical teachings such as the UN being the eight king and calling all Christendom the worst of all religions and comparing all Christians to Catholics when not all Christians are Catholics, lying about what Christians teach such as JWs idea of the trinity, the fact that they don't believe Jesus is divine when the bible clearly shows over and over his divinity. Etc, etc.
For me it was 1995. Not even so much the change as the disrespectful way they threated us like idiots. They couldn't admit they were wrong, instead the wrote a vague article that didn't quite spell it out. The only real evidence they were actually ditching the generation of 1914 was the Awake masthead.
That pushed me to investigate other stuff and pretty soon it was parousia and blood and the divine name. All that was based only on reading the bible and WT publications, only after I left did I discover there were thousands of others who had had a similar journey.
