People leave the Org but don't drop the doctrine? (page 4)

Butterflyleia85

I still don't believe in Hell or the trinity either. Never will I don't think. Just doesn't hold any weight over one idea over the other.

I myself still believed in the doctrine up until just a few months ago. My husband sat me down, asked me to explain EVERYTHING I believ in and why, and I just couldn't. I could spew all the information, the bible quotes, the actual book and magazine quotes... but it just rang so hollow to me. That day, I was very disturbed, and I was still in denial for a while.

Nowadays, it still is a bit hard to fully comprehend what I feel. I know the truth, I know JW doctrine isn't the truth, but after so many years of getting it hammered in your head as a kid, it's a hard thing to let go. If I talk to family who are still JWs or who are DFd, I just mentioned the whole 'I'm out but I still think they were right on some things' even if I don't believe it, just avoid confrontation.

But definitely, this is a huge 'issue' for many ex-JWs.

leavingwt

"I myself still believed in the doctrine up until just a few months ago. My husband sat me down, asked me to explain EVERYTHING I believ in and why, and I just couldn't"

I admire your husband's approach. For, if we cannot justify a strongly-held belief, why hold it?

I would rather hold an 'I don't know' position than adhere and defend beliefs that I can justify or support with convincing evidence.

leavingwt

the_raisin

I think he got tired of our arguments regarding "God" and the Bible, with me just spewing out JW doctrine without ever backing it up. I'm very thankful he did, because it made me realize what a hole I was in.

It really is a 'slap in the face' moment, isn't it, when you realize you can't no longer hide behind a belief you don't really believe in anymore?

I have many family members who are doing the 'I don't know' position when asked, but little by little I see them coming out of it. :)

00DAD

the_raisin: It really is a 'slap in the face' moment, isn't it, when you realize you can't no longer hide behind a belief you don't really believe in anymore?

Tom Paine said in The Age of Reason, "Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving, it consists in professing to believe what one does not believe."

Similarly, T. H. Huxley wrote, "The foundation of morality is to ... give up pretending to believe that for which there is no evidence, and repeating unintelligible propositions about things beyond the possibilities of knowledge."

OldGenerationDude

I believe there's more to it than just doctrine or brain washing. I really believe that most of us, at some point (and some of us still) found the Watchtower attractive enough to join because it fulfilled something in us. We wanted to be right, or we needed something to make us feel we could be right, to feel we had made the right decision and back up our choices (or hand them to us). In a confusing world it's not the surprising that people want answers.

While you can approach it that way, religion itself is not supposed to be about critical thinking. It's not supposed to a scholastic exercise of the brain. It's supposed to offer something that transcends all of that. It's supposed to be beyond the reach of science and inexplicable and mysterious and comforting and (guess what, Watchtower) spiritual. Yes, there is study and, as I stated before, there are schools of critical thought, but in the end it's about giving up control, not gaining it, and getting "unspoken" answers and some sort of enlightenment you can't get from the certainty of something like scientific methodology.

But somehow, a lot of us, didn't find that satisfying. God, or religion, wasn't good enough for us. Because it supplies mysteries instead of answers, and faith in exchange for empirical evidence, it didn't supply what some us apparently wanted, and we were looking for some guarantee that what we were believing was "right" (and some enjoying the false feeling of being superior or smarter than others that it supplied)? Thus we may have wholeheartedly fell for and agreed in the canned Watchtower response: "Why belong to a religion if it’s not the right one?"

You come here or to some other board and you find people debating again, offering their latest set of convictions that they now claim ownership in exchange for what they gave up (or lost) from the Watchtower, and promote that with the same fervor, same zeal, and same approach as they did in the Watchtower. It's still the "I'm right" and "you're wrong" and "here is the long argument of proofs to prove it (so I hope you have an hour or two to spare)."

In other words, I don't always think the religion of the Jehovah's Witnesses is completely to blame. I think it's people who stay in that type of mindset, people who need to have everything marked to fit into boxes to neatly mark all things as "good" or "bad," "right" or "wrong." When some of us discover the Watchtower isn't "right," we then make the erroneous mistake that our current position is the "right" one, and then we are back to "preaching" and "declaring the good news" of this new 'kingdom' we've found. And it's not just religious either. How many "new" atheists who have left the JWs now "preach" their belief and go after religion exactly the way the Watchtower does.

We may not have moved on much at all. While the Watchtower is being dishonest, I think sometimes we forget that we were capable of making that mistake ourselves. We were among the dishonest, and we are therefore capable of being that now.

While I am sure this does not apply to everyone, and I am sure that if it does it might apply partially, in some cases, all the same I think the worst "doctrine" of all from the Watchtower is likely the one we may have had going in (which is why we still hold on to it). That doctrine is the need to compartmentalize because we refuse to live in the world like everyone else. Nobody has all the answers. No one had a guarantee that what they believe is 100% right. It's arrogant to think so, whether your theist or atheist.

We are tiny little specs on a tiny little globe spinning through an enormous universe that we can't possibly wrap our minds around. Of course we want to feel we have some control. The "controlling God" issue by "having the right doctrine" or "open mind" is just a symptom of this "doctrine."

We need to grow up. When the end of our lives face us, religious or not, we will still be asking ourselves if our convictions are right. Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple Inc., questioned his atheism as his days came to an end. I am sure it wasn't easy for Pope John Paul II either, and he was the Pope.

It isn't easy. We won't have all the answers. We aren't going to know everything. It is all a leap of faith. Instead of dividing ourselves into categories on the personal details, we should be realizing we are all on this branch hanging over the same watering hole, just waiting for our turn to come around when we have to jump in. There is no other branch, no other ending to this story, and instead of holding hands and helping each other take the plunge like we should be, we are up here arguing or ("stupid-er" yet) claiming we have the best understanding of what being on the branch means and what it will be like to jump into the lake (when in reality none of us have been on this branch before and have never been in the lake below).

We need to let go of ourselves and take each other's hands. No, not popular, and takes courage to do so. We fooled ourselves once when in the Watchtower thinking we had it all right. We are all capable of doing it again. So it's time to grow up, acknowledge where the Watchtower was wrong, realize no one gets all the answers now, and do the best we can, helping and appreciating one another along the way.

Doesn't mean there's not direction out there. Doesn't mean there isn't some truth to know or believe in. I'm just saying that it's the falsest of doctrines to believe you can have the truth, in its entirety, and that whatever we found to replace the Watchtower shouldn't be used for returning to our old "witnessing" ways (to both theists and atheists--and you agnostics too--no free rides to nobody). Blame the Watchtower for what wrong its done and doing, yes, but don't forget to take the blame and medicine we deserve for what we did while there (and still doing, if we are) to "sell our one and only Truth" to the public now.

heathen

LOL blondie - I wonder why they believe that about Jehovah correcting the Israelites, maybe it's because it's been hammered in their heads by the WTBTS . I don't think it's that easy , what we have are wicked men and imposters at the hieght of their game today ant the GB has made very serious mistakes , they even allowed for satanic symbols in their publications , they fornicated with the beast , they hold people back from education for fear they will meet apostates in school, they stifle the R&f from any sort of critique . The blood dogma is a complete joke ,even the way they explain it ,it's retarded . We know they can't change it for fear of liable suites so no hopes in that murderous dogma getting changed . Now look at the generation dogma , they look around and notice there's nobody left from 1914 and decide they need to change it to some ridiculous nonsense after promising people for a century they will never die and now everyone is just to sit their like zomies and agree without question?

tootired2care

I did not leave because of doctrine either; I think they have their bible facts in order much better than all the other Christian faiths that are mixed with Pagan stuff, Trinity garbage etc. My issue more has to with how the God of the bible wants us to endlessly toil and be a our dictator and control and snoop on every aspect of our lives.

garyneal

I think they have their bible facts in order much better than all the other Christian faiths that are mixed with Pagan stuff, Trinity garbage etc.

Interesting, I can just as easily say that upon leaving the IFB's I felt that they had their Bible facts in order more so than other faiths. They believed in the 'Trinity garbage.' It's all about perspective really as I too did not leave the IFB churches because of doctrine.

People leave the Org but don't drop the doctrine?

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