Quite a few years out the organisation for me now. For the first time in ages though, I actually re-evaluated my position on god/WT.
I had attended a few funerals in the spring and had also reignited some friendships with people from the hall. But actually, I just keep going round in circles in my mind. I cannot back an organisation with such a flawed past and one that endorses such policies as shunning & blood. There are many more issues in addition to those.
So, it got me thinking about my beliefs about god, aside from the WTS.
On the one hand, life being created and formed by an inteligent being sort of makes sense to me. On the other hand, natural disasters and mosquitos tell me that this is a flawed ideal. I conclude that some questions will simply remain unanswered and are too big to receive a definative answer either way.
But my biggest issue, I have realised, is the presence of human suffering & evil in the world.
I recall (when I was an active JW, and boy was I active), I had an interest in the website of USHMM. www.ushmm.org The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
I always had and interest in the activities and movements of the witnesses, naturally. But having spent many hours researching the holocaust and all that occured, I was left absolutely distraught at what had happened. The photographs of hundreds of jews being rounded up and shot in fields which had been dug up for graves just haunted me.
There is one photo (perhaps you have seen it). A family consisting of two younger men, a grandad, a young boy and an infant have been asked to dig their own grave. The two younger men are standing at the edge of the pit as the grandad, young boy and infant are walking to the same spot. The SS are standing poised to shoot.
It is a horrific image. Can you imagine their suffering? The terror of being hunted & found. The fear while being forced at gunpoint to dig your own grave. The humiliation of being asked to strip naked. And then the horror of watching your family being systematically murdered.
It really is just awful. The extent of evil exsisting in this one single scenario is harrowing. It happened all over the place, over many years. What's worse is that it has been repeated in other countries also.
Now, for me, no-one is so big, so powerful and so important that these things need to occur to 'prove a point' or as the witnesses put it 'settle the issue of universal sovereignty'. There is just nothing at all that justifies the need for these things to take place. What's more, even if this were the truth of the matter, I can't love or repect a god who stands by and watches these things happen for 'the greater good'. It just doesn't add up.
So, my conclusion is that I must be an atheist. I have felt like this before and having re-examined the issue I still feel the same.
Human suffering completely removes the idea of the existance of a loving and caring god.