Raypublisher,
Thanks for the note. Since I last posted I have been able to sit down and listen to Parts 3 and 5 taking notes and screen shots of text. Getting a much better picture of what went on and more to follow, I'm sure.
From my outside perspective, this was quite a remarkable experience. A mix since I have had to follow some of the same steps as you had without the background of growing up in these beliefs. My discoveries about 607 BC, notions of charity, the failings of early leaders and the devotion to anonymous leaders later... In the midst of all this I was treading water trying to deal with a family crisis here. We had a relation of seven years when my ex decided she had to go back. She told me it was initiated by the death of her son, but by the time she was re-assimilated, I was considered an apostate to a belief that I had hardly even heard of initially, not to mention that it never would make much sense. I took lessons on weekends, but I could never shake the conviction that the elders lied to me with every page of pamphlet they presented. They also often frequently stiffed me for hours before they would announce that they weren't going to show.
Yet I can understand the duress of such a star chamber meeting. I have felt it enough by just charging over to a local KH, a KH that looks identical to the one you went to. I would demand to speak with someone who was answerable for the lies that I had read, attempting to raise some of the same questions or challenges. For with me, it's not only the claim that Jerusalem was destroyed on a schedule to justify the existence of the governing board. God was also presented as the destroyer of the Babylon modeled on either an Assyrian king or god, a destroyer of a Babylon that supposedly had done his work and then when that was done he would destroy it too as some moral example. He could be on your side too. Earthquakes in Haiti were not challenges to our capability to reach out, but just another indication that another round of righteous, final destruction was to get underway. This was the initial recruitment pitch that I was given. But it too is a fraud.
Yet there wasn't anyone that would own up to anything other than that they were in my living room presenting this material.
Ostensibly at the KH I would meet good, kindly people - yet at the same time the dissonance with any outward reality is as chilling as anything I have encountered in my life. Going into the KH for me reminds me more of Morpheus in the underworld pleading for the return of Demeter, if I've got my mythology right... Contradictions, edits and liberties in biblical text, historical records, calculations of the eclipses for and after the fall of Jerusalem, absence of charity or an acknowledgment of what followed Matt 24 - Matt 25. Nothing makes a difference. The demonic can be anything that one just does not want to hear. It won't even be acknowledged.
And then the person I loved who had seemed always to have encouraged me to take risks, move out of my comfort zone... When I would bring any of this up when she started to assume her new persona, she'd angrily charge me with conceit, intellectual pride, lack of humility before the truth, etc. None of her interpretations were self evident and the explanations I heard in the KH meetings I attended were simply self inflicted exercises in programmed learning: a community pressure to answer WT verse question annotations. Between the Bible and WT, it was clear which had precedence. I never heard a single chapter of the Bible read or examined. Just WT articles with Bible citations as random as bingo numbers. How this formula works on people, I'm not sure, save that I have seen similar for multi-level marketing recruits.
But I am still only half way through your story. And like the others who have commented, I am really impressed with your preparation for this event and how much you were able already to cover making your point quite clear to your examiners and the audience outside. As my comments above do indicate, my background is different from yours, yet this encounter with regimentation and control has disturbed me too. How this will all settle out, I am not sure; but I do share your belief that truth is more important than this false face and posture that so many have been forced to present and observe.
God's purpose in our lives is not always clear, but I believe that God's purpose is there.
