You think the Watch Tower Society's revised New World Translation is exciting?
Well, I'll go them one better!
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The 6 x 9 Paperback 
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(Excerpt from the chapter: THE HORROR!)
I had been to Sunday school once. My experience was troubling. A first impression of religious people in general was their tendency to reduce everything to black and white binaries. I, on the other hand, preferred colors.
Doctrines and theology were not glued to the inside of my thick skull. I was neither offended nor invested in challenging my JW friend Johnny’s bottomless well of surprises. I suspected my buddy was compensating for something or other with all these obsessions. This was a minor flaw like a birthmark; to be ignored while not being rude by noticing. But, who am I to judge?
I was pig-ignorant about these matters and it was obviously important to him.
As we became best-best buddies, I grew restless with the interruptions to our equable camaraderie. I was less shy about speaking up, although it was awkward for me to challenge my best friend. Johnny exerted an advantage. Although we were equals, his conversancy with his own religious teachings became trump card in a natural rivalry for the “top dog” status.
Mostly, I didn't "get it.” Who spends their waking hours reading up on religious doctrine when it is the 60’s and the best time in history to be alive? We lived in interesting times when everything was changing in society. I eventually came to understand no friendship was possible unless Johnny recruited me to his religious worldview. He saw the world as temporary and escape absolutely necessary! In his belief system, the end was near. So, why aim for success or wealth? Why even try? His religion discouraged ambition.
Friendship is based on sharing the same sense of reality and developing close affinities which lead to two-way communication. Once you are on the receiving only end problems do occur. I became the cup poured into by him. He was Mister hot kettle.
My mother had read to me from the Book of Revelation for some kind of spooky thrill. My Grandfather studied world religions while searching for thetrue one and scribbling copious margin notes in his stacks of books. My Grandmother was a lapsed Catholic with horror stories of life in a convent as a girl. My mother was more into UFO’s and Ouija boards than Jesus.
I had never met my Dad. I was incurious about religious matters. They seemed arbitrary, obsessive and tedious.
Religious people I had met gave me the creeps. My best friend’s family was not like that. Their house displayed no icons. The kindness and gentleness inside their home was a magnet for me. My own household was dysfunctional on a poisonous emotional level.
To my reckoning, naturally good people were attracted to other good people and that created religion. I never believed religion made so-so people “better.”
Johnny wanted to "study the Bible" with me and we set some time aside each week. For me, this was just to “get it over with” because such seemed inevitable. It would be like listening to some dear friend’s conspiracy theories.
It turned out Bible study was a polite hoax as it had been presented.
Johnny provided a garish, day-glow orange book titled, "From Paradise Lost to Paradise Regained." He explained it was an "aid.” Oh-h-h-h, so that’s how it’s done: 90% “aid” and 10% Bible. I caught on pretty quickly. As long as a scripture was quoted it was Bible.
Why not simply say, “We’re going to study my religion’s ideas and then, we’ll look something up in the Bible that may support it.” Nope, there was not only certainty attached to these opinions, there was absolute certainty. I’d learn later why they were so confident.
Prefab questions at the bottom of each page, for me to parrot correct answers in response, irkedme.
I felt this was stifling curiosity. I fought it and asked my own nuisance questions. My friend was exasperated within a couple of weeks of this routine.
You can lead a horse to water…
For one thing, I was skeptical by nature about the way religious people flip Bible pages. If they want to prove something they take a little from here and a little from there and then up and over and down. It was a buffet in a cafeteria and not any kind of context-driven process: a bamboozle method! Not that trickery was a conscious motive on anybody’s part. It wasn’t.
I absorbed by osmosis many interpretations of the scriptures from constant attendance at their Kingdom Hall. It wasn’t called "church.” Witnesses had a thing about commonplace Christian words such as church, they did not like them! The strategy was to change familiar religious terms into some other word. Jesus died, not on acrossbut a pole or torture stake, for instance. Eventually I caught on. This way of speaking was an insider’s language and only another JW would recognize the odd phraseas Shibboleth.
Witnesses simply describe their religion as “being in the Truth.” When they say “the Truth” they only mean one thing: the Watch Tower Society’s current opinion.
Think of it as hollowing out a pumpkin and carving a face. You still have the pumpkin and yet it has been transformed to represent Halloween.
My family warned me, “Jehovah’s Witnesses twist the scriptures.”My reaction to it was, “How would you know?”
In fact, their warnings drove me more and more to defend Johnny’s beliefs. This was more my evaluation of family than of the Watch Tower gravitas.
How can a non-expert refute an expert? That’s how I reckoned it. I was choosing sides little by little by defending my friend. Was I naïve in thinking of him as a Bible expert? Draw your own conclusions.
(Snip)
