by MissConfused 35 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
Its been a while since i spoke up.
After a lot of 'tactful' questioning, i have come under the conclusion that Witnessing TTATT with dubs will NEVER work. There is nothing called reasoning with them. Their brain is so washed that they believe that anything against WT&BSS is fueled by Satan! :( Feeling so low. Do I have to live being a 'hypocratical' witness all my life? I guess i dont have a choice. Love them a lot to live without them :'(.
It is extremely hard work unless something happens to crack shell of cognitive dissonance. If they have started to have doubts there may be a door, otherwise you are banging your head against a brick wall. It is very frustrating if you think you can use logic to overturn the belief system and then realise they are just not listening to you.
Pick your battles wisely. Be patient. Show them - by your example - that a person can be happy, content, positive and productive without the Kingdom Hall.
ginger
It worked with me, got me thinking and researching when a bible student asked me to prove using the bible that Jesus is Michael....as I checked the WT articles I realized it was one of those "evidently" types of proof.
It works with some of them, and you never know when or what issue might get them thinking.
Something that was big to you may not impact them at all.
Something that is big to them might leave you scratching your head, wondering why THAT was important to them.
The harder you push them, the harder they will resist.
Generally understatement and sporadic low key questions work best.
I'm thinking of statements like, "I just don't get this overlapping generations teaching. Oh, well..."
That works a lot better than, "The overlapping generations teaching shows that the whole 1914 thing is a lie."
Softly, softly catchee monkey.
Miss Confused, I can't imagine how difficult it would be to try and reverse-witness from within. Even though it would mean distancing yourself from the ones you love, it might be a saner approach to be true to yourself and follow the above approach after exiting yourself. Your call. I wish you all the best.
Be patient, I've had to learn that. Just occasionally I see tiny cracks in the conditioning that give me hope.
We all had different things that woke us up, but for me, "in" for a very long time, it was the accumulation of many small nagging things that eventually grew so large that I started to investigate.
As said above, you never know when you may be planting a seed that will grow.
Reverse witnessing does sometimes work. Sometimes, it just bounces off of their Watchtower training. But at other times when it seem to be ineffective, it may ping on their cognitive dissonnce. In other words, careful reverse witnessing, that you can learn by reading Steve Hassan's books or other sources of how to help people in a cult, can have long-term accumulative effects.
An example. I was already wondering if "the truth" was not the truth. One day out in recruiting in the door-to-door literature distribution work with an older “sister” it was my turn to speak to the next “householder.” Before me was a man in his fifties, totally answering to the stereotypical description of a hippy left over from the 1960’s. I don’t remember our conversation exactly, but he asked if God was so vain that He expected me to spend all my time praising Him in this door-to-door work, and if God wouldn’t forgive all the ignorant masses out there for never believing the message of these strange Jehovah’s Witnesses that come to their door with nice printed hand-outs. He went on to say that he felt that if Armageddon was truly so imminent, that God would do better than just deliver the warning with a few million nicely dressed nuts knocking on
doors with literature that hardly anyone was likely to read, but God would have billboards, television and radio commercials, or maybe even deliver the word through some actual miracle. He asked how many Witnesses were spreading the word in Muslim parts of the world and whether Jehovah would really kill the children there for faithfully believing what their parents taught them. I knew the pat answers to his questions, but I was enthralled with his mannerisms and his way of free-thinking. I really didn’t think he was wrong. Even the “sister” with me had nothing to add and enjoyed his philosophic view of everything.
While I did not stop the door-to-door recruiting at that moment, it profoundly changed my attitude about what I was doing. I did not feel that this work was really the urgent work that a loving creator was assigning. After that encounter, I knew that God’s Holy Spirit wasn’t telling me to
preach the word of Jehovah’s Witnesses as a pioneer.
