Your final WTF? Moment!

by restrangled 79 Replies latest jw friends

• 

  keyser soze

  The final straw for me was during a CO's talk. He was relating an experience from a shepherding call. The brother he was visiting was strugging spiritually due to multiple personal problems he was enduring. He told the CO that he couldn't wait for the new system to get here so he didn't have to deal with all of the problems he was facing. The CO's response: "What makes you think you'll be in the new system?"

  I shouldn't have been stunned by the utter lack of empathy, but somehow I was. That was it for me.
• 

  Splash

  A few stepping stones:

  1. As a teenager I was told (1980's?) that Babylon the Great had fallen. I looked out of the window and saw it actually hadn't.

  2. Knowing that babies naturally eat white blood cells in breast milk, but could not take a white cell transfusion because the WT says to abstain.

  3. De Cruce Libris Tres (Justus Lipsius) held up as a definitive support that Jesus died on a stake. Found it online and realised this was the opposite of what that book said. Went on to realise that '...' in any WT quotation actually means "we've misrepresented the quote right here".

  4. Adding square brackets '[ ]' in the Bible to denote where something has been added that does not appear in the text, then seeing the latest version of the Bible keep the spurious additions but remove the square brackets, so you are deceived.

  These days the WTF moments come thick and fast. The more you know the more you can see.

  Splash
• 

  Muddy Waters

  My final WTF moment was a culmination of previous moments and thoughts, those previous thoughts all submerged obediently.
  
  
  - the generation teaching which changed & became "over-lapping"

  - the acceptability of blood fractions

  - reporting field service time

  - feeling like you're on a constant treadmill, never good enough or doing enough

  - the elders "going beyond the things written"

  - and finally, the WTF culmination moment:

  I was going to give the book, "My Book of Bible Stories" to my little grandchildren (who, thank goodness, were NOT being raised as JWs!). I looked at the book through their little eyes and was shocked. So many scary, frightening pictures! So much blood, so much violence!! Who could put out and approve such a book for little children?? When I realized that the governing body would have to approve this book, it stunned me. I also knew that most of the GB did not even have children of their own, yet here they were putting out a nightmarish book which would terrorize children. How could a book such as this make children want to draw close to God?? I wish I had seen this with my own little children.
  
  When I began questioning the wisdom of the GB, when I began doubting them, it all began to fall apart. I started to see the WTS as another man-made, man-led religion, and the house of cards began to fall down. It gave me courage to read Ray Franz's books, and that was the end of it for me.
• 

  goingthruthemotions

  i started having doubts when they started changing the wheat and weed stuff and the final straw was the generation BS.

  do my own research I found that stated in 1john2:21

  21+ I write YOU, not because YOU do not know the truth, but because YOU know it, and because no lie originates with the truth.

  the truth does lie, all i see if lies...i am still tryig to wake up my wife.

  she made a commment a few days ago that bothered me and showed how deeply she was brainwashed. I was trying to tell here about the faithful and discreet slave and how it has changed so many times. she stated i don't care about the past. i just care about now, they have the truth she said.

  I was like really....luckly we have only been in 6 years and half of that being baptized. don't associate with jw's anyways. we think they are shallow. she feels the same.

  GTTM
• 

  villagegirl

  You guys make me proud to be here among you all.

  For years when I was in, I would hear from the platform

  and from the "friends" how "apostates" and anyone who left

  were gone because they were "immoral" or "gnashing their teeth"

  "miserable" "demonized" and alone on the scary "outside"

  They pictured apostates as vicious, and depraved and sex-fiends

  and drug addicts, and other scare tactics.

  I believed it, so do others still today. Yet here in this thread,

  is demostrated, honest, clear thinking, moral people,

  who are sincere, thoughtful, who struggled to free themselves.

  And those who did get disfellowshipped for "immoral" reasons

  were often destroyed mentally and emotionally because they

  were in the WT. It amazing how many and varied the triggers

  are; that finally awaken us. For me it was a Watchtower that

  reffered to Millions Now Living "May" Never Die, and I was sure they had

  changed the title and I went on a library search for it. I obtained a copy

  and read it and the prediction the prophets would be resurrected in 1925.

  It began to unravel from there. It was Millions Now Living Will Never Die.
• 

  leaving_quietly

  I don't think I've yet had a final WTF moment. I remember my first one, though. I was researching marital separation because my own marriage was (and still is) in a pretty bad state. I wanted to know the scripturally valid reasons for divorce and separation. I already knew what the WT said on the topic because I was an elder at the time. I could find zero backing from the scriptures on their three reasons for separation.

  Next was the "overlapping generations".

  Next came quotes from secular sources without stating who those sources were, and the infamous ellipses that were continually inserted. Once finding the sources, I could read for myself the quotes in context. There were many WTF moments there.

  Next came reading the Bible itself. Cover to cover. Finding out what the Bible said about many, many subjects was eye-opening. I learned how to detect "cherry-picking" with this exercise.

  Next came various word studies. Thanks to technology nowadays, one can easily find out what the Bible has to say about a particular word, such as "faith" or "salvation" or "paradise". This led to quite a bit of research using the Kingdom Interlinear and Emphatic Diaglott as well as online research tools, such as biblehub.com. This also let to me discovering they did indeed change the NWT to fit their theology despite their claims otherwise.

  1914 fell quickly as the entire doctrine is based on an assumption that Daniel's vision has a second fulfillment, that there is some link between the word "times" in Daniel 4 and Luke 21:24, that Jesus was talking about the fall of Jerusalem to Babylon (when the Greek word for "will be" trodden is in the future tense), and that those times actually amounted to 2,520 solar years.

  Other major doctrines fell, too. 144,000 only as kings and priests. 144,000 only going to heaven. "New scrolls". Forbidding to eat the bread and drink the wine. The list goes on.

  Like someone else here said, I pulled on a thread, and the tapestry started unweaving quickly.
• 

  Emery

  I had 2 "WTF" moments. The CO just came to town and during his public talk, he mentioned Matthew 18:20 - " For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them." and then he preceeded to say, "This scripture only applies to Judicial committees." WTF!?

  And my final WTF moment I had was when I read 'The Finished Mystery', yes the wise spiritual food that Jesus personally thumbed through to grant the organization the greatest honor in all Christian history by appointing them as his Faithful and Discreet Slave. I would say, there were probably over a hundred separate "WTFs" moments during that read. I've never felt so embarassed to be a JW until after I read that book.
• 

  tornapart

  Overlapping generation 'new light' at the DC 2010. Reading CoC was the nail in the coffin.
• 

  committeechairman

  LoisLane:

  Generally, if an elder got inappropriate with his question, since I usually ended up being the -ahem- committee chairman, then I would excuse the accused individual and straigten out the elder who couldn't respect someone else's dignity. Then we would apologize as a committee. I was partially or directly responsible for more than one elder being removed for this reason. I take it seriously.

  Someday I'll have to explain in more detail what my handle, CommitteeChairman really means. It is, at the least, triple entendre.

  CC
• 

  skeeter1

  So cool, that alot of you came out with the overlapping generation. When that change came out, posters on .jwn knew it was going to wake up alot of folks. It did!