When my wife and I left the 'truth' after realizing that it wasn't.........Jehovah and Jesus were put on the back burner. God had always been silent in my life so by that point in time I saw no need to try to stay with and believe in a bad translation of that silence.
The Von Daniken book was published about then: "Erich von Däniken was a leading proponent of this hypothesis in the late 1960s and early 1970s, gaining a large audience through the 1968 publication of his best-selling book Chariots of the Gods? and its sequels.............The origins of many religions are interpreted by von Däniken as reactions to encounters with an alien race..............." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_astronaut_hypothesis#Erich_von_D.C3.A4niken
The funny thing was that his theories felt no more outlandish then the WT teachings....they were also a great deal more fun and historically interesting.
I was struck, after looking at the books pictures, how most of the gods looked and acted like the people that had built a worship around them.
In short mankind was making it up......filling in the blanks so to speak. I came to a simple conclusion........... the god's didn't create us we created the gods and did so in our own image.
The old testament was a perfect example of this......it was a construct that mirrored the beliefs, traditions and the culture of the Jewish people. It was a speculation of their prehistory then a blueprint of how they lived , fought, thought and believed.
The WTBTS has evolved it's own belief system but one that fit their corporate persona.......... in fact the WT dogma did not become a religion until Rutherford decided to rebrand the old Bible students as the JW's so the Society could apply for a religious tax exemption in 1934 or there about.
Because they had been a publishing house (and now a real estate investment company) this new religion was launched as the religious arm of the WTBTS complete with it's corporate culture as part of it's dogma.
Basically I came to feel that they had made it up just as every religion has made it up.
