Oppressive, superficial, and unloving - yep, that pretty well describes it.
All the whining by the Taliban Society about the infidels "apostates" and "opposers" fed my curiosity. "What are they so desperate to hide?" I often wondered.
Fruitcake, Tomcat, and elumn8, welcome to you all!
So many of us here were raised in the org, and it really is an eye-opener when we finally stand back and take and objective look at our lifelong religion! Talk about shackles.
About the flame wars: when I first ventured onto this site (and others) what I noticed first of all was: honest emotion, exchange of ideas, Biblical debate, evolution-vs-creation debate, 607-vs.537 debate, gut-wrenching stories of abuse/abandonment/indifference/shunning/suicide, jokes, recipes(!), you get the idea.
Then I happened upon a few flame wars and my thought was: "wow, they're "allowed" to do that here". You see, free speech is precious, and even if it means wading through some garbage to find the treasure, it's worth it.
Whatever flame wars were around didn't turn me off. The WTS did a much better job of turning me off.
The watchtower is always telling us how they are being repressed in one country after another and yet they do the same to thier own members. Everytime I want to get into a serious discussion with one of the members, about discrepansies with thier beliefs, they go to the insight book and give me thier standard reply. Then I have to spend hours looking up data to reply to them, of course by this time I am labled as agrumentative.