What triggered your awaking?

by Fadeaway1962 34 Replies latest jw experiences

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  caves

  For me it was a radio show as well. It was in Fayettiville Arkansas on the rock station.

  I recorded it as it aired and they took callers at the end. I stupidly called in (or looking back not so stupidly) and got on air. I was defending the jws. I got hit with calm logic. Brain exploded! The crack started. That was in 2001.

  In truth, when I was about 8 I remember thinking that if I was the devil I would hide under the guise of "true worship" to mislead. Years later I came across Paul Harvey's speech of 'If I were the devil'. It clicked more.

  Then Crisis of Conscience. Which I read several times over.

  An elder also said a comment at a book study he was presiding over where he flat out said that there no way only 6-7 million people would be saved(late90s). He quickly moved on with the study, but I never forgot it. He and his wife faded shortly after but I didn't know at the time that's what he was doing.

  Long story short, it was little cracks over several decades, until there was a gaping hole I could not ignore.
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  LV101

  No reason anyone here woke up/walked but interesting -- the suggested link re/nowwhat's 'kingdom halls will be gone and this is how it will work' on Mikey & Kim's youtube? Kim links a youtube how 1 Chronicles 13:15 says Jehovah is not the God of Israel. Did anyone know this after their experience/many yrs with the 'truth' and Watchtower?
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  oppostate

  hey LV101 theres no 1 Chronicles 13:15
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  HappyDad

  Two decades of borderline doubt coupled with the lack of love and the way the elders treated my daughter, then reading Crisis Of Conscience in 1998 helped me to finally make an escape.
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  Phizzy

  I was born in, became more and more interested in what the Bible really said, and one day decided to read the Book of Daniel with an open mind, got to Chapter 4, realised there was no way you could extrapolate from that the 2500 years that led to 1914, unless you were slightly bonkers.

  At that point the whole JW Org teaching collapsed like a House of Cards. No 1914= no choosing of an FDS in 1919= the GB are self-appointed charlatans.

  It wasn't long before I walked away for good, I gave an Elder the chance to come back to me and prove 1914, as he felt sure he could, he never came back.
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  smiddy3

  Welcome Fadeaway1962 ,for many of us it was a gradual thing over many years ,little things we were told to wait on Jehovah about ,however being a bit impatient because no jehovah was answering any of our doubts we took things into our own hands and looked up the internet , WALLA ,here were the answers we were looking for , not evidently`s,presumably`s, or its most likely , or any other such mumbo jumbo that spews out of the G.B./WT/JW`s mouth .

  And here we are liberated from a lying ,controlling ,cult that has kept millions Captive in A Concept that they are chosen by God to be their spokesperson for God in this day and age,as his prophets .
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  JoenB75

  Caves,

  Funny with those perspectives and expectations of God. In the Christadelphian understanding (I was for a short while a baptised Christadelphian), the great harvest / multitude takes place in the millennium and few people are saved prior to that. The vast majority that ever lived are never raised. "God does not bless his creation equally". An elder told me Hitler was appeared on the world scene to make possible the creation of israel that they think is of God. The JW is essentially a humanist. His org may behave harsh and controlling but he has a bleeding heart for humanity, hence all the "isn't the world a bad place" preaching.
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  truth_b_known

  For me it wasn't one single thing, but a number over a period of about 16 years.

  1) I was 19, a Ministerial Servant, working in the Accounting Department at a Circuit Assembly. The elder in charge and I were listening to the program up in the accounting office of the Assembly Hall. The speaker mentioned a change in alternative service for when brothers were drafted into the military. The "new light" was that alternative service is now alright to take whereas before you had to turn that down too and just go to prison. This elder new many were were affected by this back during the Vietnam War. I saw how deeply this affected him as he chose alternative service as a non-Witness back then.

  2) I was in my 30s and my family attended a convention with my parents. On the way home my father shared with me a story about a Circuit Overseer in our home state that intentionally looked for Witnesses who claimed to be Annointed for the purpose of disfellowshipping them. My father shared if we had stayed instead of moving out of state he would have been targeted for disfellowshipping.

  3) I was about 35 when my father revealed something deeply disturbing to be. I was 13 when my father moved our family to another state. My father claims to be Annointed and was the presiding overseer in our home state's congregation. When we moved into our new congregation in our new state, that new congregation's presiding overseer told family heads not to associate with us. My father learned that when 3 different brothers came forward and told my father some 22 years after it happened. I then knew why no one ever truly befriended my family and I.

  4) About a year later I began to learn why the story of Noah's Flood in the Bible could not have happened from a standpoint of physics. That was the final straw for me.
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  EverApostate

  I got into the cult in 1997.

  Several times, I used to have this question. Why did Jehovah punish adam and eve and all their offspring’s for once act of disobedience. It always sounded as Injustice

  Then the way Jah supposedly handed the situations. The plagues of Egypt, the genocides and killing of innocent people for petty reasons.

  Then it was in 2008, that a fellow witness of mine told me about the 1975 fiasco. OMG, I didn’t have a clue until then that the WT had created such an anticipation for 1975 and then when it didn’t happen, threw the blame on its members.

  In one WT study, during 2009, there was an article about the bears tearing up children because they mad fun of an old man. The WT conductor justified this act and said that those children deserved that punishment. That was the WTF moment for me.

  Then I started to research more about the Bible and WT simultaneously.

  Found out that Bible is Garbage and WT is a Garbage tower built on a garbage landfill.

  I disassociated in 2011. Happy atheist from then on.
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  LoveUniHateExams

  I'm the same as Jimmy Young and LHG - it was the 1995 generation change that first opened my eyes.

  The Watchtower mag that announced that change also had an article about child abuse. The article said something like 'if a child says Brother Creep abused him/her but Brother Creep denies it, then there's nothing you can do. You just have to wait on Jehovah.'

  The generation change made no sense. It only made sense if you considered the view that the Governing Body didn't know what the hell they were talking about and were just making it all up as they go along.

  And the child abuse article - I was 'in' but I could see this was wrong.

  I stayed with the JWs for another 11 years because 'where would we go?', etc.