https://www.jw.org/en/jehovahs-witnesses/faq/resign/
Unshacklethechains have a look at this article if you have not already.
Why Do You Think People Become Jehovah’s Witnesses?
by minimus 31 Replies latest jw friends
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mikronboy
I posted this before under another persona. Basically I changed my computer and lost my password, so I've started again as mikronboy. I know, I know, it sounds like a racehorse! OK, here we go, so sorry if you've seen it before - so how did I finish up as a JW?
I was the number 2 son, born in 1946. I’d had an elder brother who died just a few days after his birth in 1944. I mention this because this sad occurrence led to a series of events that were to have a major effect on my own upbringing.
My parents were simply Mum & Dad.(We say Mum, not Mom!)
Dad was 25 when I arrived, Mum was 24.
Dad had been in the RAF during the war. He’d joined up in 1940 and assigned to Bomber Command. He became a bomb-aimer and altogether flew on 43 bombing sorties over Germany.
When I arrived Dad was still in the RAF, so my earliest years were spent in mainly female company, my mother and both sets of grandmothers eager to take part in my development.
We had lots of relatives living within walking distance. Grandparents, great-grandparents, cousins, aunts, uncles, most all of our extended family were within a mile or two. So there were frequent family get-togethers, particularly at Christmas.
Life was good. I was at school at age 5 where our seating position in our class was dictated by how clever we were deemed to be. I sat at the “top table” and quickly learned how to read. In 1953, when I was 6, all the children at school were presented with gifts to celebrate the crowning of Queen Elizabeth the Second.
My home life was good too. Both my parents were ardent football (soccer) supporters, so, every other week of the football season, I would be farmed out to one relative or another so that they could watch the game while I played happily with my cousins.
My parents partied a good deal. Dad’s RAF pals were always visiting us so there was loud music late into the night while Dad would perform his favourite party trick of drinking all the water out of the flower vases.
Eventually Dad was demobbed from the RAF, but not before they had re-trained him in the difficult and demanding job of an air-traffic controller.
Meanwhile, Dad would make model aeroplanes, ships, windmills, cranes and trains – would you believe it, supposedly all for me! I never got to touch them much either.
Yep, I was a happy child, although my mother had a heavy right hand which she wasn’t averse to using on me whenever I transgressed.
Then one memorable day, my Mum and Dad sat me down and told me that my dad’s new occupation meant that we would soon be moving house. We were going to leave the North of England and move “down south”.
London!
So we moved south to London.
Actually it was a London suburb. Close to London Heathrow Airport, my Dad needed only to hop on the 116 bus, change to the 90B in Hounslow and he was there in less than 30 minutes.
The inevitable change of school brought me many problems, not least being my own broad Lancashire accent. Also, the school was a good 12 months ahead of the one that I had left, so I was quickly demoted from bright star to bottom-of-the-class dunce.
Mum was also very stressed. She missed Lancashire, the family too, and also found the southerners of England damned unfriendly.
I was later to learn that the death of my elder brother in 1944 had a lot to do with her unhappiness.
When my brother had died years previously, my Dad had been granted 48 hours compassionate leave by the RAF.
That first night, in 1944, when the Lancaster flew on another bombing run over Germany without my Dad on board, the plane had been shot down.
The crew were listed as Missing, presumed killed.
My Dad had been distraught and also full of guilt.
My grandmother – his mother – had been dabbling in Spiritism and suggested that Dad saw a spirit medium with a view to getting in contact with his dead crew.
Eventually Dad complied, he agreed to see a spirit medium.
The spirit medium went into a trance and said that she was now in contact with the skipper of the shot-down Lancaster. She stunned my Dad when she said that his name was McKay. She described in detail how McKay had witnessed the death of himself and his crew.
The whole thing shook Dad up considerably.
So now here we are, 9 years on in 1954. I’m almost 9 years old, Mum is highly stressed most of the time and Dad is working hard at London Heathrow.
Then, in late 1954, my Dad received a letter that had come from overseas.
The letter was from a chap called McKay and had been written just a few weeks previously.
Skipper Mc Kay hadn’t died in the crash of the Lancaster. He’d parachuted to safety and spent the rest of the war as a POW. He just wasn't dead - he was very much alive!
So now my Dad was really shaken up. He needed some answers.
But where to start looking?
So my Dad has been kept off a doomed Lancaster bomber by the death of my elder brother and has also spoken to the “dead” skipper whom he now finds to be very much alive. Spooky!
That winter was a real chiller. Our water froze solid, cars were unstartable, the airport was closed temporarily.
My Mum took solace in the Playhouse cinema in Feltham and in the never ending consumption of mint imperials along with a deep addiction to cigarettes.
One night, whilst she was at said cinema, there was a knock on the front door. I was sent to answer it. My dad was in the attic attempting to unfreeze the water pipes by means of a lighted gas-poker attached to the garden hose which was in turn attached to the kitchen stove.
I opened the door to be confronted by a tall, hook-nosed man (in retrospect he looked like Abe Lincoln) who wanted to speak to one of my parents. Oh God I thought, he must have come to complain about me.
Well, no. I heard Dad say, whoever you are, come inside, it’s far too cold to talk on the doorstep.
At which point I lost all interest and went back to reading my comic books. The witnesses had entered our home and I was to remain blissfully unaware until...
...Until several weeks later when my dad announced that we were going to “a meeting” and that I was going too and I had better practice sitting still for a whole hour! Oh crikey, this was terrible!
Years later I learned what had happened that icy evening when the witnesses first called. My Dad had said to the witness, Leslie, that if he could answer just 1 question satisfactorily, he would look further into this strange religion.
So, Dad had told Leslie all about Mckay and the spirit medium and how McKay was dead then suddenly alive and living in Canada.
And Leslie had the answer...
Demon impersonation!
Because demons were wicked they were also imperfect and because they were imperfect they often made mistakes and because this particular demon who was impersonating McKay hadn’t done his homework properly, he had made a fundamental error in not checking up that McKay was definitely dead. Silly demon.
My Dad bought it 100%.
We were part of a religion and from here on in, nothing was ever going to be the same again.
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UnshackleTheChains
https://www.jw.org/en/jehovahs-witnesses/faq/resign/
Unshacklethechains have a look at this article if you have not already
Fade away 1962
The link below shows what JW. Org purposely left out from the link above
https://jwsurvey.org/shunning-2/news-bulletin-jw-org-asks-can-a-person-resign-from-being-one-of-jehovahs-witnesses
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JoenB75
Biblical ignorance and they have a form of that enforced agreement that Christianity once had and atheism dreams of 🤭. I have a current discussion with an elder and one of his big points is that Christianity should be united. I tell him human unity only comes by force🤭. But thumps up for him daring to do ping pong with an apostate 🤭🤭
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smiddy3
I can agree with Biblical ignorance being a factor.And beleiving from outside influencers that the Bible is the word of God.
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stan livedeath
they think it will get them a visa to america--paradise on earth.
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jwundubbed
I think overall, people who join are people like you and me who are looking for something in their lives that we all look for... hope. Lots of groups offer false hope, but you can't see it until you are up close and personal.
My mom joined after her first divorce. She had a dysfunctional family and had suffered a lot of abuse and trauma. She married at 14 and divorced at 18.
My dad joined because the Vietnam draft was looming over his head and everyone was scared. There was a lot of change happening in the world at that time. A lot of people can't handle change well and look for something bigger than themselves to give them hope and reassurance.
My siblings and I were all born in.
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profetic
Let’s be honest here, Charles Russell, Joseph Rutherford and Frederick Franz were control freaks who had an obsession with prestige and power. And why eight million intelligent God-fearing Christians would remain loyal to their legacy does raise eyebrows. But truth be told, the majority of JW’s have without much choice, inherited their cultural tradition through family ties.
But for outsiders such as myself, trusting in the JW’s would be like trusting in a Bank many times over while my life savings was being squandered time after time through bad management practices. The irony of the JW’s trustworthiness is that when it comes to money, they are very frugal, but when it comes to their souls they are neglectful — believing that mistakes are meant to make the Society wiser when quoting. Proverbs 4:18 & 13:9 which says:
1 The path of righteousness is like the morning sun, ever brighter till the full light of day.
2. The light of the righteousness shines brighter but the Lamp of the wicked is snuffed out.
Dear reader, could it be said that the above scriptures are a “Get out of Jail Card” by false prophets and there bogus teachings? In fact some religious commentators believe the above scriptures to be referring to non believers who are the wicked ones by refusing the light of truth when snuffing out sound reasoning. (Romans 12:11)
But regardless of what Proverbs was intended to teach, it was the Jehovah’s witnesses the"light gets brighter" mindset that excused Charles Russell’s failed prophesy’s and pagan beliefs.... preferring instead to honour him as one of Jehovah's chosen people who challenged Catholicism’s dogmas on Hellfire, Purgatory, Penance, Maryology, and the Holy Trinity.
I readily admit that in some strange way my admiration goes to Charles Russell for his passion and willingness to invest his life savings in a magazine acclaimed to be the most widely distributed, privately produced English-language works in the United States.
But make no mistake, my admiration for Russell’s is for his stand against the perils of Catholicism, but other than that —I believe the Devil has more than one horn.
The bottom line is this: despite claims by the Jehovah’s witnesses in searching new light they are reluctant to revoke Russell’s Michael-ism dogma and its cousin the Ransom Sacrifice whereby it is taught that Jesus’ fleshly body was dissolved (in gases) when Michael's Spirit life-force was liberated. As far as I’m concerned, Russell’s gnostic ideology is no different to Catholicism’s claim that the Virgin Mary's body wasn’t dissolved into dust but assumed into heaven. Source: "Laodicean heretic."
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Still Totally ADD
Boundaries from the cult saved my parents marriage. So I was born into a concept. It was all I knew. Still Totally ADD
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phoenixrising
I really don't know. But I don't think it can be broad brushed as for a reason. I think its a one on one case by case. I may have a different idea if I were not raised in. I never had a choice until I grew up.