Types attracted to the sect known as jehovahs witnesses. (page 2)

Vidiot

I had issues with that methodology even back when I was still in, because my (nevertheless loyal JW parents) had taught me that joining should be a decision made by careful reasoned thought.

It's pretty clear that religion generally is attractive to people with emotional and mental difficulties. This is not to say that all religious groups are made up of defective humans but it is very clear that the utopian dream of the Watchtower is a classic sop to the needy. Then again Christianity was designed (and I mean designed) to appeal to the down trodden masses.

Virran

Yup. My mom was, and still is, a very insecure and nervous person. We had been in contact with the witnesses for years, only because my brothers one classmate was a witness and they were good friends. His mom had been preying on my mom all this time but when my grand mom died, my moms mom, she let the teeth sink into my mom completely. My mom was desperate and that was the end of our childhood as we knew it. Bye, bye good things in life, hello insanity!

Phizzy

This morning a JW lady told me when I went into our village that they were out looking for Hearing Impaired people for JW's to call on who know Sign Language.

I guess they think this is another group easier to fool than the average joe.

life is to short

Yep that was what always got me was how many mentally ill there were. And to make these poor people go door to door to recruit others after they get done love bombing them is criminal.

I have been door to door with mentally ill people who are hearing voices and selling door to door stresses them out so badly that they are shaking like a leaf. It is beyond embarrassing to be standing at the door when a householder opens it and this totally mentally ill person stumbles and shakes telling the person that that have to become a JW or else die. Almost all of the mentally ill people I was around INSISTED that they TAKE ALL THE DOORS. I do not know what was with that but they would get so wigged out if I did not let them that it was just easier to go with the flow and look stupid to strangers at the door then to have to spend the day with a crazy person mad at me.

LITS

dbq407

Around here too they go to the nursing homes and count time and studies by studying with people who pretty much cant do anything or think for themselves anymore. They they bring them to the hall in their wheelchairs and oxygen tanks and get them to comment once in awhile. That usually doesn't last long though, i'm sure the family gets wind of it and stops that. Other new ones coming to the hall have been ones that are clearly mentally unstable. Its sad they prey on these people. They would never help them out otherwise if they weren't coming to the hall.

Fencing

The converts I knew almost always had extended JW family (aunts, uncles, cousins, inlaws, etc.) who had been hounding them for years. And within that group, they generally only gave in after some difficult time in their life - death of a close relative or child, major financial problems, etc. Always at some kind of low point in their life.

The ones who converted and didn't have family in already - the straight cold-called converts - were very far and few between, and were typically REALLY odd. Something was always off with them, mentally.

LongHairGal

I was enticed into the Witness religion because I was interested in "end of the world prophecy" and I was led to believe they had answers other religions did not have.

Back in the day when I came in, the congregation I was associated with had stable families and I didn't particularly notice any crazies. I think that came later.

I notice people are fond of saying that anybody who gets involved with religion must have a "screw loose". This is a bias in our increasingly secular and degraded society and people who say this are implying they are somehow more "normal" because they are not interested in religion. By the way, I consider myself now to be an agnostic. I believe in live and let live.

I do agree that NOW the JW religion has a higher than normal percentage of people who are a little "off".

This is not just because the religion offers the "hope" of the New System but because the religion made the mistake of intentionally recruiting people with serious issues. They knew they lost their best and brightest and in order to FILL the empty seats in the halls...they started studies with homeless and other types who are bad news.

Did they think they were going to inflict these sorry individuals "who got religion" on the unsuspecting people in the halls? Namely, some poor woman??..Glad I'M no longer there!!...Let them go introduce them to a Circuit Overseer's wife or some stuck-up elder's wife.

By the way, these people have no money to contribute and only add to the many other deadbeats in the JW religion!

I suspect many other religions nowadays have their share of "disturbed" individuals and people with serious social problems. This is why I would NEVER get involved with any sort of religion again, even if I were inclined to be religious. I'm done with it.

David_Jay

I think I was a certain "type" when I accepted "the Truth." I can say this because when I grew out of those habits and views I was able to re-evaluate myself and compare myself to why I felt like I didn't belong and had to get myself out from the Witnesses.

Me, I thought that there had to be one "truth" or a "right way" to life. I was determined to find it.

I was also the type of person that believed myself to be humble, but secretly I enjoined being the center of attention and having answers and filled with "facts" (what I now call "factoids") that would impress others.

I also had the habit of viewing myself and my worldview as the right one, no matter what it was.

And I rarely viewed myself as possibly mistaken. My path was the right one because I had done the research myself and now knew better. Those who did not take this path were the ones who were mistaken. Life was a game of constant compartmentalization.

That was me before being a JW. I fit in nicely upon joining and got my pats on the back and enjoyed how proud I could be in now finding "the one true religion." But I was just a teenager then.

Along come my 20s and I could see how my idealism just wasn't realism. How could I be the judge of myself and my choices? Even when I was greatly mistaken in the past, I could never really tell. It feels just as right to be wrong as it does to be right, and we often pick and choose the "facts" we wish to believe in.

When I grew out of that I stuck out like a sore thumb in the Kingdom Hall. Along came the elder visits, asking me if I was giving in to "independent thinking" and having doubts about "this being the truth and the one true organization." I was no longer walking like a duck or quacking like a duck, so the other ducks could see I was just not a duck. But I once was, and like the ugly duckling of fairy tales I grew up to be something quite different and unexpected.

I can't say this applies to everyone, but as I mentioned in a previous post, I didn't let go out this pattern right away. I quickly embraced an anti-religious and very militant atheist ideology. Now atheism was "the Truth," and all people who embraced anything but were the hated, the unenlightened masses. My new gospel had to be preached, and I did it every time someone mentioned religion or any view that did not agree with mine.

Both a family of atheists and academics from the universities that graced me with their patience helped me see there was more than doctrine at error. It was a way of thinking, a personality trait ( or a series of them in me) that was flawed.

I think a lot of JWs are like that. I met a sister who had left the Church of Christ, believing it was the truth until she studied with the Witnesses and learned they had it. My best friend had once been a Mormon, believing he had the truth until he studied the Live Forever book and realized the Witnesses had it.

Atheists who had never had a religion or grown up in one never felt the need I had to "spread" their message around as truth. Coming out of the Watchtower I learned that people don't choose religions because they necessarily want to be right or have the "only truth." I was looking for a club that would keep my illusion of being in the right alive, and pat me on the back for my compartmentalizing. And if one group didn't necessarily do that, I would alter their set of convictions to fit my needs.

Ucantnome

my father was into politics and knew some high ups he wanted a better world i think

Types attracted to the sect known as jehovahs witnesses.