PIMI JW have a permanent spiritual gun pointed to his forehead all the time.
The people who are solely responsible for coercing and brainwashing
people into believing that blood transfusions are wrong rests solely
with the governing body.
I sympathize with these statements. I was PIMI at one time myself. But in my case I was indoctrinated by my own parents at the age of 6. Others I know of were actually born into the cult. Children are not responsible for their actions, not legally and not morally. They are not responsible for a belief system that is forced on them. If their parents "brainwashed them" then that is on the parents, not the children themselves.
So if you are speaking about children, the I agree wholeheartedly with your statements. But you should then place the blame on the adult parents who did the coercing. I never had one Governing Body member spank me because I did not want to go to the meetings. I never had one GB slap me for fiddling about while out in service. No governing body member threatened me because I did not properly close my eyes during prayer. My parents did all that. If an Elder "counseled" me in a cult-like way with cult-like advice, it was my parents who agreed with that and made certain I toed the line.
My parents chose to become Jehovah's Witnesses as adults. They chose to be brainwashed by the religion. If one starts to blame the GB, then what about the District Overseers, the Circuit Overseers, all of the Elders, the Ministerial Servants and everyone else who actually did the hands-on "brainwashing?" Why would you give those people a pass? These others had much more of hand in brainwashing my parents than the GB ever did. They were the actual hands on applicators of every abusive, cult-like move made on me.
And my parents chose the religion for themselves and then pushed it on me. The GB did not do anything to me. Heck, a few years before I was born there wasn't even a GB at all, yet the religion existed. Who would we blame then?
So, if you were an adult who chose to become a Jehovah's Witness, that my friend is not coercion. How were you coerced to join the religion? Did someone put a gun to your head and say "Hey, listen to my baloney and believe it or I will kill you?" How exactly was the religion forced on you if you were an adult of free will and chose to believe it?
If you were an adult and you heard the message and you liked it, then that is on you. It must have spoken to you on some level. You must have wanted all that came with it, for whatever reason. For it to turn out that you were actually joining a cult and cause you harm, well, that was on you to figure out. Your "not free" mindset is something that you chose yourself.
Don't blame the GB, the Devil, the Elders or someone else. Blame yourself. That is actually the healthy thing to do, because if you don't, you will never properly heal. You will forever walk in victim-hood in your own head and will be blaming others for what you should have known when you joined a cult voluntarily.
Again, the situation is much more complicated for those of us born in the cult or brought in very young. For me, it took me about 40 years to wake up to the mess I believed in. Yet, I still blame myself for not figuring it out more quickly because deep down inside I knew something was wrong in my early twenties (after coming back from Bethel) but the indoctrination that I received as a child was very hard to overcome. So, I blame myself for not exiting earlier, but I don't blame myself for my initial belief system because that actually was forced on me.
For me, I blame my parents. No one else. They were the ones who were responsible for raising me, for protecting me and for teaching me, not anyone else.
--
Final point: I always see people naively talk about the Governing Body as if they are the only ones who are "responsible" for the Jehovah's Witness faith. The thing is, if you have ever spent any time at Bethel like I have (and others on this board) we know that the GB is not a monolithic group (they don't all think exactly alike for example) and they are not the only ones in the faith with "power." There are many people on the Writing Committee for example who are not GB, but they exercise great power over the masses of Jehovah's Witnesses. There are many on the Speaking and Teaching Committees who do the same. Most of the people in Bethel in my days there that the young Bethelites spoke about the most and who we tried to emulate were not the Governing Body members at all. Those other lesser known people actually had more influence on us in the long run because the GB mostly seemed like old men we could not relate to at all. Some of the GB we even openly disliked and mocked in private. Those particular men had zero hold on us. To us, many of them were more figurehead than actual instructors... unless we happened to like that person. Some of them were quite likeable, while others, not so much.
So to me, it very simplistic to try to represent the Jehovah's Witness faith with just a small group of old men who very few people even know personally.
