The great bugaboo ( something that
causes fear or distress out of proportion to its importance) of the JW’s
is that you are wasting your time reading books..... and beware of what your
reading. After all you have the WT publications to read and study. In a world of absolutes most of the JW teachings from it’s onset has been
trashed by the WT Society itself as old truth........ unfit for modern ‘new
light’. So what is one to believe? Read and fine out. I discovered the joy of reading at age 12. When my father passed a year
later I turned to reading as a refuge. My joy for reading stayed with me through out my teen years and continued
through out my adult life. It taught me everything I learned and is directly
responsible for allowing me to think and connect to what I would later call the totality and responsibility of life......... something the Society only
see’s as our responsibilities to the organization. I read books appropriate for my young years and later books that lifted me
on their wings. Steinbeck, Hemingway, Wolf.
I read Crappy thrillers that always had a nugget hidden in plain view. Bad books, good books, great books. Three books in particular helped me out of the JW religion. This was in an era well before the internet.......... even before certain religions were labeled cults. At 14 I read: The Voyage of the Space Beagle.
I read Crappy thrillers that always had a nugget hidden in plain view. Bad books, good books, great books. Three books in particular helped me out of the JW religion. This was in an era well before the internet.......... even before certain religions were labeled cults. At 14 I read: The Voyage of the Space Beagle.
This Science Fiction book is about the
crew of the Space Beagle ( A Darwin reference) and it’s intergalactic
expedition. It describes contact with alien races and impressed on me what the
possibilities of life...... as we don’t know it......... may exist. A simple
book that was the a reference for Star Trek and the Alien movies decades
later.
What it did for me was open my mind to
other concepts and the possibilities of different forms of intelligent life.
Lives that contradicted the doctrines of the WTBTS.
It was all make believe but still it
stayed with me.
At 16 I read: The True Believer by Eric
Hoffer....... the USA’s blue collar social philosopher. The subject of his book
was not the mass movement be it political or
religious..... but why people joined them and how they were manipulated by them.
He never mentions the WT or JW’s I seriously doubt back in 1950 that he even
knew of them. But for me he defined who they really were. While I still got
Baptized and pioneered (more of a social statement) I would recall what he said
and wrote .....it served to give me a clearer picture of the
WTBTS.
Here are a few things that he said that
has stayed with me over the decades:
“All active mass movements strive, therefore, to interpose a fact-proof screen between the faithful and the realities of the world. ...by claiming that the ultimate and absolute truth is already embodied in their doctrine and that there is no truth nor certitude outside it. ...To rely on the evidence of senses and of reason is heresy and treason. It is startling to realize how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible.”
“The quality of ideas seems to play a minor role in mass movement leadership. What counts is the arrogant gesture, the complete disregard of the opinion of others, the singlehanded defiance of the world”
“Here, as elsewhere, the technique of a mass movement aims to infect people with a malady and then offer the movement as a cure.”
And these:
Not only does a mass movement depict the present as mean and miserable - it deliberately makes it so. It fashions a pattern of individual existence that is dour, hard, repressive and dull. It decries pleasures and comforts and extols the rigorous life. It views ordinary enjoyment as trivial or even discreditable, and represents the pursuit of personal happiness as immoral.
If a doctrine is not unintelligible, it has to be vague; and if neither unintelligible nor vague, it has to be unverifiable. One has to get to heaven or the distant future to determine the truth of an effective doctrine.
The true believer is apt to see himself as one of the chosen, the salt of the earth, the light of the world, a prince disguised in meekness, who is destined to inherit this earth and the kingdom of heaven, too. He who is not of his faith is evil; he who will not listen shall perish.
All mass movements rank obedience with the highest virtues and put it on a level with faith.
This was.... in all possibility...... the
first anti cult book.
While pioneering where the need was great
I read the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich which also had a big influence on
me. The concentration camps....... the inhumanity and a missing God who
apparently didn’t really care started to chip away at my easily incomplete and
foolish beliefs.
I knew that General and future President
Dwight Eisenhower was one of the liberators of those camps. What I didn’t know
was that he was raised an international Bible student and the Kingdom Hall was
in his home. Talk about succeeding on an almost unbelievable
level!!!
In our early 20’s my wife and I left the
so called ‘truth’ .........we found a higher truth ‘Humanity’. Blame it on our
reading lol.........
So what influenced you.......... be it
books or any other type of media?