There's a lot of reasons why someone could still stay in the organization. Family, friends, prestige come to mind. Fear, uncertainty and worry could be reasons to stay on a little longer. What if the "slave" is right? What if Armageddon does come?......
What Might've Kept You Still In The Organization?
by minimus 44 Replies latest jw friends
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freelife
Maybe I would have stayed if i did not have to revolve my life around trying to get to meetings on sun. tue. thurs. and service and studying. between meetings and work i had no time to think for myself. but i guess they don't want you to think anyway. Also being told it is not right to date anyone who is not a jw. i did it their way and married a complete psyco bitch. She was wacked out.
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seattleniceguy
Hey Minimus,
I've thought about this one a lot. About whether I was destined to get out at some point, no matter what the particulars turned out to be, or whether there was one critical turning point that I may have missed had events worked out differently.
I think that in my case, seeing the truth was inevitable at some point. I had grappled with strong ideological problems with WT doctrine for a long time. The only thing that kept me in was being so busy. I was working full-time, attending the meetings in English, and helping a foreign language group too. I liked the feeling of being the guy people could count on, so I was happy doing all this scurrying around, but I had little time for quiet thought.
What finally forced the issue for me was a combination of a few different things:
- Over the course of a few years, I observed the strength of my arguments and "fallback positions" degrade slowly but surely. "Fallback position" is the name I give to the intellectual escape route that people use like this: "Well, maybe it's true that there's no evidence Isaiah was written that far back, but I know the Bible is God's word because of X." I found that fewer and fewer of these positions were holding up under even mild scrutiny.
- I quit my job and began working from home. This afforded me lots of extra time. I planned to start pioneering, but I wasn't due to start for a couple months.
- During those months I spent much more time out in service than was normal for me, and I met very many intelligent people with very intelligent things to say, to which I had no reasonable answer. I began to have the horrible feeling that perhaps I really was wrong, but I supressed it and prayed and studied as hard as I could.
- I began to hit it off with a girl in the organization that I really liked, and I think my subconscious realized that something had to be done before serious emotional harrm was done to one or both parties (due to the soon-to-surface doubts).
- My body began producing physical symptoms whenever something that disturbed my faith would pop into my mind. Most often, I would get sore throats that would appear within two seconds of having a thought that I could not logically argue away.
- A few days before I broke down, a few weeks from starting to pioneer, still loyal as ever for all I knew at the conscious level, I began to realize that I could not look into the future at all. I couldn't see myself in a year, a month, or even a week. It was like a black fog. For the first time in my life, I had no desire to do anything.
These symptoms were building in me a long time, and finally, events came together to force them to a head. But I think that perhaps my own brain engineered many of these circumstances. I think that this happens with a lot of people. I know people who are not rebellious but who have done things very far out of character and gotten themselves disfellowshipped. I don't think these are accidents. I think that below our conscious mind, there is a mind that knows something needs to be done and sometimes schemes up drastic measures to effect change.
One of the most interesting discussions I've read on how our mind tries to engineer these dramatic events is at a trading website. If you're interested, I encourage you to put disbelief aside and check out this link (the pertinent content starts under the subheading, "Structure of The Mind (A Fred-ian Model)"):
http://www.seykota.com/tribe/TT_Process/
SNG
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Sentinel
What I needed most was what they gave me less of, love and compassion. Had those two things been ever present, I may have overlooked all the silly doctrines, unanswered questions, rules and regulations. Perhaps I should be thankful that they did let me down.
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minimus
Seattleniceguy----I think I'm getting a sore throat.