For me it was numerous nagging doubts about the character of the people who claimed to be the cleanest people on earth, morally speaking. So many cover-ups. I'd go to meetings and feel a strange yawning emptiness...look around at the people and see, with very few exceptions mask-like faces, some of the women especially, so stupid you'd say "Hi", they're stuck for an answer. It was being at another hall for a meeting where a brother tried gently to disagree with the ludicrous statement that all performing artists were immoral skanks..his sister 'was an opera singer and lived an exemplary life'. He was told to stick to the words in the study article (the script) and to refrain from dissenting comments (genuine expression). I went over to him and told him he was a brave man to say what he did. It was watching me and my little kids tossed aside like yesterday's trash for leaving an explotive, loveless marriage to an ignorant, crude and abusive dub, and be told I was unfit association for leaving. I can totally relate to EvilForce's take on the Chinese torture, Death of a Thousand cuts...the cuts so thin and deftly inflicted that you die by degrees,your personality and uniqueness drained away, your mind reeling from assaultive Double-speak, disoriented from the doctrinal ground constantly shifting from under you. One day I attended a CA and the eerie presentiment of evil was just too obvious to ignore. Even the air in that place was thick and unhealthy. I got up and bolted out of there. It was like escaping a manniquin warehouse, row upon row of plastic people just sitting there getting their minds deleted. Once the questions start...you're on your way out! You just can't help it.
zulukai
JoinedPosts by zulukai
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46
What was your breaking point?
by soundbox_guy inokay, i'm new as you all probably know, so my question may have been discussed several times in the past.
i'm just curious as to when some of you came to the conclusion that enough was enough and that you didn't want to attend the meetings anymore or not be a jw.
was it in field service, at home, at the hall?
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46
I'm new here
by Apostanator inthis is the first time i feel comfortable posting something.
i've been a lurker for over a year and i must say there are a lot of courageous people here who left the watchtower.
thank god for the internet and sites like this.
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zulukai
Welcome, welcome! You"ll be right at home here in no time at all....would love to hear your media story. I can tell you'll be a great addition to the crew! Lots of new ones lately, most encouraging to see. We're all in various stages of recovery, some still angry, even bitter with DAMN good reason...so you're in a mass exodus of a kind, one that's leaving a wilderness of fake friends and make believe....You're NOT in Kansas anymore, Toto! :- ) Zu
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My Story.................
by whyamihere inmy whole mothers side of the family made us think like that as well.
everyone knew who my family was!
i knew he was the once since i was 9 years old.
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zulukai
Brooke, I've just read through all the comments and especially the one from your mother-in-law!!! Fot the first time on this forum I am totally speechless.....all I can say is how wonderful that so many found their way out of that insane BS religion on account of what you went through. Most of us on this board have had sad and sorrowful times too.. and we can relate to your story....it's wonderful that so much good came out of it all!
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Governing body GUILTY of wife beatings
by gumby inan ex-dub friend of mine and i were discussing the various ways in which the wts ( governing body) has in so many ways, been guilty of many ruined lives.
i mentioned to him something i had forgotten about......that being the policy the witnesses had in the past with regards to how a witness mate handled physical abuse by their non-believing mate who physically beat them over their religion.. i related to him how my wife and i used to take a sister with an abusive mate back and forth to meetings for quite some time.
many times she had black and blue marks on her face as well as other areas.
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zulukai
I WAS in the Borg when all those nauseating articles came out and yes all kinds of real life situations were written up in fruity-tooty Borgspeak about the women who endured abuse for the sake of someday getting their abusers into the religion. It was made to seem like a "rite of passage" albatross some women had to bear. It made me ill then, it makes me ill now. I left an abusive JW husband and I can tell you the Borgites view these dub husbands in the same light...their wives have to put up with the abuse as if their husband was a non-jw., but the elders are not going to help you, end of story. Come to find out years later that the elder I went to for help was himself a wife beater. I told my sorry-assed husband, the worse excuse of a man I ever met, when he was slapping me around that he would have to kill me because I was going to keep getting up off that floor and fighting back. I left shortly thereafter and the rest is history. But I can also tell you that the hidden abuse in witness marriages is endemic to the closed and secret-society nature of the cult. This is why pedophilia flourishes also. The male superiority thing had it's roots as we all know in very ancient times and has always caused suffering and ignorance. The Borg cult knows very well that this is a useful tool of subjugation and they wield it with impunity as the women are doing the bulk of the preaching work and have to be kept in line. When women are uneducated their economic survival depends on a man, it makes women into chattels. That phrase "husbandly owner" says all you need to know about the experience of marriage as a JW. Many women have become distraught and emotionally devastated in witness marriages and this too robs them of the will to seek freedom. All according to plan.
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THE WATCHTOWER & ISLAM
by steve2 inthis question is aimed more at watchtower scholars who have impressed me with their ability to unearth amazing stuff from the distant and more recent past on statements made in watchtower publications:
1. has the watchtower ever directly critcised the islamic faith or its sacred text, the koran?
if so, what are some specific examples.
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zulukai
Aniron, your comments about your friend whose husband worked in Saudi Arabia are dead right on. Any evidence of Christian paraphernalia such as Bibles or traditional symbols such as the cross were enough to get anyone stupid enough to flash the ownership of such items in serious trouble. Two Philipino guys who tried to organize an xmas prayer meeting for the catholics were found out, taken to the men's prison and scheduled for exucution. They were spared in an eleventh hour reprieve barely put in place by the Phillipino government. Others caught doing similar things were not so lucky. Interestingly I was able to obtain an NIV bible WHILE I was working there through a highly organized Christian group in a highly convoluted smuggling operation involving spy-level hijinks that the CIA would marvel at. The people doing this were taking horrible chances. There was NO representation from the Borg. They wouldn't be bothered with the Bible anyway,they would want to smuggle in their mindless trash.
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I'm thinking about going back to college, any advice?
by zagor ini think it would be great final chapter in my healing process, and would love to catch up with my life anyway (most of guys of my generation have finished it long ago and have kids).
i'm interested in science and engineering, but i'm afraid my mind my have become too dull over many years of brain washing.
social sciences sound great too but im not sure if i like them enough to pursue such degree to the end.
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zulukai
Zagor... I'd like to pass on some more info re college from the perspective of your comments about what the Borg experience may have done to your intellect. The fact that we are all here together sharing our "x"-periences with the mindless drivel we lived through should be proof enough that our thinking abilities are alive and well. We saw it and we bailed out on the spur of our insights. In Alberta, Canada one ex-jw was a university prof. with all the credentials etc. James Penton is his name. There was a nasty controvery in that province in the late '70's or early '80"s that resulted in a huge disfellowshipping orgy that got rid of many good and honest people, and he was one of the first to be chopped. He wrote something you will find very interesting. It was his experience that when ex-jw's got the chance to go to college or university they experienced the mental phenomenon of their intellects surging ahead like wildfire. Some reported their IQ's testing off the graph, acing highly technical courses, winning scholarships. What I experienced in those regards startled me, I was even called back to the testing center because the counsellor couldn't beleive that an uneducated lowly housewife and mother could obtain such scores. Needless to say to find out that I WAS intelligent after all those years of intellectual junkfood and being trivialized ala the Stepford Wife syndrome was an event much like a resurrection and I have never looked back. You already realize you have talents, proclivities and abilities that are just sitting there waiting for the light of day. You too will be pleasantly surprised and I urge you to get the ball rolling as per the many excellent ideas on this thread. College was for me personally the best time of my life..it's when I joined the real human race and real human endeavor. My dear kids helped me get through the intensive study to become an RN and it brought us together in a far deeper way because they participated in their own economic wellbeing and future comfort. One of them became a dental hygenist and today is going to Vancouver, BC to start her training for part-time Coroner for the remote coastal community she lives in. My other daughter is a pharmacy tech in charge of a large medication distribution area in a major hospital. I shudder to think of the utter waste of their lives had I not left that mindless cult. Cheers! ENJOY and welcome to the rest of your life!
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I'm thinking about going back to college, any advice?
by zagor ini think it would be great final chapter in my healing process, and would love to catch up with my life anyway (most of guys of my generation have finished it long ago and have kids).
i'm interested in science and engineering, but i'm afraid my mind my have become too dull over many years of brain washing.
social sciences sound great too but im not sure if i like them enough to pursue such degree to the end.
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zulukai
I was enrolled in college four months after I left Borgville. I had two young kids to raise and a burning rage to get as far away from those depressed, under-educated dumbed down weirdos as I could. You might be surprised to find out you're a lot smarter than you think you are. I went for a battery of IQ and aptitude tests arranged by a Canadian government workforce agency, alas long since gone...but was that ever an eyeopening experience for me. Perhaps you could find similar help as has been suggested by Jeannie at a college, at an education fair. I look back on the years I spent in college getting a real education as a life altering experience. My mind and my intellect just began to grow like a starved thing..which in fact it WAS...I wonder why?? LOL Go for it and see if you don't agree. You may find as I did that you have many talents and many gifts and thank God you have a second chance for life. I knew several bright, promising young people in that cult who have sunk into do-nothing, go-no-where lives and I pity them. I took unbelievable verbal abuse about going to college, and especially about becoming a nurse. But, I have walked on the Silk Road, stood on a desert plain strewn with petrified wood from the dawn of the world's beginning, seen the "howling wilderness" spoken of in Deuteronomy, camped in starlight on the landlocked skeleton of a coral reef in an ancient Arab kingdom far, far from home. This is the real meaning of EDUCATION....these are the windows that open once you close the door to the prison of Borgville. Go for it !!!!
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THE WATCHTOWER & ISLAM
by steve2 inthis question is aimed more at watchtower scholars who have impressed me with their ability to unearth amazing stuff from the distant and more recent past on statements made in watchtower publications:
1. has the watchtower ever directly critcised the islamic faith or its sacred text, the koran?
if so, what are some specific examples.
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zulukai
If the WTBTS ever criticized Islam the way they have raged and deficated all over Christendom for decades there would be NO Borg, period. Our radical friends in the Middle East would have quite literally lit a match under the whole sorry-assed organization and sent it to kingdom come. It's quite spooky actually (to take another view here.)...but radical Islam has quite a startling similarity to the watchtower religion in several aspects. The hatred of secular education AND for the same reasons..it's the devil's way to corrupt the faithful. Women are dumbed down, treated like semi-retarded children and relegated to a servant's role and are seen as decidedly stupid, weak-minded and fickle. In Islam four women have to be witnesses to a crime before their testimony will stand in court and even then it may be disregarded on the whim of a male judge. The testimony of one man however is accepted as truth because women are too emotional and unstable. Ring any bells? I've read that same self-serving drivel in plenty of watchtower propaganda. Convienience marriage is another shared tenat. A man is not to enter a room and be alone with a woman or their judicial courts will decree that sex has taken place and the woman is therefore of suspicious morals. ( In Islam this usually means a death sentence however.) How often were we taught about not being seen in compromising situations for the exact same reasons A woman is not to teach a man, or have any authority over a man. And a rather interesting situation as regards pedophilia can certainly be found between these two religions. The LEGAL age for a girl to be married in Iran for instance is NINE. Yes, you read correctly. Nine year old girls in Iran are given in marriage to men of any age all the time. Pediphilia is a state sanctioned pastime in many Islamic countries, but it's ok because the little girls are "married". The Borg protects child molesters too. I may be stretching out too far here, but ever since I worked in an Islamic country and saw whereof I speak, I have had suspicions that the bizzare undercurrents presently coming to light about the witness religion are not of Christian origin at all, but along with Islam come from the same prehistoric mumbo-jumbo as the masons and the star worshippers of ancient Mesopotamia. The robotic mindset, the hypnotised lock-step mentality, the same death to the infidel hatred and freaky addiction to mind numbing rehash is just too similar for words. Maybe that's another reason the Borg doesn't diss Islam.
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letter from congregation
by by grace inhi all, i've been gone for a little while, but i'm back and i wanted to get some opinions.
back in april i told you guys that i sent out my da letter to the congregation, our family, and some of our witness friends.
well, we got a letter in response from two elders by certified mail.
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zulukai
That letter sure sounds like a form letter to me too...they probably have a filing cabinet filled with this stuff because so many are leaving. I also detect that they want you to come to them (a summons) so that they can have the last word and put you in your place. It chokes them up that YOU told them how it's going to be, not the other way around. Right now you are in charge of your own exit and THEY don't like it. Keep it that way. That's a better memory than the ones you'll have when they are through with you!
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Name Some Trivial Things That Are Big Deals To JWs
by minimus inso many things come to mind to show how silly jws sound in reality.
for example, being allowed to pass the microphones is a big deal, especially to a young brother.
or being given the "privilege" of cutting the grass or working on a "quick-build" is really something special to a jw.
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zulukai
CHAPARONES!!!...everytime there was a get together of young people there had to be a chaparone even if the party was in your backyard in broad daylight. Now I know it was because NO teenage witness kid could be trusted not to bring alcohol or pot to your prissy little BBQ...and if you turned your back they would all be playing "doctor" in the garage. A witness friend of mine even told me that grownup ADULT witnesses going out on a date have to have a chaparone now. Her older unmarried brother (a PO) was told he had to have another witness person along as a chaparone if he wanted to take some sister out for dinner....NEW LIGHT, She didn't like it when I blurted out What already!!!???... what are they going to do, sweep the crockery to the floor and start shagging on the cafe table??? This whole dumbass religion is a laughing stock. THE most bizzare shite passes for some kind of ultimate sacred proclamation with them. This woman was offended that I wasn't swooning with the wonder of it all.