I'm atheist, and I don't believe ANY religion, to me they're all equally bogus as far as "truth" is concerned.
However, as one who has close contact with JWs, I know they are among the worst, socially and religiously speaking. They are a group of people who get "certainty" from their faith, not "happiness". To achieve "certainty", you have to have a bunch of rules and things you must not do, to convince yourself that you are doing "what is right". A true JW leads a very servile and pitiful existence, going door-to-door and preaching to people, trying to unload the watchtowers, actively blocking out ideas from non-believers, turning their back on the world.
And there's the whole literalism thing. A JW believes the strangest and most unbelievable parts of the bible to be LITERALLY true. To reconcile this literalism with the odd, fantastical and self-contradictory nature of the bible, they have an amazingly rhobust system of excuses that supposedly ties it all together and makes it "make sense", but it still doesn't make any sense. and then there are certain realities that creep in over time, which is why their doctrine changes so often. They have a bullshit euphemism for this rapidly changing doctrine, they call it "new light" as if god has thrown them a bone of wisdom.
And then there's the fact that you, your children and/or other loved ones will likely suffer negative consequences. They might insist that you stop associating with non-JW family and friends. Your kids could be SEVERELY screwed up from this particularly malignant kind of brainwashing. You might die from refusing a blood transfusion. This could happen the very day before they get some "new light" and decide it's no longer wrong to receive one.
And, quite frankly, by the best definitions of the word, it is, in fact, a cult. There IS cult mind control in both their social behavior and their doctrine, which you MUST swallow completely to become one of them.
If you must join a religion, I highly recommend you look elsewhere.
