Oh God, the things I remember...
I remember sitting, aghast, listening to fetishistically detailed torture methods employed on our "brothers and sisters" from whatever landlocked African shithole du jour was spastically destroying itself. I was under ten years old. I have never, to this day, been able to look at bicycle spokes without having images straight out of Stephen King's worst nightmares springing instantly to mind...
I remember, years later, sitting in a car full of young JW teens, with everyone speculating on what things would be like in the "New Order." When it came to be my turn, I couldn't think of anything to say. I believed, even then, but my otherwise rather copious imagination always failed me when it came to imagining Paradise...
I remember shutting my eyes tightly, every night, and praying "incessantly" because I was terrifed of demons. I always laid awake for at least an hour, every night, without fail, with every part of me covered by blankets except the tip of my nose. I remember hearing stories of levitation, of telekinesis, of changed voices, of visions in mirrors. Supposedly secondhand stories from people whom, at the time, I trusted implicitly. For years I could not look at mirrors in the dark because I was afraid of what the demons would show me in them. To this day, in the fullness of my adulthood, I still have a hard time looking into mirrors when it's dark...
I remember hoping that God would spare me, that he'd know I was "just saying it," because I knew I'd never be able to look into a loved one's face with a gun held to their head and not denounce everything I believed in to spare their life.
I remember losing myself in fiction, especially science fiction. I remember wishing that I could wake up one morning as a character in one of Anne McCaffrey's novels. I remember the escape these dreamings provided...
Now, as an adult, an avowed and confirmed "inactive," someone who stays (barely) in for his wife's and his parents' sake, who looks for every excuse possible to miss meetings, who has not prayed to an imaginary, petty, vindictive, evil old man in the sky for over five years, who has not knocked on a door nor raised their hand to "comment" in a similar period of time, who lacks the guts and the balls and the personal integrity to just make a clean break, AS THAT GUY, I sit and watch my wife tell my children to pay attention at meetings.
I listen to them talking about how utterly vile the world is, how nobody in the world will help anyone else, how everyone is just out for themselves.
I hear them monger fear, fear of Satan and demons and the Great Tribulation.
I hear them talk about rape, and sexual immorality, and oral and anal sex, right in front of my three- and eight- and ten-year-olds, as though it is a proper thing to talk about in public in mixed company in the presense of children.
I hear them vilify Harry Potter and, ironically, the works of C.S. Lewis.
I hear them demonize college, and doctors, and the medical community, and science, and scientific thought, and independent thinking, and homosexuals, and female ministers, and every other religion on the face of the planet.
And I think... how much more of this can I let happen? How much longer can I let this go on? And when the times comes--and come it will--when I move from passive, self-hating, pathetic inaction to actively controlling my own (and my children's) destiny... what will happen then? Will I even be allowed to see them anymore? Will they grow up hating me? What will they be told about me? When and how will I will back their trust, their love?
Make no mistake. This "faith" screws children up, really badly.
