being born in to me was devastating.
when you are a child born in and raised with the they vs us and they are evil and worldly and going to die.
not allowed to form relationships with anyone not one of you.
James Hetfield of Metallica and Ellen Degeneres were raised Christian Scientist. Beck was and is a Scientologist.
There are a lot of successful people who've overcome similarly screwed up childhoods. One of the biggest benefits I derive from telling people about my JW upbringing is learning that I'm not on an island. Lots of people have had to overcome similar challenges.
It doesn't make our upbringing okay, but it does put things in perspective.
being born in to me was devastating.
when you are a child born in and raised with the they vs us and they are evil and worldly and going to die.
not allowed to form relationships with anyone not one of you.
In some ways, being a JW accelerated my development and in other ways is stunted it.
I left the JWs in my mid 20s. I had been in leadership roles since I was a 17 year old regular pioneer. My reading, writing and public speaking skills were well above average. I was much better prepared for college and the working world than the average person my age.
However, I was incredibly underdeveloped from the perspective of relationships and dating. We were never allowed to date normally and the principles that formed the foundation of a JW relationship were often completely at odds with those in the real world. Whereas being a rule-following JW was often enough to attract a female JW, in the real world you had to develop yourself more fully as a human being.
Women expected an interesting personality, romance, and excitement. Normal people spent their teenage years fumbling through romantic relationships honing their dating skills, and I was expected to learn this as a grown man when the stakes were higher and the tolerance for mistakes much lower. It was bad, but I worked through it.
my husband and i were discussing the rally cry shortly before 1975, stay alive in 75 (1975), some here believe that the end might come in 2034 (some tongue in cheek) counting 120 years from 1914 the same internal between when god supposedly pronounced judgment on the people on the earth before the flood would come.. so it could be, no more after 34. i thought it was good and funny at the same time..
I don't see this current crop of GB getting back into the date-setting business. It's all "the end is near because we say so" with these clowns.
anyone remember 1992?
i can remember i was in the cult.
times were changing at a rapid pace.
I've been on this forum for 12 years now. I faded a few years before that.
I've been pondering how the current crop of millennial ex-jws are different than the boomer/early-GenXers who left shortly after 1995.
I wasn't an "apostate" in the late 90s, but I do remember visiting the old H2O forum on two occasions. One was purely by accident as news had started trickling in of new GB appointments and I went online to confirm it. The second time was in connection with a search for the Creation book. That little blue book convinced me at 15 years old to forget my doubts and embrace the "truth" of the Bible.
During the few minutes I spent on that forum, I saw well thought out, lengthy debates about doctrine. Someone had gone through all the footnotes of the Creation book and pointed out how the quotes were misleading. There were echoes of that on this forum still when I joined 12 years ago, but the impression I got was that those debates had been thoroughly exhausted and were being brought up fresh as new arrivals discovered them. For the most part stuff like 607 BCE, blood, real WT history, had been settled.
But the JWs who were leaving and finding online forums in the late 90s were folks who were raised on Freddie Franz' ramblings and who were encouraged to do lengthy research into various WT doctrinal topics. Some folks fancied themselves JW scholars of sorts. It makes sense that a certain amount of reprogramming would need to take place in order to truly free yourself. I went through that lengthy process myself and it probably took a solid year or two.
However, if you go to the exjw subreddit today, which is full of millennial and post-millennial ex-jws, doctrine is hardly brought up. It's certainly not discussed as in depth as it used to be 15 years ago. I have to think that reflects the post '95 environment in the Witness world. The trend after '95 was steadily against "deep study" and more in favor of obeying for obedience's sake. There's no need to verify anything, just trust the governing body. People who grew up in that environment don't need the deep doctrinal deprogramming that I needed when I made my escape.
i'm not sure why this memory popped up, and i was wondering if any others, when they were still active jw had dealings with a pyramid scheme involving other witnesses in the organization?
at the time it was 1993, and my husband and i were still newlyweds.
once in a while, we would attend a neighboring congregation because that was where he grew up, and some of his family was still attending there at the time.
Looking back on my childhood, there wasn't a single door-to-door scam that my mother didn't fall for (including allowing herself to be converted by JWs who knocked on her door). She was a poorly-educated immigrant woman trying to raise a family in a strange country.
Frying pans, tupperware, vacuum cleaners, cassette tapes and study programs to teach her to speak English, encyclopedias...all of it. And we barely made enough money to keep ourselves above the poverty line. We couldn't afford any of this, but, you know, payment plans.
My brother got sucked into Amway. He paid the up front fee to receive his starter package but moved away from it quickly when he saw too many religious parallels with the Amway folks and convinced himself they were under the influence of demons.
Homeopathy was popular, too. I'm convinced one local woman had munchausen by proxy. She'd go to quack herbalists who would diagnose various sicknesses in her children. They would take various sugar-looking pills throughout the day. Those kids were terrified of the world because their mother saw monsters around every corner.
The local congregations were hotbeds for this kind of stuff. They are communities of gullible people with underdeveloped critical thinking skills. For scammers it's like shooting fish in a barrel.
so i’m just reading the part in ray franz book “crisis of conscience” about the 1925 prediction of “millions now living will never die”.. ofcourse all witnesses are very familiar with this campaign.
yet none of us ever had an issue with it, including myself.
since the booklet was published in 1920, we are one year away from 100 years from that time.
The big A has always been, and will always be, immediately behind the next overlapping corner.
Every child who has grown up a JW has been told he or she will likely never graduate high school given the nearness of Armageddon.
Seventy years ago the JWs were publishing books telling children not to bother even thinking of marriage because it would just complicate things during the Great Tribulation.
ronald l. lawson ph.d., professor emeritus, queens college, cuny – papers on seventh-day adventism, with some comparisons with mormons and witnesses.
9 january 2019. link.
a question that continues to draw research in the sociology of religion is what factors spur the growth of religions (kelley 1972; iannaccone 1994; bruce 2002; hoge and roozen 1979; stark and finke 2000).
This video does a great job of explaining Adventism and its offshoots:
The same guy presented a varitation of this with more of a focus on JWs:
ronald l. lawson ph.d., professor emeritus, queens college, cuny – papers on seventh-day adventism, with some comparisons with mormons and witnesses.
9 january 2019. link.
a question that continues to draw research in the sociology of religion is what factors spur the growth of religions (kelley 1972; iannaccone 1994; bruce 2002; hoge and roozen 1979; stark and finke 2000).
I tried to convert a former school teacher when I was around 19 years old. I gave him various books to read, and his comments to me were that the teachings really reminded him of Seventh Day Adventist teachings. He had experience with this because some years prior, a SDA couple tried converting him. He just kept going back to how similar the teachings were.
A year or two after that, I started a Bible study with a SDA. He thought it was going to be more of an exchange of ideas, so it didn't really last very long. He told me the same thing, that there were a lot of similarities in the doctrine.
It wasn't until I was out and learned of William Miller, the Second Advent movement, and the spin off groups that were so influential in the development of Charles Taze Russell's teachings, that it all began to come together.
This chart promulgated by William Miller was kind of what put everything in perspective. CTR later copied this same basic framework to arrive at 1914. For William Miller, the date was 1843 (later 1844), but CTR just changed a few things to arrive at his preferred pet date.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Miller_(preacher)#/media/File:Millerite_1843_chart_2.jpg
i can't say much out of fear of getting caught, but i overheard a jw i know on the phone with a friend talking about "how close we are to the end.
" yeah, yeah, i know.
we've been on the brink of armageddon for well over a century, but what struck me about this particular instance was what she said next.
I discovered this forum by accident. I was already inactive and 99% out mentally.
In 2006, out of the blue I got a mass JW chain email. It said that a Bethel speaker had announced at an assembly that Matthew 24:14 had been fulfilled. The end was really, really near this time.
Since I had lost contact with JWs, I had no one whom I could reach out to in order to verify this statement. A tiny piece of me was afraid that I had made a mistake and would realize that the JWs were right far too late.
So, I googled "has Matthew 24:14 been fulfilled" and it led me to a thread on this board. Apparently, the chain email had been widely circulated and there were several threads discussing it.
So I started reading and kept reading. I would stay up until 2 or 3 in the morning every day reading and reading. Within a week or two I was 100% out and have never looked back.
Moral: This kind of "the end is really near this time" panics have happened frequently throughout the 130+ year history of the WT.
a post on another thread got me to thinking and writing.. should we even be trying to get our loved ones out of jehovah's witnesses?.
when a person truly believes in their belief system, or even if they don't but have held to that system for a long time, there is nothing we can say that will move them from that system.. why?
perhaps pride.
It's an interesting thought experiment. If I could snap my fingers and have my elderly parents magically wake up, would I do so?
Part of me thinks the humane thing to do would be to allow them to continue with their comforting delusion. Another part of me thinks that if I were in their shoes, I'd like to be confronted with the truth, consequences be damned. But I can't get in their heads and determine what their preference would be.
For me, it took roughly ten years before I fully came to terms with leaving the JWs and felt like I'd reached some version of being "normal." They probably don't have that much time left.
At the end of the day, though, it's just that, a thought experiment. You can chip away at it, but they have to want it themselves. There were multiple conversations that I had along the way that chipped away at the foundation of my JW faith, but I had to connect the dots myself. Nobody woke me up.
#/media/File:Millerite_1843_chart_2.jpg){kind=link}