Thank you guys very much for the warm welcome! I appreciate the info on the acronym, every forum seems to have their own.
I found this forum via google, can't remember if I found freeminds or here first and it's been eye-opening. Mrs. Eagle and I have have been attending a church (gasp! Christendom - harlotry!) for about a year. Well this church is a conservative bible-based old-time praying church (which really freaked me out first to even walk in because I was born and raised a jw. As a child I only went into one other church for a wedding and we were scooped up and dragged out almost knocking over the bride to get out the front door when the ceremony ended. Thank goodness armageddon didn't happen during that wedding!) This church is filled with many individuals - I like to call them "people" and these "people" have many different opinions on everything from scripture interpretations to ideas about how the sanctuary remodel should go (chairs or pews.) Then these "people" participate in something called 'politics' not republican/democrat politics (they're into those also) but cliques and pecking parties and affiliations. They can't even decide on the hiring of a music minister without a filibuster. This bickering back and forth with some of the "people" getting their feelings hurt was making the Eagles very uneasy and we couldn't figure out why. We even considered quitting, we quit the jw's so why shouldn't we quit the church? Well, I bent a knee and sought direction. And then I got on the computer and googled 'jehovah's witnesses' and started reading. I didn't read the pro-jw stuff because I get that everytime I visit with the majority of my relatives and it always sets off my bs detector.
Anyway what I found was pretty amazing. I realized we were viewing those "people" at the church through a great big WTBS, with the emphasis on BS, made magnifying lens. We are the ones with the issues, not the brothers and sisters at the church. Every little nit-pick clique-y political thing those folks did or does is ok, because they can, they are allowed. They're human and that's what humans do. We were looking for perfection because that's what we were taught to look for, finding fault because the wt said to. I had to re-read and re-learn and re-apply numerous scriptures like 1Thess 5:12-15 and 1Cor 13:4-7. Yeah I had read them thousands of times but I had to remove the wt's little extras like 'love...keeps no records of wrong - unless you see Sister Publisher go to an r-rated movie and then we wanna know about it and if you don't tell us you saw her we'll call you to the backroom and counsel you' The more I read on this forum on cults and their nefarious effects the more I realize I have to change my own thinking.
Gopher - you wanted to know more about how the Eagles found out the truth about the troof. Well, I guess it started on the wedding night (way, way, way late into the night). We started talking about the wedding day and the people we had seen and the ceremony. I brought up elder overzealous' comments before the wedding about her trip the day before to the apartment. Needless to say it ticked her off and we started playing a game of 'Did you know that they (said, did).....?' It seemed that we had a rather large collection of ammo of offenses that these holy spirited appointed men committed. That got the ball rolling and it just kept rolling. If I had to pick out something in the literature that really pushed me off the fade cliff it was the revelation book. Until I started reading the early russell rutherford carp I don't recall reading a bigger load of psycho-babble self-promoting nonsense.
Speaking of babbling it's after 3 in my timezone and I need to stare at the back of my eyelids for a while. I am a night owl but its late even for me. Thanks again everyone for the welcome words!
