Posts by Galileo

31

My life - a brief history. Part 2

by Galileo in

this is part 2 of my journey out.

part 1can be found here.. .

choosing madness.

Galileo

I hope you don't consider suicide, Buddy. That is no answer.

Don't worry about me. Those days are years behind me now.

31

My life - a brief history. Part 2

by Galileo in

this is part 2 of my journey out.

part 1can be found here.. .

choosing madness.

Galileo

If it's not too painful Galileo, I'd love to hear more about how things went with your wife.

Actually it's very painful, still, but I will share it in part 3, which will probably be the conclusion (I won't know until I write it).

Galileo, you and I are going toe to toe if you leave another story hanging!

Ha ha! I know. I lied earlier when I said I hate to stop on a cliffhanger. I love it! But the conclusion is coming soon.

31

My life - a brief history. Part 2

by Galileo in

this is part 2 of my journey out.

part 1can be found here.. .

choosing madness.

I'll try and finish it by tomorrow. I have the flu this weekend so it's slowing me down and clouding my thoughts, but I hate to stop on a cliffhanger, so let me put your mind at ease: I lived. Honestly I was never that close to suicide, and if I would have done it at all, it probably would have been years of contemplation before I actually did it. But the fact that I was thinking about it so much made me realize I couldn't continue on like that.

Once again, thanks to everyone for your interest in my story. It is the first time I've told it to anyone. I know many of you can relate. I hope it may help some who are going through this right now.

31

My life - a brief history. Part 2

by Galileo in

this is part 2 of my journey out.

part 1can be found here.. .

choosing madness.

Galileo

This is part 2 of my journey out. part 1can be found here.
Choosing Madness

Over the next several weeks I did intense research. Every question that had ever made me uncomfortable, for which the Society had no answer or an unsatisfactory one, the questions I had been taught to put out of my head, I now put under a microscope. I did not do what most witnesses think of as research, i.e; read whatever the Society has written about it and accept it without question. I opened the Societies publications only to verify their position on things, then closed them and looked at genuine reference publications.

I was dumbstruck.

Again and again, the Watchtower Societies publications were so wrong that they either had the most incompetent researchers imaginable, or they were being deliberately misleading. The “Creation” book, one of my favorites because it seemed to explain so clearly the evidence for design in nature from a scientific perspective, was absolutely worthless from cover to cover. To an evolutionary biologist, that book is a joke. It became clear that it was not written to convince scientists at all. It seemed to have been written to convince those with little or no scientific education that science supports the idea of an intelligent creator behind everything, which it does not. (A brief aside: The idea of an invisible hand directing events either currently or in the distant past is both unverifiable and unfalsifiable, and therefore generally considered by scientists not to be a scientific question).

At some point, I don’t remember the circumstances, I came across Leviticus 7:14-16. Of course virtually all Witnesses are familiar with Leviticus 7:14, but I don’t recall ever reading verse 15:

14 For the soul of every sort of flesh is its blood by the soul in it. Consequently I said to the sons of Israel: “YOU must not eat the blood of any sort of flesh, because the soul of every sort of flesh is its blood. Anyone eating it will be cut off.” 15 As for any soul that eats a body [already] dead or something torn by a wild beast, whether a native or an alien resident, he must in that case wash his garments and bathe in water and be unclean until the evening; and he must be clean. 16 But if he will not wash them and will not bathe his flesh, he must then answer for his error.’”

If you came upon a body that was already dead, then it couldn’t be properly bled. The blood has already soaked into the meat. So this scripture says, in effect: Don’t eat blood. But if you do, take a bath and be unclean until evening?! This is the issue that is so important that we were dying over?

When I was seventeen I had watched a friend, a beautiful young Spanish teenager named Maria, slowly die over a period of eight months. She had Leukemia. Some friends and I would go visit her in the hospital on weekends, watching her life’s force drain a little more every week. Even in her last days, when she was too weak to even get out of bed, she insisted on her sisters and mother helping her get dressed and put her makeup on when we were coming to visit. When I met her she was so beautiful, so full of life, that you never would have guessed she was sick. The last time I saw her, less than a week before she died, she couldn’t have weighed more than sixty pounds.

In most of the population that has access to modern medicine, Leukemia has a very high survival rate. But among Witnesses, because of their refusal of blood based medicine, it’s a virtual death sentence. In the years after my eyes were first opened to the deception of the Watchtower Society, whenever I heard a Witness express some variation of the standard “Even if it’s not the truth, it’s the best way to live”, it was Maria’s beautiful young face that always came into my mind.

There were other issues. Many others. Eventually I began thinking about the burden of proof. I thought about how before I learned these things, I was convinced that the Watchtower Society was correct, and so anyone trying to make the case that they were wrong had to prove it overwhelmingly. As the scales tipped, and one fact after another shifted away from the Watchtower Society’s favor, I began to realize this burden, seemingly insurmountable at first, had been met. I began to find it harder and harder to answer the question “Why do I believe?”. Then finally the answer came: I believe because I choose to. In spite of the facts, in spite of the evidence, I would force myself to believe. Admitting disbelief would mean losing everything I cared about. My family wouldn’t speak to me, my friends would abandon me, my wife would certainly stay with me unless I gave her a scriptural reason to go, but her sadness would be unbearable. I would never be able to explain to her why I stopped believing or she would leave me on the grounds of apostasy. So I chose to believe. I decided if I was going to do this, I might as well go all in. So I not only stayed in, I became positively zealous.

I threw myself headlong into spiritual life. I started taking off two days a week to accompany my wife in the field ministry. I was used more and more as an example in meeting parts. I always commented at meetings. I became close friends with elders and pioneers. All the while my faith in religion and god was slipping further and further away.

By the time I was appointed a Ministerial Servant I was an atheist. I had stopped praying altogether, except before meals with my wife or if asked to in public, in order to keep up appearances. I began giving Public Talks. I wondered what the congregation would have thought if they’d known that their speaker was an atheist. Then I wondered how many others were doing just what I was doing, simply going through the motions because they had too much to lose. I have come to believe it’s quite a large percentage.

I kept this up for years. The emotional toll was tremendous. I became withdrawn. I rarely slept more than a few hours a night. I felt as though everything in my life was an illusion. My marriage, my friendships, my identity itself. It was tearing me apart inside. I had managed to keep everything, everyone I cared about, but the price was a pretend existence. I could pay that price for a while, but it added up quickly. After three or four years of this, I became desperate for breathing room.

I couldn’t bear to try to convince someone else to convert. The very idea made me feel sick. I stopped going out in service during the week. We were building a new Kingdom Hall, and I used this as an opportunity to help do site prep on the weekend so I could avoid weekend service as well. If I wasn’t out in service people assumed I was at the hall site, and vice versa. I also started finding projects around the house that would take up my weekends so I wouldn’t have to make excuses to my wife.

I became withdrawn, distant from everyone. I feigned illness often. I was so exhausted from leading a dishonest life that I felt I just couldn’t do it anymore. I started leaving out points in my talks that I felt were untrue, and bringing in extra material that I felt was accurate, yet could still be interpreted as supporting the Society’s viewpoint. No one seemed to notice. On the contrary, people always told me how much they enjoyed my talks. On one occasion the outline for a forty five minute public talk I was scheduled to give was so full of nonsense I couldn’t see how to salvage it. So I just left the nonsense out. I finished in what must be some sort of record – twenty minutes. It was the last talk I ever gave.

For over a year I found ways of getting out of field service entirely, and then made up time at the end of the month. I was getting more and more depressed. My wife tried to help me, but of course she couldn’t, because she had no idea what the real problem was. And how could I tell her? By this time I had been pretending to share a belief with her for over five years, a belief that was the center point of her entire reason for existence. I began drinking heavily. I couldn’t see any way out.

My thoughts began turning more and more towards suicide. I would lay awake at night and imagine what it would be like to hang myself. One day I was home alone and started to search online for painless methods of poisoning. Suddenly the realization of what I was doing hit me hard. It was like I had been shaken awake from a dream. I knew something in my life had to change and quick. I summoned all the courage I had, and when my wife got home, I told her I couldn’t do it anymore.

Although we stayed together for two more years, our marriage ended that night.

41

My life - A brief history. Part 1

by Galileo in

this post has gotten quite long so i decided to break it up into at least two sections.

i hope it doesnt come across as rambling.

i should start with a confession: it was my smurf that walked out of the kingdom hall in the early 80's.

Galileo

A lot of History and Science. My local library carries a lot of stuff from The Teaching Company. Here's their website. If your library doesn't carry anything you're interested in you can request what you want through the inter-library loan program (although this often takes a long time).

Sorry everyone on the delay of posting part 2. I had some issues come up late this evening that I had to take care of immediately. I should be able to finish it and post it tomorrow evening.

41

My life - A brief history. Part 1

by Galileo in

this post has gotten quite long so i decided to break it up into at least two sections.

i hope it doesnt come across as rambling.

i should start with a confession: it was my smurf that walked out of the kingdom hall in the early 80's.

Galileo

Wow, you guys, the response has been overwhelming. It's so incredible the community that has formed here. What would we all do without the internet? Look for part 2 tonight. It's getting kind of long, so there may be a part 3 as well.

Seeker, that's wonderful. Writing for a living has been my dream since I was ten or eleven. I have published a few articles in the technology field, but I don't know if I have the self discipline to make it a career.

41

My life - A brief history. Part 1

by Galileo in

this post has gotten quite long so i decided to break it up into at least two sections.

i hope it doesnt come across as rambling.

i should start with a confession: it was my smurf that walked out of the kingdom hall in the early 80's.

Galileo

"You will find that there are quite a number of Ex JWs who are highly intelligent and who also missed out on college."

Of this I am quite certain. It is one of the reasons I stressed my early academic potential. The story of what this group does to their children, the opportunities it robs that have lifelong implications, is a story I felt needed to be told. It resonates with almost everyone that was raised "in the truth". I am sure it has been written about by many others, unfortunately, my experience is far from unique.

41

My life - A brief history. Part 1

by Galileo in

this post has gotten quite long so i decided to break it up into at least two sections.

i hope it doesnt come across as rambling.

i should start with a confession: it was my smurf that walked out of the kingdom hall in the early 80's.

Galileo

Thank you everyone for the kind words. I am going to try to write part 2 tomorrow. Maybe in the evening. The irony of writing my experience on a Thursday night seems to good to pass up. But then there's also Lost...

Inkling, Douglas Adams is my hero! One of the great critical thinkers of our age, and died much to soon. I wept when he died. Have you read the Salmon of Doubt? It is incredible. It was published posthumously, and has some incredible nonfiction essays in it.

41

My life - A brief history. Part 1

by Galileo in

this post has gotten quite long so i decided to break it up into at least two sections.

i hope it doesnt come across as rambling.

i should start with a confession: it was my smurf that walked out of the kingdom hall in the early 80's.

Galileo

Yeah, don't know what happened the first time. I copy & pasted from Word & somehow I lost all formatting. Had to go back and manually re-edit. D'oh!

41

My life - A brief history. Part 1

by Galileo in

this post has gotten quite long so i decided to break it up into at least two sections.

i hope it doesnt come across as rambling.

i should start with a confession: it was my smurf that walked out of the kingdom hall in the early 80's.

Galileo

I thought it would be fitting that my first post here should be an introduction. This post has gotten quite long so I decided to break it up into at least two sections. This is the first, I will post the second soon. I hope it doesn’t come across as rambling.

I should start with a confession: It was my Smurf that walked out of the Kingdom Hall in the early 80's. Just kidding (If you don't get that then Google it).

I was born into a Witness family. My father was disfellowshipped and my parents divorced before I was five. When I was in kindergarten my teacher told my mother she was so excited to have such a gifted student in her class. Years later my mother told me she thought the teacher was crazy, "What is a gifted five year old? Someone that can stack blocks well?" Since education was unimportant and borderline apostate, my mother did what any good JW parent would do when confronted with unusual intelligence in her child: she ignored it.

In third grade and again in fifth, at two different schools, It was recommended that I attend a special school for gifted students. Both of these requests were met with yawns of irritation from my mother. What would worldly education matter when Armageddon would be here before I ever saw the inside of a High School?

In middle school I was finally put into a program for gifted students. My mother had no quarrel with this, as it was during regular school hours and didn't require her to do anything. It was the first time in my life that I actually enjoyed school. Mrs. Baie was one of the few teachers I remember clearly from school, and the best teacher I ever had. She often came over to talk to me while the students were working on their assignments; about how "special" I was, about how far I could go, about the importance of college. She suggested that I could skip over grades, that I could possibly even start receiving college credits before I even got to high school. I explained to her that I had no intention of going to college, and this broke her heart. She started calling my mother to have her convince me of the importance of college. Of course this was to no avail. She wanted to have my I.Q. tested. My mother refused. By this time my mother had come to accept that I was indeed blessed with an unusually high intellect, however, her rote reply was that this was a gift from Jehovah that should be used in service to him and to the congregation. “Worldly” education was a temptation from Satan. People that went to college came out evolutionists. I of course agreed submissively, as I had been conditioned from birth to do.

By the time I got to high school, I came to view education as a distraction from spiritual pursuits, the waste of time that I was supposed to see it as. I knew no employer worth working for cared about a high school diploma, they wanted college. I was long since resigned to starting my own business. Without college as a goal, high school seemed beyond pointless. I started to miss a lot of school. I missed so many days that the rules of my high school dictated that I had to repeat my freshman year, regardless of grades. I stopped attending all classes but Algebra. One day my Algebra teacher came over to me and asked "Why are you here? You've missed too many days. I can't give you a grade." I responded that I like math, and I wanted to learn. I told him education should be for its own sake, that it shouldn't be about grades. He never questioned me again.

At fifteen I dropped out of school and got my G.E.D. My test scores put me in the 99th percentile of graduating high school students in all subjects except, ironically, in math. Just because you like something doesn't mean you have an aptitude for it.

The summer after I got my G.E.D. I was baptized. I was fifteen, and I was embarrassed it had taken me so long. Most of my friends were baptized at twelve or thirteen. I Auxiliary Pioneered the following month. This was the start of my “spiritual progress.”

I moved out on my own, with a roommate at first, when I was sixteen. At seventeen I moved from the Pacific Northwest to the south, to a city that was booming economically, in order to start a janitorial business. Not the type of work I would’ve chosen, if I had been presented a choice, but it was one of the few businesses that could be started with very little money and no experience. Inside of two years I was married to a very spiritual (and very beautiful) regular pioneer sister.

Her spiritual interests were the reason I married her. I knew she would be a good and caring wife, and an excellent spiritual partner. I liked her a great deal as a friend. I did not love her, at least not in the romantic sense. I had been deeply in love before, with a girl whom I had had a two year relationship with, and who I very much wanted to marry. I knew what it was like to be in love. I knew even as I proposed, as I walked down the aisle, and through the next ten years of our marriage, that I did not love her in this way.

I can imagine some of you reading this and thinking that I am explaining this fact, the fact that I didn’t love her, in order to excuse some future action on my part, an affair being the most obvious candidate, so let me assure you now that this is not the case. I have only ever made love to one woman and to her only within the bounds of wedlock. Neither did I leave her. I tried desperately to make it work, right up to the end, and in the end it was she that left me. But I am getting ahead of myself.

I have always had a voracious appetite for knowledge. I read on average about two books a month (this past month it was five), both fiction and nonfiction, and I have read at least that much for as long as I can remember. I love learning about history and science. I can’t get enough. My business was not intellectually stimulating to say the least. As my business progressed and I started taking on employees, my job started to require more and more time driving between job sites. I started checking out audiobooks by the armload from the library and listening to them as I drove. It was wonderful. I discovered there were entire college courses on audiocassette! For the second time in my life, I found myself in the position of learning for its own sake what I would never receive credit for, and I loved it.

One day while listening to a college course on ancient Egypt, I learned something that would change my life forever. The Egyptians have written records and artifacts back to the time of the supposed biblical flood and before. Centuries before. The ramifications of this hit me like a ton of bricks. Even if archaeologists were off in their estimates by a thousand years, the flood story can’t possibly be literally true. Yet the Egyptian and surrounding peoples’ fascination and meticulous recording of the positions of the stars make it highly unlikely that the estimates are off by even a few years.

I started to do my own research, going to Barnes & Noble and looking through books of ancient history. In one such book, a chart of world history, I came upon an even more startling fact purely by coincidence: The Babylonian Exile started in 587 B.C.E. This couldn’t possibly be true. That would make the 1914 chronology invalid. Without 1914, all of the other prophetic dates are wrong as well, since they’re all based on 1914. Without 1914, the Watchtower Society has no claim to being anointed in 1918. They would have no reason to exist at all, in fact, such a major failing would be overwhelming evidence that they should not exist at all.

I opened up another book: 587 B.C.E., I opened a third: 586 B.C.E., still another: 587 -586 B.C.E. Even while my trembling hands were pouring through book after book, desperately searching for a single one that backed up the date of 607 B.C.E. (which I would never find), the tumblers of my mind were clicking into place. There were things which had always nagged at me: why do we start from 537 B.C.E. and count backwards seventy years to get the date of the start of the overthrow of Jerusalem? I had always assumed that it was because scholars had overwhelming evidence for the date of the return, yet were unclear on when the overthrow happened. Yet this always seemed odd to me nonetheless. Weren’t there records of both the beginning and the end of the Jewish exile in Babylon? Why are there animals that are clearly designed to eat meat if they’re all going to be vegetarians in the New System? Why is the Old Testament so much more full of far-fetched miracle stories then the New Testament?

These and a myriad other doubts came flooding to the surface over the coming hours and days. Why does the New Testament claim that epilepsy is caused by demons? Why does the bible say the Earth is a circle if there is a Hebrew word for sphere? None of these were new thoughts to me, but I had always been able to lock them away, to bury them, to quarantine those thoughts deep within my mind, where they couldn’t infect my worldview. Now, that room was too full, the lock was forced open and those thoughts all seemed to tumble out at once. My mind was screaming for answers, and I had to find those answers, or deny reality entirely and go tumbling once and for all into madness.

For a time, I chose madness.