Good grief, I'm feeling positively prehistoric after reading "Villalobo's" post - I was dragged into the religion kicking and screaming by my parents in the 1950's!!! [BTW, this is going to be a looong post...]
Saw a lot of crap go down. Girl children weren't considered of any value, so often I got to be the proverbial fly on the wall. I remember being 5 years old, taken to a KH by my grandparents (who lived in the Black Hills of SD at the time) and standing in a brightly lit KH, looking at the darkness outside and having an utterly overwhelming urge to just run into that dark night and disappear - forever!
I remember hearing about ol' Moses receiving the 10 commandments and recognizing that it was actually a volcanic eruption that apparently the Israelites and their god were too stupid or ignorant to figure out, and wondering why none of the supposedly intelligent adults around me recognized the clear description of a natural phenomenon. Sodom and Gomorrah's destruction was probably also a volcanic eruption/pyroclastic flow; spotted that one right away, too. Some of the 10 plagues of Egypt also fit volcanic phenomena.
Then there was Abraham. When gawd asked him to kill his kid, he just simpered and said, "O-K, YHWH! Whatever you want!" Even as a child I knew that wasn't right - in fact, it really freaked me out. It wasn't until recently that I found out why Abraham agreed so quickly. Seems the Phoenicians used to live in the land of Canaan, and seems that they eventually made an exodus of their own to Carthage in North Africa. Seems that the Romans, in their usual rumor-mongering way, claimed that the Phoenicians were into child sacrifice.... So guess who ol' Abraham must have been hanging around with, to have so quickly and easily agreed to kill his only kid? Nice slither out of it, though. "Uh, fellow Canaanites/future Phoenicians, a new gawd told me I wasn't supposed to kill my kid, so now I'll have a real lineage and become a nation with enough men to form a military force! But "GAWD" told me to spare my kid...."
Then there were the beatings/kickings during the "family Bible study". Get this; my dad, who was prone to depression, joined this religion to escape his depressions! [He was manic-depressive, actually...] So here we have an adult male wearing his steel-toed work boots kicking a little nine-year-old girl in the shins every time she slumped, slouched, or didn't answer enthusiastically enough to please him. I saw a lot of child beatings in the JW KHs... I remember when I was seventeen I had to pull a little blond girl (12 years old) off of the throat of her little black girl (12 years old) best friend. She had a double-handed throatlock on the other kid and was slamming her head into a support pillar of the KH. Mind you, there were many adults standing around chattering after the meeting which had just closed, but they were totally oblivious to what was going on. Immediately after I separated them and asked the little black girl if she was alright, I hear my mother's totally clueless voice shrilling behind me, "And here's [my name], playing with the little kids again!" That experience taught me quite a bit about the mind-numbing effects of WTBTS mind control - apparently all the adults were pretending it wasn't happening!!! That little blond girl was third-generation JW, by the way - her grandmother had gone around all the doors with the phonograph player running the recording by ol' Drunk Judge Rutherford in the '30's. Her daughter, the child's mother, had briefly come to her senses and left the religion, but Grandmomsy apparently guilted her back in. Then she tried to get her unbelieving hubby into the religion and beat her own kids. No wonder the blond kid snapped...
Then there were the examples that some of the JW adults set... When I was around 7-9, somewhere in that age range, some JW bimbo in the little town of Evergreen, Colorado, decided that she needed to obey some new light issued by the WTBTS, I guess?? What this nitwit did was have an affair with another JW, a boy about ten years younger than her (she had two children that weren't much younger than myself) and then told her non-believing Sherriff's deputy husband about it. I'm guessing that she asked for a 'Scriptural' divorce at the same time. Needless to say, the guy pulled a gun and blew her brains out. I can't remember whether he got the boyfriend too; maybe he caught them "in flagrante delicto". Anyway, I clearly remember cringing when I went to school for about 3 months while this whole scandal erupted in the newspapers. Good Ol' Rocky Mountain News! The editorial staff of that newspaper HATED the JWs, and whenever a JW did something stupid or illegal, you can bet the Rocky reported it. They were a good source for the REAL DIRT that the WTBTS would see swept under the rug, otherwise.
Around that time, I heard about William H. Whalen's book "Armageddon Around the Corner", and decided to read it. His descriptions of the WTBTS as an organization that "discouraged marriage" rang true with me, and many other unflattering things in the book about the WTBTS, too. But being just a kid, I couldn't leave the family and strike out on my own. I remember when I was 12, running into a man at the door who told me that "That organization's just using you!" Instead of defending the organization as a good little brainwashed JW should, I practically grabbed the man's hand and begged him to tell me what he meant by that. But I was out in 'service' with an adult, and he gave her a sideways glance and shut up. Apparently she was giving him the 'evil' eye... But I knew that something was definitely wrong - just too much physical violence at home for me to get my head clear long enough to come up with good solutions - or even find a non-JW adult that I could trust and confide in.
Somewhere around the age of 17 the indoctrination kicked in - or, as George Carlin put it, "No sense in getting the crap beat out of you every day!" I caved and got baptised, which made my vicious, petty-minded parents very happy and me thoroughly miserable. I turned down an unbelieving aunt's gift of a thousand dollars to go to college on, which astonished my parents. (These were the same people who, as Christmas rolled around, would drive us around to look at all of the pretty lights because THEY were nostalgic about their childhood Xmas's, and buy us "non"Xmas presents sometime in December. I always told them to buy the DAMM things in January when they'd be on SALE!)
But by that time the WTBTS indoctrination had kicked in, and then there was my parents' nasty, vicious belittlement of my existence (Dad's frequent denigrations of women in general and me in particular; he really relished that Middle Eastern Male attitude of the WTBTS...) had drastically reduced my level of self-confidence. I even married the first JW twit that proposed to me, and spent nine horrible years married to him. Then, in order to get out of that marriage (it was that or suicide, and I had too strong a survival instinct for that!) I played by the WTBTS rules and had a couple of "one-night stands" to get out of the marriage. Looking back on it, I should'a just lied about that - claimed I'd slept with someone and deluded the elders - but I was still playing the WTBTS game.
Around about that time (late '70's to early 1980's) secular information began coming out about child-beatings. Thanks to the good old Rocky Mountain News (again!) for printing the real truth about things (!!), I recognized my father's vicious behavior in the articles in the news. Then the WTBTS installed new Printing Presses at Bethel! And guess what?? The call went out through the congregations - and I can still remember their exact words.... "We are seeking people who can program computers, and they must have received a COLLEGE EDUCATION IN COMPUTER PROGRAMMING, not self-taught..."
I hit the roof!!! How dare they discourage ME from getting a college education and then ask for help only from people who received the very thing they've been condemning for 20 - 40 years or more!!! Then - two parents in some congregation out in Aurora beat their child to death, and were put on public reproof because, as the elders put it, "the police had to be called in". In other words, if this had somehow been hushed up, without bringing in the authorities, there would have been no "public reproof". That's when I realized that if my dad had beaten me to death when I was a child (he knocked me unconscious at one point) the JWs and the WTBTS wouldn't have given a spit!! That was in the early 1980's; I walked out and never looked back. But I had made several conscious choices through the years that had prepared me to leave: 1. I never had children by the JW hubby, 2. I had made 'worldly' friends and 3. I obtained enough training in accounting (not a degree, though that would have been nice) to be gainfully employed and self-supporting. Many poor JW girls and women never even get this far.
Long post; sorry 'bout that. I'll shut up now. Zid
