There was a lead up to the one defining moment. About three or four years before I left I was discussing with one of my closest JW friends and we agreed that there was no proper evidence for anything which the org taught. All of it was asserted without evidence!
Later I spoke to a local and elderly bro who by his age was one who naturally took the emblems at the memorial. In fact he had been a secretary for Rutherford in the late 1920s but by now (late 1980s) was regarded as an eccentric oddity. A single man who gave his life to the org and could have done with some help but JW charity hardly came his way. Nevertheless I informed him of my doubts and he, obviously taking his own counsel which was skeptical of the Watchtower, suggested, confidentially that I take my own.
I had started to read philosophy; Pascal, Nietzsche and the deist Kierkegaard. I had as a pioneer never believed in a literal devil and reading Kierkegaard on Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac was the defining moment. Early one sunny afternoon standing by the window in my office at home, I realised that God too was a fabrication of the human imagination.
If a voice from God told me to sacrifice my son I would not and could not do it. God is a psychopath and the bible is full of psychopaths! It’s a work of deranged and totally human thinking. Goodbye God and the Bible!
I went to the meeting and
squirmed in my seat as I saw the brothers haplessly parroting the praises of the GB and "God’s
organisation", so blind, so indoctrinated, unthinking, misled. I could endure it no longer and had to leave
during the meeting... perhaps no one noticed but for me it was an immensely liberating
gesture to leave and to know that I would never attend again. I had been a Watchtower zombie and now I was to become myself, what
freedom and hope there was!
Once you understand why the JW org is so very wrong; you can
never return.