Jst2laws, you have to make allowance for children who were raised from birth in the JWs who never gave wholehearted creedence to a conviction that there was or is a loving god. The farthest one can throw such young ones is their predictable fear of the unknown. Ie, they do not "know" there is not a god, so they must obey strictures imposed by parents. By this I mean that there is no God except what the parents enforce by disciplne and fear. God is contained in the belt, or the sword, and nothing else. There is no conviction that there is a being who treats one as a dignified equal, which is the story given out by those who say that God is love. So while being a JW can lead to atheism, and does, it is not the sole cause of atheism. To ascribe such undervalues the cognative faculties of those who see the glaring lack of evidence for god *before* they see the human hypocrisy that denotes unilateral, categorical untruth.
Going on memory here... "Faith is the assured expectation, the evident demonstration of realities though not beheld." I would distinguish faith from belief. As discussed in the Is Atheism Genetic thread, belief in itself is the seperation twixt animal and man. But religious belief is one step beyond that initial cognative advantage, and becomes a powerful and exploitable resource by those so talented. But the advantage, for my money, is incalculable. To anecdotize: Back in '94 or so, I read Tolkien's Silmarillion. I was so taken away and impressed with the veracity of its secondary reality, a concept Tolkein treats in his essay "On Fairy Stories", that I made a decision that his secondary reality, that of which we convince ourselves, was every bit, in every way, as palpable, savory, credible and morally instructive as every last bit of pendantic detail to ever come out of theologic apologetica, Catholic, JW or what have you. For me, it was moreso believable. And yet, one cannot choose to convince oneself of something which is obviously the product of inventive genius. Global deluge, regional Black Sea/Carpathians flood. Parting of the Red Sea, seismic activity that causes depressions into which vast amounts of waters rush (see history of San Francisco bay). Burning bush, mirage. Blood in the Nile, red algea. Ezekiel's wheel-within-wheel chariot, multi-circular atmospheric rainbow effects. Ezekiel's? vision of the amies of Jah standing around him, Devil showing Jesus the kingdoms of the world, fata morgana mirage. Star over the nativity, supernova. Pillar of fire/smoke, beacon bonfires set by advance scouts. ad infinitum. Every one of these required genius to apply the natural phenomena to a moral agenda. Occam's Razor boils everything down Except for that elusive quality, which I can equate most with divinity itself, the imagination, the creative faculty of magnetizing the tribe via tales of objective and reward. (Tolkein's revisionisms included Numenor as Atlantis legend, Valar as the Greek pantheon and the Elven languages as Latin and Germanic. As far as I'm concerned, there's no reason I could not devote my faith full-time to a mythology conceived no later than the Battle of the Somme, as others have devoted theirs to a mass-exodus (religiously-persecuted Puritans, anyone?) of a certain people out of Egypt., and the ensuing ingenius revisionism required to keep them coherent.)
I believe, based on the technological advances of society, that if one can conceive a thing, one can construct it. It follows that since we can conceive of a god, a diety, we can given enough time construct one up to our specifications. Therefore I see no retarding difficulty of the god-spot, because it is itself what lifts humanity up by the bootstraps. So as dealt with in Star Trek and similar sci-fi sandboxes, if a hypothetical communicator in 1963 can be duplicated by a cellphone 30 years later, what logical reason is there that a hypothetical species in 1963 could not be duplicated by a human-descended race of vastly more powerful sentient electron-field suspensions 30000 years hence? Granted, such a "god" would still be tied to out physical universe, our physical matter, but how much more of a leap would it be to become pure extra-universal energy, the stuff of which the hypothetical Christian god is made? [I may be stepping on Mormon territory, not sure.]
Based upon this, and recent theories on the nature of Time, I go one step farther to say that if one can suspend in their mind a continuum of time, like a timeline, and view all time as equal, then one can take the natural technological consequence of an inevitably created God, born of humans, as a contemporary event to what we call our own Time, then Presto, there is a God, and he is what humans have been saying for millenia, and he is up to par with their expectations. But this is a suspension, a model for looking at it, and can't pass for reality. But it helps me to conceive how people, ex-JWs or otherwise, can somehow believe in a Christian God. (And that's as Occam's Razor'ed as I can get it.)
