Just finished this well written autobiography. Based on my 30 years as a dub, it certainly has the ring of truth throughout. It also parallels my own story, which was kind of spooky; I could have written this with only a few minor changes! Anyone know if "Alan Miller" posts here?
willyloman
JoinedPosts by willyloman
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49
You just gotta read the story, Fade From the Truth, A Tale of Learning Then Unlearning the Beliefs of JWs
by AndersonsInfo inevery once in a while there's a story so well told that it deserves lots and lots of kudos and plugs.
here's that 124-book length story which is the first one linked from "exclusive autobiographies" on the home page of www.watchtowerdocuments.com.
read it free!.
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Having the Circuit Oversear over for dinner...was it like a royal visit for you??
by Witness 007 ini rang a sister who i haven't spoken to for years who said "she couldn't talk since she was cooking for the c.o and his wife who have special dietary needs......was this like a royal visits at your cong and whats with the "we can't eat flour, or yeast" or blah blah blah!
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willyloman
Oh, yeah, especially Guy Pearce. Who now, of course, IS royalty.
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I just put a bullet in the head of....
by AK - Jeff in....my final jw relationship.. i did it.
i killed the relationship.. my cousin rick and i had been inseparable as jw's.
rick is five years my junior, and in many ways i tried to look out for him like a little brother when we were younger.. i have wrestled with an on again/ off again attempt to stay in touch with rick since i left jw's.
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willyloman
Jeff: Nice post. Further proof that leaving the WT influence behind often allows us to occupy the moral high ground.
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Verifiable Former Bethelite Willing to Answer questions
by Uzzah ini am a former active poster here, former elder, former bethelite and pretty much known by people on the xjw boards since the mid 90's.
gawd that makes me sound old.. i notice that a great deal of uproar is being made by allegations of a hide in the closet alleged bethelite.
to counter the damage caused by this claim, i am happy to address any questions people may have about bethel, protocol, etc.. i was at the canada branch for 11 years, worked in multiple areas including the legal department, service desk and writing dept.
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willyloman
Yet when I said I wanted to leave, they all but drove me to the gate.
Exactly. Most of us former "prominent elders" had the same experience and found that our exit wasn't met with wailing and gnashing of teeth. The silence was deafening.
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Did you Fade Gradually or Stop Attending Meetings Quickly ? Reasons ?
by flipper inbeen thinking about this and curious about what makes us all come to the decisions we came to in our fade/exiting the jw organization.. i think for myself having been born-in & raised a jw my doubts about the generation doctrine had simmered for years within me quietly and by the time i finally left in 2003 i had reached my breaking point.
also seeing unjust treatment of rank & file witness ( myself included ) just propelled me into my decision even quicker.
so - one day after meeting with 3 elders in a back room before a meeting and seeing their judgmental aggression towards me - i just told myself " enough is enough ".
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willyloman
Once we decided life could be no worse if we just up and left, things just fell into place. We changed congregations on the excuse that there was a KH closer to our home. Some months later my wife became ill for about three months (but had a full recovery) which provided an excuse to "step aside" as an elder. Then I started missing a lot of meetings to "care for my wife."
After a few months, called the congo secretary and told him we were moving to a different congo that met later in the day on Sunday so that "we could make more of the meetings." He said he would send our cards over to them along with a letter (which technically he wasn't supposed to do; Society direction is you show up at the other congo and they request the cards).
We never went to the "new" congo. A month or so later the secretary from that congo called and said he'd received our cards but no one had seen us; he wanted to know if we had changed our minds about moving over. I told him we were fighting serious illness and that we would definitely be there when we got better. He called a few times after that but we screened all our calls and didn't pick up. There were a few messages left, which we deleted without answering.
A few months later, an elder from one of our previous congos came by unannounced. He said he had spoken to some elders at a recent assembly and none of them had seen us at a KH in months. Ironically, I had just had some surgery and was on crutches. So he believed me when I said we were dealing with a series of health issues. I told him members of one of the other congos visited us often and that we were doing well spiritually (and we really were, altho not in the JW sense).
Within a month or so, we were both healthy and fully functional; we never attended another meeting again. Our lifelong "friends" rapidly lost interest in us. We went on to develop other interests and new friends and now have a wonderful life.
Like the rest of you, our circumstances were unique to us. What we did was use the knowledge the dub experience had taught us: you have to get off the radar by moving and resigning any "privileges" Then you lower your profile further by becoming weak publishers, missing a lot of meetings. Then you move again to get your cards transferred to a congo where they don't know you; elders hate having to deal with weak publishers who just moved into their congo and will find any excuse not to pursue them (they have enough problems already).
We took this complicated path out of dubdom because we didn't want to lose our JW family, and it worked. They're all ex-dubs now.
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POLL: Should a "True Grit" virgin (me) see the John Wayne version 1st?
by Open mind ingregor posted a "true grit" thread a few days ago but i didn't want to read it for fear of "spoilers".
as a jw youth, i was not allowed to watch the original "true grit" because it was too violent.
anyway, on to the opinion poll: for those who have seen both the original and the coen brother's remake, would you recommend seeing the john wayne version first?.
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willyloman
The original film (w John Wayne) has been on TV a lot lately and I saw it for the first time about two weeks before we went to the newest film. Despite the directors' claims that the movies are very different, in fact they are remarkably similar. Whole pieces of dialog are almost verbatim (because they are lifted from the book). The characters are largely the same. I came away thinking the newer one was a simple remake of the earlier film. There are a few differences but the plot is essentially identical in both. Some random thoughts on the actors:
Jeff Bridges is slightly better than John Wayne - but only because Wayne plays against type in the movie (probably why he got an Oscar for the role). Matt Damon is, of course, better than Glen Campbell (who was a singer, not an actor). The "14 year old girl" in the story if the real star of the film and both actresses are phenomenal in their roles - easiy the best thing in either version of the film.
The new film tacks on a "many years later" scene that is from the book but missing from the older film. It may or may not add much.
Bottom line: it was a good film 45 years; it's just as good today. Better? Depends on who you ask.
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Is A 'Moderate' Opinion of the Governing Body Possible?
by metatron inradical circumstances push people into extreme frames of mind.. it seems to me that, for some time now, the governing body of jehovah's witnesses has been surrounded by increasingly more difficult circumstances and hardships.
they have cut magazines, literature, sold off real estate, dumped long term bethelites, dumped paid subscriptions, railed against facebook, condemned college attendance, and begun to sell off branch offices.. a moderate, reasonable viewpoint of these changes is easy to come up with: the rank and file are broke, burned-out and dispirited.
furthermore, the increasing depth of these changes would push any reasonable person to conclude that the organization is in quiet decline - far from any realization of heavenly intervention.. the above would logically push a reasonable person towards the conclusion that the 130 year doomsaying history of the watchtower society is a pious fraud at best.
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willyloman
Events in my own congregation led me to realize this was a man-made organization and its leaders had the same failings for which JWs often criticized other institutions. A come-to-Jesus moment for me was early one Sunday morning when my eyes opened and it was all too clear. I was so shaken I told my family I wasn't going to the meeting that morning. Instead, I drove 60 miles to a scenic lake and sat on a deserted dock alone with my thoughts. In those moments, I knew this dub thing was nothing special and that I would need to get out and take my family with me.
That was in 1992.
We left in 2003.
That's how strong their hold is and illustrates how difficult it is to get out when you are so invested emotionally, intellectually and socially.
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Why can't the WTS handle the truth on why people really leave the organization?
by RULES & REGULATIONS inwhat do you think are the reasons why the wts can't handle the truth on why members quit?
why must they disfellowship everyone who would say something like this to an elder on why he/she no longer wishes to be a member......................................................................................................... '' i do not want to be a member any longer because of the changing ''generation'' teaching,the wts is just a publishing and real estate corporation,the preaching work is just a means to distribute books and magazines,the baptism and disfellowshipping of teenagers is wrong,the meetings are boring,the meetings are repetative, the 144,000 is symbolic not literal ...etc.....etc.....
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willyloman
Terry: brilliant analysis of the Placebo Effect on the whole dub concept. I know, I lived it. Once I outgrew it, there was no turning back.
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Do you remember the moment that you stopped believing that it was "The Truth"?
by freeflyingfaerie inwas there one incident or epiphany that struck you hard?
or was it a slow...gradual awakening (no pun)?.
my coming out of the jw coma (as i like to call it) began at a family rendezvous in the beautiful florida gulf coast.
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willyloman
For me there was no one big "wow" moment. It was a gradual thing punctuated along the way by a series of events. Much like Terry's experience, there came a day when I came to the realization that I had outgrown the religion.
It all starts, IMO, when you begin to answer those nagging questions that all dubs have (but are trained to squelch). When you start to sit with your thoughts and follow them out to their logical conclusion it becomes clear there is a reasonable and valid alternate point of view. When you allow yourself to look at it from another angle, the whole thing suddenly looks very different. It's that classic paradigm shift people talk about.
It's like the illustration someone used in a talk once; he held up an apple and asked what we saw, then answered his own rhetorical question, describing a delicious apple. Then he turned it around and showed the back side of the fruit which had been hidden by the palm of his hand. He had taken a large bite out of it and allowed it to sit for a day or two and turn brown. When he held up that side, it was no longer appetizing.
His point: things look different once you examine all sides. He used it to illustrate how the world could look shiny and appealing but still be rotting away inside. What he didn't say is that the same thing could apply to any organization - including the one we are most familiar with.
In the end, once the toothpaste is out of the tube, there was no putting it back. That's where I found myself, There was no other choice but to move forward, into the light.
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"The 1975 Fiasco Viewed from Inside Bethel"
by leavingwt invia the brooklyn heights blog, a former jehovahs witness, now a convert to orthodox catholicism, recounts his days as a bethelite in the witnesses' brooklyn heights headquarters, in a series of recent blog posts.
part i -- the journey from jws to the orthodox church.
http://orthocath.wordpress.com/2010/02/27/the-journey-from-jehovahs-witnesses-to-the-orthodox-church/.
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willyloman
Like 'Crisis of Conscience,' this blog has the ring of truth and is highly recommended reading for anyone coming to grips with their own exit journey.