Posted by ExDub [ExDub] on October 31, 1999 at 16:37:02 {MDPAlM8llYS2pgVcL2CgYwT5J/kZ46}:
In Reply to: Do you like the lie??? posted by Tantalus on October 31, 1999 at 15:59:24:
You know, I have wondered the same thing myself. I quit years ago. It took me a long time to get over the trauma of having been a JW, and then to start looking at spiritual matters again. It was a very traumatic thing for me. I did not run from the JWs to something else on the rebound. I just got away, feel that I escaped with my soul intact somehow!
Now I am shunned and somehow that is okay with me. I really only regret the loss of two friendships. And I look at one of them especially and wonder why she stays. She is intelligent and very sweet and kind.
She and I used to sit in my living room and talk about how the new system would come before my children were even grown. To even question whether that was true or not was to invite being "marked" or disciplined in some way.
Now my children are not only grown-up, but one of them told me she found a grey hair!
The WTS, I feel, was mistaken about the end of things (over and over), but I don't think they intended to lie. BUT, the lies are where they behave as though it was not a major doctrine of the faith.
One day my son had a witness come to his door. He stepped outside and asked how they reconciled that the end didn't happen. She was rather young and she told him that the WTS had never said the end was near really, that it was the members who'd said that. What a load! Not TRUE. She herself may believe that, but whoever told it to her was lying.
We had whole talks about the end times. It was continually pounded into us.
So, I agree, why on Earth would anyone stay in an organization like that?
ExDub