This will be the first of a series of articles I’ll be doing for this new website, along with a blog. I’ll be dropping in a new article every week or so, and hope to get at the blog every day or two. As it says above, my name is Robert F. Smith, known to many as Seeker4 from the H2O, JWD, JWN and several other Jehovah’s Witness discussions boards, where I posted many thousands of times over the past decade or so.

The heading above sums up what the focus of my blog and the articles will be - what brought me from decades as a third generation Jehovah’s Witness, a very active elder, Pioneer, assembly overseer and more, to not just rejecting the literal theology of the Witnesses, but also rejecting the Bible as an inspired book and the concept of god as well.

This site is intended to provide active Witnesses, former Jehovah’s Witnesses, people studying with the Witnesses and others with inquiring minds, access to the variety of paths that a small group of ex-Witnesses have taken. It will also provide an in-depth look behind the curtains of what being a Jehovah’s Witness is really like and of how the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society (WTS) itself functions. Many of us that are writing and blogging here have had an extensive background in the Witnesses and with the WTS, amounting to literally hundreds of years. Many have been elders and Pioneers like myself, others, like Randy Watters and Barbara Anderson, have served for years at Brooklyn Bethel, the WTS’s world headquarters.

Our purpose is to show how we have handled life after the WTS, and to provide some guidance, support and resources for others dealing with issues and questions about Jehovah’s Witnesses. The Witnesses like to paraphrase the verse in the gospels where Jesus asked his apostles if they also wanted to leave him (John 6:66-69), and they answered, ‘Where else is there to go? Only you have sayings of everlasting life.’ The Witnesses add the "only" there, apply it, not to Jesus but to the WTS, and use it when someone says they are leaving the organization, or when thinking of leaving themselves, assuming that there is essentially no life or happiness or sense of accomplishment outside the Watchtower organization. In fact, The Watchtower magazine and other WTS literature has frequently made reference to the thought that it is impossible to be happy or content in life without being an active JW. That is just one of many WTS myths that the writers here will quickly dispel.

We’re here to show that that is not true at all. We’ve all taken a variety of paths, some to other religions, others to various forms of spirituality, and still others, like myself, have stopped believing in the supernatural all together. In fact, during my several years activity online on the Jehovah’s Witness and ex-Witness boards, I’ve come to think that the Witnesses have produced an extraordinary number of atheists and agnostics like myself. While I have no concrete data, any shout-out on one of the threads for those who have become non-believers will produce a considerable number of responses.

I know that there will be some reading this who will wonder how it could be possible to go from feeling that one has an intense, personal relationship with Jehovah God to feeling even more strongly that Jehovah God, and any other god, demon, devil or angel, simply does not exist except in imaginations, stories and mythology. In fact, it’s quite a simple and straightforward journey, though often not an easy one. That’s what my series of articles is intended to do, to take you through the process I went through, first in coming to question the teachings of the Witnesses, then in coming to question the Bible as the inspired Word of God, and finally to rejecting religion all together.

I was not born into a Witness family. I was born in Keene, NH and have lived all of my life here in the Northeast of the United States, mostly in Vermont. If my father had not died at 34, a few months before I turned 2, my story, and that of my three older sisters, would be quite a different one. But he did die, sadly, long before I was old enough to have any memory of him, and my mother moved to Vermont and remarried. My stepfather’s mother was a nominal Witness, and would remain so all her life. I would guess that it was through her influence that my mother and stepfather began to study with the Witnesses around 1961, when I was about 9 years old. During those intervening years I remember briefly attending a Baptist Church and a few Sunday School classes, but little else having to do with religion. I also remember celebrating Christmas, and even being in my school’s Christmas pageant a few times.

But all of that would come to an end in the early 1960s. In late March of 1963, my parents were baptized as Witnesses. I’d been sitting in on their study with Russ and Barb Hemingway in the early years of the Bellows Falls, VT congregation, and took quickly to the Witness teachings. I was bright and mature for my age, and on October 26, 1963, at the ripe old age of 11, I was baptized as well. I have to admit that 11 is young for that step among the Witnesses, though certainly not unheard of, but if you haven’t gotten baptized by 16 or so, people begin to wonder what’s wrong. You’re not old enough to vote or drink or marry, but the Witnesses have no problem allowing a child or teenager to take such a drastic, life changing step as dedicating their lives unreservedly to a god, and, especially under the current questions asked at the time of baptism, also dedicating themselves to an organization, the Watchtower Society. Why do I call it drastic? Because once you do it, there is no easy way out. Leaving a high control religion like the Witnesses is difficult indeed.

As their name indicates, Jehovah’s Witnesses pride themselves on worshiping the Jehovah of the Old Testament - a rancorous, foul tempered, punishing deity if there ever was one. So, you might assume that there would be some pretty strict penalties among his followers, and you’d be right. Among the most damaging punishments is the Witnesses’ adherence to a strict form of shunning toward those who leave the organization. It is not unusual for parents and grandparents to be disowned by their children and grandchildren, and vice versa. Someone who leaves the Witnesses, who is disfellowshipped - the Witness’ word for excommunication - is viewed as the worst of the worst.

So, you get baptized as a kid, say when you’re 13 or 14, then realize by 18 or 19 that you don’t really believe everything that the WTS teaches, but what can you do? Discussing your doubts can get you disfellowshipped, as will having sex outside of marriage, getting drunk, smoking pot, smoking cigarettes, joining the military or any one of a few dozen other prohibitions in the WTS catalog of serious sins, most of which are common parts of the average teenager’s rite of passage into adulthood. If you are a baptized teenage Witness and do any of these things and get caught or confess, you risk being disfellowshipped, with the result that you might very well be strictly shunned, not just by members of the congregation, but also by the closest members of your family. It’s a daunting situation to face for anyone, and especially a young person, making the fear of being disfellowshipped a powerful tool for the Witness organization in keeping people in line.

Often, if a wayward, disfellowshipped older teen is living at home, the parents will be encouraged to ask them to leave. I’ll never forget the anguish in the voice of a close elder friend many years ago as he told me how a Circuit Overseer (a traveling JW elder who visits congregations in a circuit of about 20 different congregations for a week at a time) pressured him to kick his disfellowshipped son out of the house. He gave in to the pressure, made his son leave home, and regretted it forever. It left the son with no support, the elder told me, and just made a bad situation worse.

None of those things were really an issue with me at the time that I got baptized at 11. Life in the small Bellows Falls Congregation of 40 or so Witnesses provided me with a number of good friends, as the Reimann family, the Hemingways, the Sauves and a few other families in the congregation all had kids around my own age. We’d get together for meals after the Sunday meetings or stay over at each other’s house on the weekends or school vacations. Get-togethers with kids from nearby congregations were common, and we’d have ice or roller skating parties during the year.

The Witnesses also had two, three-day-long Circuit Assemblies each year, where several hundred Witnesses gathered for a program that included Friday evening, and all day Saturday and Sunday, and they were great social events as well. Then during the summer, a longer District Convention was held, including some memorable ones I attended up to eight days long at Yankee Stadium in New York City. The first one we attended as a family in the summer of 1963, and there were others during the 1960s in Manchester, NH, up in Montreal, Quebec, Essex Junction, VT and in Springfield, MA that I remember well. Conventions at Yankee Stadium in 1965, 1969 and 1971 were also memorable, often with 100,000 or more people spilling out onto the outfield for seating.

Those were interesting years for me. I attended high school through the volatile 1966 to 1970 period, and I was definitely torn in two directions. I had an intellectual and artistic thirst that was at times so strong I could literally feel it burning inside me. But the excitement taking place in society in general during the 1960s was matched by the excitement taking place in the Watchtower Society at the same time, and deserves it’s own column.

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