Sunday, March 29, 2009 marked an important anniversary in my life. On March 29th, a year ago, I was sitting at the famous Jersey City Assembly Hall, watching the talks as they were presented in American Sign Language. I was feeling out of place during the assembly day for the first time in my life, having been raised as a JW. 

 

During the lunch intermission, I felt as if I no longer had anything in common with the people around me anymore. I was in college at the time, in my last semester getting my bachelors, and what I learned fascinated me. Yet no one around seemed a bit interested in my schooling, as it had no bearing on "spiritual things". Finally, during the last talk, I paid close attention to what the speaker, a Bethel Representative, signed. I remember 2 key points from his talk, summing up the lessons of the day:

As I listened to that, something clicked inside of me. What about people who can't spend that much time in this "all-important" work? And why does this "all-important" work seem so futile, with such meager results. 

 

 

In our ASL congregation, we had 36 pioneers. Yet in the year since our congregation was formed, meeting attendance was level, hardly any interested people came to the meetings, and definitely no-one got baptized. I thought to myself, "all this work for nothing!", yet we must continue "as much time as possible"??? For the first time in my life, it seemed like a mindless statement.

 

 

My thoughts returned to the brother giving the talk. He was mentioning a second important point, which I cannot forget, as it made me have a "Matrix" moment:

At this point, my college trained critical thinking mind kicked in. 

"What if", I thought, almost out loud, "the organization is wrong after all? What if those who criticize it have valid criticism? Why does the organization mention the criticism so much if they have the truth?" At that, it felt as if scales fell from my eyes. A few months later when I saw the movie "The Matrix", I felt exactly as Neo felt when he opened his eyes and he was in a matrix, full of dulled, hypnotized, drone humans. I looked around at everyone that was in attendance, and it seemed as if they were all enjoying the program. But I was not. I resolved at that moment never step foot in a Kingdom Hall ever again. I felt bewildered, confused, even terrified. The religion that I had been raised with, spent 16 years of my life in full time service with, including at Bethel, as a Special Pioneer, and even at Gilead and in Missionary service. Yet this was not the beginning of my doubts about Jehovah's Witnesses, rather it was a culmination of years of wondering about the "truth".

 

 

As a child, somewhat persecuted, bullied, or ridiculed at school for my faith, I needed confirmation that what I believed was really true. I was a frequent visitor to the library, so I sought out books about Jehovah's Witnesses. I was perhaps 10 years old and I found Marley Cole's 2 books documenting the history and success of Jehovah's Witnesses. Here was the confirmation I needed! Jehovah's Witnesses were a normal religion after all, since an independent author such as Cole lavished praise on the Witnesses and their stand. (It wasn't until I left the Jehovah's Witnesses that I learned that Cole was a Jehovah's Witness himself, so this was a publicity stunt by the WT to establish credibility. Well, with me, the ruse worked.)

I grew up with a keen appreciation for Bible prophecy. As a teen, I remember getting out the old books explaining Revelation (Then is Finished the Mystery of God and Babylon the Great has Fallen) and reading the books in my spare time. I swallowed every word and believed it wholeheartedly. However, when I began to study Daniel, I felt twinges of doubt for the first time. Daniel mentions an enigmatic period of 2300 days. The Society claimed that this period was fulfilled from 1938 to 1944, with the publication of certain Watchtower magazines. While I accepted everything that the Society said as truth, I drew the line here. It made no sense, even to my childish mind, that the 2300 days that Daniel was prophesying, were fulfilled in 2 obscure issues of the Watchtower magazine in the late 1930s. This seemed completely arbitrary, yet I knew that Jehovah was providing new light to his organization, so I figured that maybe this prophecy has not yet been fulfilled, and perhaps Jehovah will clear this up eventually. At the age of 14 I was baptized, fully believing that I was serving God Jehovah.

I began to aux pioneer shortly thereafter, and loved the truth. Shortly before beginning my senior year at high school, at the age of 17, I became a regular pioneer. A year later I attended pioneer school where I really enjoyed the in depth Bible study and the training in the ministry. One point stuck in my mind, though. We were discussing the concept of context and Bible interpretation. Psalms 37:29 was mentioned as a scripture that we used frequently, yet it had a different contextual application. The instructor pointed out that, according to the context, the verse merely indicates the psalmist’s belief that righteous people will always live on the promised land, not that a particular group of people would live on the earth forever. The latter, he explained, was the extended application, which we could use. But we should remember the contextual application when we explain the extended application. I filed that thought away along with my feelings about the 2300 days and kept on pursuing "spiritual goals".

These goals eventually took me to Bethel, where I spent almost 3 years. 

Later, I served in Ecuador as a need greater, and was appointed as a Special Pioneer, and served in congregations where I was the only MS or elder. During the mid-90's, when all the new understandings about the generation, sheep and goats, and celestial phenomena were coming out, I was conducting the Watchtower study in my little congregation of 16 publishers. While I felt that some of these changes were a bit odd, I felt that God was behind it all, thus he was revealing these truths to the congregation in his due time. One assignment I had to do on the service meeting was to explain 1914 and the 7 times. I found that I could explain it easily, as I knew all the proof texts and could do the calculations, but as I would do the mental leaps necessary to defend this teaching, I found myself uneasy. "Why isn't this prophecy clear in Daniel?", I wondered. "Why do we need to infer that Nebuchadnezzar reflects something greater?" "Are we making the right inference?" "Why do we go from 360 day lunisolar years to make the 2520 year calculation, and then switch to 365 day solar years to arrive at a conclusion?" Of course, I put these doubts out of my mind and filed them along with my other misapprehensions, confident that Jehovah would clear things up in time. After all, this is what the WT said to do if we had doubts: 'keep busy and wait on Jehovah'. I followed the instructions exactly.

I also had some questions about the governing body and the FDS. From my earlier service in Bethel, and having been raised by someone claiming to be of the anointed, I knew that the idea that the entire body of anointed Christians around the globe did not prepare the spiritual food. I knew that the GB did not know who my step-father was, and probably did not know who other anointed were outside of Bethel. Once, while I was in Bethel, it was announced that there were only 35 anointed persons in the whole Bethel family including brothers and sisters (around 1991). The end must be close, I was sure, since there were so few anointed ones at Bethel, and the GB was so old, once they would die, they had hardly anyone at Bethel who could replace them. Would they contact my step-dad one day, since he was anointed and much younger? I couldn't imagine him being a spiritual leader of the organization, especially with his hot temper that seemed so unchristlike. At any rate, I knew that the GB was running the show. It was definitely not the whole "anointed remnant". 

Yet each time I would conduct a Bible study and get to the chapter about the GB and the FDS, I had to teach something I knew to be wrong: that the FDS refers to the entire body of anointed Christians on the earth and that they are dispensing spiritual food to us. I knew that was not true, yet, obediently, I continued to teach it, confident that Jehovah would clear things up in due time.

However, my biggest doubt to date happened in the year 2000. The Society published an article indicating 6 lines of evidence that we were in the end. I really did not find the lines of evidence convincing, and that itself bothered me. But the last piece of evidence was easily tested: the end is near because the number of anointed ones is decreasing. I pulled out the yearbooks from the past few years. The most recent one showed an increase, not a decrease. I was shocked! I had caught the society in a lie, yet no one seemed to notice. Again, I placed this thought in the back of my mind and kept busy in Jehovah's service.

As time wore on, perhaps because of our theocratic history, when my wife and I applied to Gilead, we were accepted rather quickly. Gilead seemed to give preference to those who had experience serving in a foreign land, so we made it! I thought that this was the opportunity to clear up all my doubts and see Jehovah's guiding hand. The society assigned us to read the whole Bible before we arrived at Gilead only 3 months away, which meant reading about 17 chapters a day and little time to read anything else, including Watchtower publications. While this was a lot, for the first time in my life I was just reading the Bible without any WT interpretation. I got a different feel for the Bible, although I couldn't put my finger on anything particular, though, until I got to the book of Revelation, the week I arrived at Gilead. Reading Revelation I realized that there could be many interpretations of the book, and perhaps the Society's interpretation of some key texts (such as Rev 1:10) was flawed. Shudder the thought! Here I was in Gilead, wondering if the Society was correct in its interpretations!

As Gilead began, the doubts in that corner of my mind that I had suppressed all those years started to assert themselves. I had supposed that Gilead would be a huge relief, since the more in-depth study of the Bible would bolster my faith. However, I found that Gilead had the opposite effect, since the in-depth study showed that some beliefs did not really stand up to scrutiny at all.

As we went through theocratic history, I began to question whether Russell was really guided by God after all. The old literature - which we had free access to in the Gilead library - seemed so alien and unlike the modern JW literature, so that it seemed a stretch of the truth to call it "the truth" since "current truth" did not resemble Russell’s truth at all.

Much of Gilead is spent discussing the Bible verse by verse, chapter by chapter - but in an unusual way. I would have expected that in Gilead we would read through the Bible and extract the practical lessons that would assist us in missionary life. There were, of course, a few lessons which used this method. However, the majority of the classes focused on prophetic parallels.

 

 

It turned out that every event in the Hebrew Scriptures was just a foreshadowing of the modern day history of the Watchtower organization. Job's comforters? False religionists attacking the anointed. The 10 plagues? This occurred to show how the work that Jehovah's people did since 1914 caused plagues to occur ion modern day Egypt (the world) in a spiritual sense. Noah and his unnamed wife? Jesus and the anointed remnant. Samson? The anointed remnant. Elijah? The anointed in the time of Russell / Rutherford. Elisha? The anointed in the time of Knorr since 1942. Isaiah? The anointed. Jeremiah? The anointed. Daniel? The anointed. Behemoth? God's organization. Leviathan? Satan's evil organization. Israelites leaving Egypt? The anointed. Vast mixed company? The great crowd. Get the picture?

 

 

Everything positive in the Bible was said to be a picture of the anointed since 1919. Everything negative was a picture of some aspect of Satan's organization, especially false religion.

 

 

Gilead transformed the way I looked at the Bible - nothing that was written could be understood unless it was representing something in the WT organization. It seemed too much to be true, it was so much overkill that every single event in the Bible had its fulfillment since 1919, that it ceased to be believable.

I realized that I could cite by rote all the scriptures necessary to prove any of these points. I could cite the chain of scriptures needed to prove 1914, paradise earth, the idea of 2 hopes, the great crowd, but each of these beliefs became less believable as I progressed in Gilead, and even the Bible itself seemed to have been devalued by their over-analysis.

Some further topics in Gilead caused me to have further doubts. Brother Carey Barber of the GB gave a talk called "The 1900 Year Old FDS". I looked forward to this talk with keen anticipation, as I imagined that it would clear up my apprehensions about the distinction between the GB (which is the de facto FDS) and the claimed FDS (all the anointed). Yet this talk left me grasping for air. Barber made the bold assertion that Jehovah has always had his true anointed worshippers since the 1st century in an unbroken line (hence the 1900 yr old slave), yet when Russell arrived on the religious scene, we had already learned that he had made an independent study of the Bible. This made no sense to me. Why would the GB assert that the FDS was running the organization when that was not true in reality? My doubts were growing, yet I resolved to continue waiting on Jehovah.

Another key teaching that caused me to feel doubt occurred when we were studying the Greek scriptures. As we covered the book of John Ch 10, we read the whole chapter in context. As we reviewed the interpretation that the WT had taught since the 1960s, I compared it to the whole chapter, and it ceased to make sense to me. I checked out some other Bibles and their commentaries (in the Gilead library), and discovered that other religions claimed that the other sheep merely referred to the Gentile Christians. This made sense to me in the context that Jesus was speaking: to Jews in the 1st century, who, if they became followers of Jesus, would eventually have to accept Gentile Christians (other sheep) into their fold. The phrase "other sheep" comes without much clarification, so it seemed that the Society had read too much into this scripture to advance their 2 class theology (a heavenly and an earthly class, hence, the "other [non-heavenly] sheep"). The Society wrote a QFR about this subject which I reviewed in Gilead, yet their arguments seemed unconvincing.

 

 

At first, this statement was reassuring. Perhaps some of my misgivings were valid - all I needed to do was wait on Jehovah, and he would make sure that the light would get brighter. So again, I tucked my increasing doubts into the back of my mind, concluded my Gilead studies, and proceeded to joyfully go to my missionary assignment in Honduras.

We were assigned to a large congregation (120 pubs) in a semi-rural area. The religious climate in Honduras was unlike what I was used to in Ecuador, which was mainly Catholic, and the people did not know Their Bibles well. In Honduras, I was surprised to see the name Jehovah plastered on Billboards everywhere, and most of the people were evangelical Christians who were constantly reading the Bible. The evangelicals could be seen reading the Bible on their patios, in their houses, at their shops, as we would go preaching to them, in stark contrast to the Jehovah's Witnesses who could be seen reading the WT, Awake, latest book study publication, or yearbook, but rarely the Bible. Conversations with these people frequently led to Bible ping pong, and most of the friends in the congregation felt that it was useless to spend time discussing the Bible with these people as the conversations went nowhere. For every proof text that a JW had, the evangelicals had an equally powerful text that proved the opposite. It seemed the height of irony to me that the people who knew the Bible so well would be viewed by Jehovah’s Witnesses as useless, and as Jehovah’s Witnesses we preferred to witness to people who were ignorant about the Bible. This seemed contrary to reason. If Jehovah’s Witnesses based their entire belief system on the Bible, and nothing else, then wouldn't it be easier to preach to those who had an intimate knowledge of the Bible? Would they be more attracted to the "truth"? Unless, the thought came to me again, that perhaps we didn't have the truth after all.

This hit me hard again one day as I was conducting a Bible Study with someone in the Require brochure. We were on lesson 6, discussing God's hope for the earth. As we read the paragraph on the paradise earth, I realized that there was no specific scriptural backing for the concept. 

I also realized that I was merely parroting off what was in the paragraph, although I was doubting it myself ("paradise earth" does not appear in the Bible at all).

Shortly thereafter, we returned to the USA. I no longer felt comfortable as a missionary, so I resigned my position and moved to New York. Yet I still believed that Jehovah’s Witnesses had the truth, mostly because of the love that they showed and their worldwide unity. While I recognized that some of the doctrine was wrong, I figured that Jehovah would clear it up in due time, as the WT and specifically Gerrit Loesch had indicated.

One day, around the time I turned 35, it hit me like a ton of bricks. I realized that I might die in this system of things. I had always believed that I would never die, since the society had made bold claims as I was growing up: "Millions now living will never die!" Never mind that they made the same promise in the 1920s, and just about everyone who believed it is now dead, but I was taught that the time was right in the 80s, since the 1914 generation was dying out. Well, that teaching went the way of the dodo in 1995, yet I still believed that I would be part of the great crowd that would survive Armageddon and would never die. All that changed when I began to face my own mortality. I began having nightmares every night, dreaming that I was going to die, and feeling that I would never wake up. After several months of this, I realized that I had little faith in the resurrection. I began grieving my own death, knowing that when I would die, it would be the end of it all. How sad! I had believed all my life that it would never end, yet now I felt as if it were so short! After several months of emotional turmoil, I finally told my wife that I was doubting the resurrection. She became upset, and told me that I was going apostate. She called one of her friends from Bethel who worked at Gilead, and reported to him what I had said. She insisted that I call him. What he told me shocked me. He said that when he was in his 30s, he had his own doubts about Jehovah’s Witnesses and was seriously questioning his faith. But he came to grips with his doubts, and decided that it was the truth after all, and left his doubts in Jehovah's hands and encouraged me to do the same. I thanked him for his frankness, yet my doubts were now becoming stronger and stronger, and could no longer be relegated to the some confine of my brain and silenced.

Around this time I was facing some challenges in my job due to my lack of education. My employer wished to give me more responsibility and a promotion, but without a college degree they could not promote me. They opted to just increase my responsibilities with a very modest increase in pay, without giving me a promotion. So I was now doing much more work, yet at essentially the same pay level and title as before. 

Recognizing my conundrum, my boss offered to help me get tuition assistance if I wanted to go to college and get my Bachelors degree. I readily accepted! I decided to do an accelerated course online, especially in view of the Society's criticism of college that take lengthy periods of time. My wife objected to my studying at college, but since she had no biblical grounds to oppose me, she relented and stopped her opposition.

I chose my courses carefully to avoid any that would conflict with my belief system. While a philosophy course was mandatory, I chose one that focused on Computer ethics, although we still had to review great thinkers such as Immanuel Kant and ethical systems such as ism. While I felt that the bible was sufficient as a moral guide for me, in this class we had to incorporate about 8 different ethical systems and apply those principles to ethical questions related to computers. I was forced to contemplate non-biblical ways of ethical thinking, which helped to open my mind.

In my final semester of undergraduate studies, there was an atheist who was in four of my classes. In two of my classes there was also a JW sister. The atheist classmate would be vocal about his ideas on occasion, and sometimes I or the sister would defend our beliefs, generally using the Bible. She sent me an email describing the atheist classmate as a "poor misguided soul". Yet while I was defending my views along with her, I failed to see him as misguided. He seemed to be happy in his disbelief, and continued to post ideas that made me think.

At this time it was March of 2008. I was missing many meetings since my heart wasn't in it due to the increasing tide of doubts that would not be silenced. I had not been out in service in a few months either (which was a first for me, as I was always a 30, 40, or 50 hour publisher). I even began to describe the Jehovah’s Witnesses in the 3rd person when talking with my wife ("You Jehovah’s Witnesses, not including myself). One day my wife came home and told me that Bro Loesch was giving a talk in a neighboring hall, and she wanted me to go. I accepted, and listened to the talk "Are you Marked for Survival?", which coincidentally, I used to give so I knew the outline well. One section in that talk describes the prophecies that Jehovah’s Witnesses expect to be fulfilled soon. As Loesch began to describe the attack of the UN on Babylon the Great, the attack of Gog and Magog, the cry of "peace and security", etc., I realized that I didn't believe in any of that anymore... it was no longer believable. I realized that I was taking huge steps in my life if I no longer trusted the GB.

The following week was the 2008 memorial. For the first time in my life, I saw the memorial as a mindless ritual, always the same outline (I had delivered the memorial talk about 4 or 5 times), always the same message: "don't partake of the emblems, only the anointed can, and they are not here". It made no sense to me anymore. The next week I found myself at that fateful assembly day, when I realized that I no longer considered myself one of Jehovah’s Witnesses. I would no longer go to meetings or go out in mindless service.

Within hours, I was on the internet, seeking out like minded people, wondering if anyone else felt like I did. To my amazement I was not alone. Thousands of people have been disenfranchised and scarred by their experience as Jehovah’s Witnesses, who are not the most loving people on the earth, especially if you dare to disagree with them.

If any doubting JW is reading this story, take heart. There are thousands, yes millions of people outside the JW organization, who will respect you and love you, not because you robotically share the same enforced beliefs, but because of a shared sense of humanity. While I spent my first 37 years of life as a JW I am not bitter. I am resolved to spend the rest of my life in ways that help my fellowman, not by insisting that people adopt my beliefs, but by genuinely caring for others, and doing what I can to help people.

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