From the Horse's Mouth

Being an apostate takes grit and determination. It's exhausting to engage with people who don't want anything to do with you. More so when considering that they have no interest in determining the validity of their beliefs, while you contest the authority of their governing documents. They are certain that they are certain, and against that kind of conviction there is little reasoning that works well.

I can't tell you how to be an apostate, or even if you should be one. Each of us has our own story to tell, and our own ledger to balance. Because of that, some of us are more intent on grinding an axe, while others are content to leave it buried. But what is constant is that the people that shun us are unified in practice. We know what buzz-words we will hear. We know what resources they will reference. Witnesses can't surprise us. Exasperate, yes, but not surprise.

I try to be dispassionate about my approach. Not because I don't feel strongly, but because inflamed tempers often lead to common logical fallacies. The list of potential fallacies is long and varied, and it can be almost taken for granted that they will be employed at some time during a heated discussion. At a glance, they make some version of sense, or at least sound plausible. But on closer examination, they reveal themselves to be a baseless dismissal of a reasoned discussion.

The title of this post is an idiomatic reference to a fallacy otherwise known as "false attribution". This a type of appeal to authority in which the advocate references "an irrelevant, unqualified, unidentified, biased, or fabricated source in support of an argument." In this application, Jehovah's Witnesses will reference publications issued by Watchtower as evidence of God's spiritual direction of Watchtower.

Most of you will see the immediate flaw in this approach.

But the problem extends to every facet of Witness's reasoning. Every doctrine they adhere to is established by the publications of Watchtower, and any divergence from that practice is means for expulsion. The 1914 doctrine, for example, is their cornerstone belief. It's the thing that makes them special. When I asked my mother to prove to me the importance and historical accuracy of 607 B.C.E., she cited (repeatedly) only the publications of the Society.

The Society, in developing this doctrine, have patently misinterpreted or misapplied archaeological and historical evidence to arrive at their conclusion(s) (this is another logical fallacy known as "argument by selective observation" (cherry picking)). However, any acknowledgement that academia has a better understanding of history and scientific data would result in the immediate downfall of the Organization.

Now, this doctrine has been held to for over 100 years through one justification or another. They've changed their reasoning. They've changed its meaning. But they have never changed the date...
Every publication from 1912 onward has stuck to this doctrine. Evidently, it must be so historically significant, in that it is directly related to two watershed moments of humanity, that being wrong about it an impossibility. Thus, the deep faith of their followers.

Watershed moments are more frequent than the Society would like, however.

As we know, the 1914 doctrine requires that Jerusalem fell to the Babylonians in 607 B.C.E. 1914, of course, saw the outbreak of World War I. It was the "Great War". The "War to end all wars". The first of its kind in which so many nations were involved, or so many perished.

It's also not true.

If we take it from "the horse's mouth", none of what I tell you next is valid to one of Jehovah's Witnesses. This is also the reason I'm no longer one of them.

Jerusalem was sacked by Babylon in 587 B.C.E. This is archaeologically, astronomically, and historically proven fact. There isn't a debate to be had. However, by 'arguing selective observations', Witnesses will always arrive at 607 B.C.E. by citing only two or three dubious sources. Whereas 587 B.C.E. is documented by literally dozens of credible, vetted sources.

Well, shit... But 1914 was such a momentous year! It certainly must be the sign of Christ's invisible return to earth, at which time he appointed Jehovah's Witnesses as his earthly representatives...

About that... You see, there have been literally dozens of conflicts that qualify as "World Wars". Poly-continental wars involving three or more nations are rather common. The Romans fought the Persians for 721 years across two continents. The War of Austrian Succession occurred across four continents. The Napoleonic Wars... FIVE continents. And the kicker? None of those even qualify as the deadliest wars.

That distinction belongs almost exclusively to the Chinese. Between the Qing-Ming Conquest, War of Three Kingdoms, and Mongol Conquests the average body count was an average was twice as high as WWI. So what does The Great War have over all of the others?

*Crickets*

Mustard Gas, combat aircraft, and machine guns. That's about it. A demonstrably false prophecy should have been fulfilled twenty years later, and nothing really interesting happened in 1934. The "greatness" of The Great War was just propaganda. There was nothing about it that was measurably worse than many of the wars that preceded it. So to declare that it was the harbinger of the last days is without foundation.

The intensely frustrating part of this is that I abhor ignorance, particularly when it's voluntary. Practicing a religion that requires ignorance as the price of admission is just insane, but it's exactly what relying on the 'horse' as an authority is. Relying on the producer of unsubstantiated claims, even in the presence of overwhelming contrary evidence, as the only necessary proof of truth is without parallel in terms of frustrating potential.

But it's just what Witnesses do...

God, the Monster

Growing up as one of Jehovah's Witnesses, I was often reminded by the platform that worshiping a higher power was a built-in feature of humanity. We were supposedly created to recognize the existence of a deity, even when there was no hard evidence to support that assertion. We even came up with silly generalizations like "there are no atheists in foxholes" to justify the inexplicable fear of the unknown. We build rites and rituals in the form of religions to assuage these fears, ever hopeful that we do not incur the ire of our Celestial Parent.

Is there a God? I don't know, and I'm certain that I don't know. Neither do you, for that matter. Gnosticism is, at its core, a self-prescribed confidence that one can know that there is or is not a God. Agnosticism is the opposite. It is the confidence that available evidence does not adequately support the hypothesis. Theism and Atheism are opposing axes of the framework in which a person either believes or does not believe in a God, doing so with either a Gnostic or Agnostic backing. People often mistake Agnosticism for being non-committal Atheism, but they are not related in that way (figure 1).

figure 1

Whether we want to believe in a deity or not, we are still limited by the absence of evidence either way. In the common era, we direct people to whom God speaks directly to the nearest mental healthcare professional. But this is only after decades of research into human psychology and neurology. The Bible, Quran, and Torah were all written by people making exactly these claims. They include grandiose visions of heaven, hell, horrible beasts, and agonizing persecution. We currently diagnose these events as paranoid schizophrenia and apply anti-psychotic medications to treat them.

But we treat religious texts with a very different frame of reference. Why, though? The fact that it happened hundreds or thousands of years ago somehow makes it perfectly understandable? Logically, no, yet we still revere these texts as inspired and authoritative. Generation upon generation, we have passed on the myths as a means of regulating our society, measuring our success by the fear they inspire.

Remembering that there is a greater scientific foundation for evolution than creation, I began to wonder if there was another, anthropological explanation for this seeming in-born fear.

The fossil record indicates that we evolved from lesser mammals. The discovery of Homo Naledi in South Africa back in 2013 extends the primate record back as far as 2 million years. While there is a considerable margin of error in the dating (owing primarily to radio-carbon dating being useful only back to 50,000 years), it is evident that they were alive long before civilization as we know it. The remarkable practice of burial of their deceased is something that we haven't seen in mammals other than humans, so its extensive use by a million-year-old primate is not without wonder.

What is not left to wonder is that this one-and-a-half-meter-tall (5 ft) primate was subject to animal predation. Mammals, right up until the extinction of dinosaurs, were easy pickings for larger and hungrier things. As the ages dragged on, some of those mammals became Homo Naledi, and others became lions. While Oldowan stone tools did emerge some 2.6 million years ago around Ethiopia, there isn't much evidence that these tools became weaponized until around 64,000 years ago, well after Homo Naledi became extinct. This would preclude the assumption that Homo Naledi had defensive tools, and biology didn't really equip primates with claws or fangs.

It is only through technology that Homo Sapiens became an apex predator. Prior to the evolution of weapons, humans were just as likely to be eaten, and had thus evolved with a fight-or-flight response to danger. This evolutionary psychology was sometimes the only response to a predator when the prey was unable to prepare itself against the threat. In modern psychology, it is well documented, and the physiology well defined.

In modern society, this response is largely unnecessary, and yet is common enough to be called instinctual. So why is it still there? Well, evolution is slow to discard things that are no longer useful.

It's impossible to tell now whether early hominids had any sense or inclination of intelligent design of their species. Odds don't favor that possibility, but it is there nonetheless. What they certainly did have was acute stress responses to threats; a tool that persisted long after they had evolved and developed the technology to be apex predators.

It's an awareness, as much as a hard-wired response, that we carry into the modern era. Evolution dictated that our survival was dependent on this awareness. Just because we were no longer prey doesn't mean that we aren't still on the lookout for the apex predator we once ran from.

How do we define an apex predator though? Well, that's pretty straight forward.

It's creature that no others prey upon. They kill with comparative impunity, challenged only by the flight of their prey, and no other creature subordinates them as a food source. Lions, as mentioned earlier, are such an animal (absent the presence of humans). So is God...

Abrahamic religions, such as Jehovah's Witnesses, refer to religious texts in which God is the alpha and omega. Before Him, there shall be no other god. Sodom and Gomorrah were leveled by fire raining from the heavens. Noah's contemporaries were drowned by a divine flood. The Assyrian army was slain by His angel as they slept.

God is an apex predator, no matter how you want to look at it. He's the biggest kid on the block. He has the most unstable temper. He demands the most stringent obeisance. He knows everything. He is everywhere. When his wrath is poured out upon thee, there is no escape. Multiple holy books are very clear about these truths.

The invention of God very conveniently responds to an awareness that has been born into us through millions of years of genetic refinement. The awareness didn't fail, even though there was nothing to run from. Our ancestors, for centuries, have had no need to fear being hunted and yet they still laid awake at night under the blanket of the universe, listening for bumps in the night.

Never in the modern era has God stepped forward to smite us personally. Evolution, however, is prepared just in case.

Christ's Bones: Why They'll Never be Found

The internet click-bait purveyor, Ranker, posted an article that made it's way back to the top of the Facebook dung-heap. The thumbnail said that there was stronger scientific evidence for the crucifixion of Jesus. Being a healthy skeptic, I wanted to read this "evidence" for myself.

Ah, Ranker, you foul villain. Snookered again!

The article turned out to be a rebuttal to the assertion that Judeo-Roman versions of crucifixion found in the Gospel accounts had never occurred. This new evidence derives from bones found to have had a metal spike driven through the heel, commensurate with the narrative that Jesus was nailed to a cross. But Jesus just happened to be a tangent; bait, if you will.

Several years ago, the archaeological discovery of an ossuary (bone box / pictured above) inscribed with "James, Son of Joseph, Brother of Jesus" gave new weight to the possible historical figure of Jesus. The ossuary, if memory serves, was even inscribed with a rudimentary cross. In time, the Israeli Antiquities Authority charged owner Oded Golan with forty counts of forgery, which were later dismissed. The ossuary was pulled from public display and returned to Golan. Much contention has been had over its authenticity, with several analyses determining that the debated inscription could not be any less than fifty years old. Thus, with insufficient evidence to call the ossuary a forgery, and insufficient evidence to authenticate it, everyone shook hands and walked away.

The ossuary, which also happened to be empty, is not particularly unusual. These boxes are common artifacts of 1st century Jerusalem which are often emptied by those taking possession. But that does glaringly eliminate the possibility of genetic testing. Neither here, nor there, I suppose.

It occurred to me, however, that the discovery of Jesus bones can't happen. The gospel account says that his body ascended to heaven and disappeared. Luke 24, which details the account most clearly, doesn't say anything about a body left behind, or discarded robes falling back to earth. This process of transmogrification entails the dissolution of the physical body as the soul of the person is carried off to heaven. If then 2 Timothy 3:16 is an absolute and all Scripture is a result of God's inspiration, the writer of Luke's account cannot be mistaken. The remaining gospel accounts don't discuss the event in any great detail, but they certainly don't contradict it. So it can be reasoned that the body of Christ was destroyed during his ascension.

Let's suppose, however, that archaeologists later discover an ossuary inscribed with something as unmistakable as "Jesus of Nazareth, performer of most excellent party tricks, son of God". Let's also suppose that that ossuary uncharacteristically contains bones. This now becomes an issue of great interest, and not just by historians.

There are a few possible scenarios. Firstly, the Christian public may accept the existence of the bones with gracious aplomb, but now have to account for a major discrepancy in the bible. The infallible word of God is now perceptibly fallible. The only responsible answer is to examine everything. The incredibly likely outcome of that is that Christianity will falter as parishioners from all denominations exit in droves. Churches will fail as monetary support dries up. Evangelical work will come to a screeching halt. It's pretty much the worst parts of Revelation for most of Christendom.

More likely, in my mind, is that the largest authorities in Christianity (Vatican) snatch up those bones before they become public knowledge and hide them away from the laity. That is the only way in which they hold on to any measure of control. This also prevents the uncomfortable void of a moral compass suddenly lost. Too many Christians use faith as the only foundation for decent behavior. There would likely be a whiplash effect wherein millions of people worldwide suddenly have no conscience in the face of no eternal consequence. Keeping the bones a secret would be the safest thing for the largest number of people.

The latter scenario being of the most benefit is what I expect will happen. However Dan-Brown this may feel, it's indisputable that religious organizations thrive on comparative ignorance. When passive steps no longer satisfy that mandate, active steps are sure to follow. Omissions mature into lies. Whether it's a matter of religious faith or secular life, asking the question "what didn't they tell me" is often a wise exercise.

Look around for the people who benefit most from your ignorance. Those are the ones who will hide truth from you.

Freedom of (Supportive) Speech

As citizens of our respective countries, we have come to rely on leaders waffling on positions. What rhetoric they shout in one moment can leave them silent in another. Usually because that position no longer serves a purpose. As Witnesses, we've become all too familiar with "new light" changing policies and practices with each convention season. There's no real end in sight.

As an avowed apostate, I often enough engage in conversations with people about Witnesses. One of those recent discussions was actually rather complimentary toward the Society at first. While recounting a recent news story in which a young boy who refused to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance had his chair kicked out from under him by a classmate, some commenters said that he had it coming; that being dumped on his ass was his classmate's 'freedom of speech'.

To the person relating this story, I pointed out that forced patriotism is an issue that Witnesses helped to resolve in West Virginia Board of Education vs. Barnett 319 U.S. 624 (1943). Pulling the wiki for reference, I pointed out that the US Supreme Court ruled in a 6-3 majority that it was unconstitutional for a school to compel students to salute the flag. Justice Robert Jackson went so far as to say that "compulsory unification of opinion [achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard]" and was antithetical to the principles of the 1st Amendment.

And then I stopped.

I noticed who was serving as Plaintiff's Counsel; Hayden Covington, who was also Vice President of the Society, having been appointed in 1942.

I grinned an apostate's grin.

Later, in 1954, Covington would appear before a judge in Scotland, this time to provide testimony in the case Walsh vs. Clyde. During his testimony, the following exchange occurred:

Q: [Court] It was promulgated as a matter which must [have been] believed by all members of Jehovah’s Witnesses that the Lord’s Second Coming took place in 1874…?

A: [Covington] It was a false statement or an erroneous statement in fulfillment of a prophecy that was false or erroneous.

Q: And that had to be believed by the whole of Jehovah’s Witnesses?

A: Yes, because you must understand we must have unity …

Q: Back to the point now. A false prophecy was promulgated? 

A: I agree to that.

Q: It had to be accepted by Jehovah’s Witnesses?

A: That is correct.

Q: If a member of Jehovah’s Witnesses took the view himself that that prophecy was wrong and said so, he would be disfellowshipped?

A: Yes … Our purpose is to have unity.

Q: Unity at all costs?

A: Unity at all costs…

Q: A unity based upon an enforced acceptance of false prophecy?

A: That is conceded to be true.

Now, you can go to the dictionary, thesaurus, or Google if you wish, but the phrase to which Covington concedes ("enforced acceptance of false prophecy") is only a gently massaged paraphrasing of Justice Jackson's majority opinion just ten years earlier.

Bringing this full circle, Witnesses have successfully and correctly argued that dissent is a guaranteed right in support of one's conscience. To be forced to support a paradigm, they felt, was unfair. To be discriminated against, punished, or otherwise maligned for dissenting was also unfair. But compulsory unification of opinion is something that the Society was evidently reliant upon, so long as it applied to their shared faith. That continues to be true to this day.

I have to admit my own frustration when exploring this topic. Speaking out against an injustice, but then embracing the same kind of injustice as a matter of institutional policy, is absurd. It is the most blatantly dishonest and manipulative behavior I can imagine. It irreversibly mortgages the integrity of an organization, or person; disenfranchises the people whose dissent they once fought to protect.

Now, if this causes you some degree of discomfort, take heart. It only means that you are still sane. It is one of the hallmarks of a cult (and I am hesitant to use that word) to say "no one treats our members like that except US!"

They divide you from society through the promise of the truth. Then they divide you from your fellows when you catch them in their lies.

Which part of that is supposed to make sense?

A Ruse by any Other Name

I remember a young brother in my home congregation once giving an Instruction Talk during the old Theocratic Ministry School format. Dan was a relatively new Ministerial Servant and, to the best of my recollection, this was his first talk of this type.

He used an effective illustration of a bag of candy that one may think was empty, but actually contained a lone treat if one was willing to check thoroughly. With his illustration, he was drawing a correlation to theocratic knowledge. When we think we've taken every last bit of understanding from a topic, looking once more could yield a small morsel of enlightenment.

And then I remember that this blog is about Jehovah's Witnesses...

C.T. Russel had embarked on his mission to expose bible truth through exhaustive scriptural examination. His fledgling Society had the admirable mission of making Christianity purely Christian. That meant excising pagan practices, false teachings, misunderstandings, and baseless tradition. Almost brilliant in its simplicity. But nearly one-hundred years later, young Ministerial Servant Dan stood on the dais and expounded on the virtues of exhaustive examination, while disturbingly ignorant of his religious foundations.

As Witnesses, we once proudly claimed to have stripped away all the practices that were not biblical in nature. We, almost haughtily, professed that we were the only true Christians left in the world. But we had actually returned to the evolving roots of all religions. What Pastor Russel had set out to do in the late 1800's had been forgotten. Replaced with new understandings, the current beliefs of Jehovah's Witnesses are ones that Russel would not recognize.

Over the decades, Witnesses have modified their beliefs to include practices once thought to be unscriptural. Blood transfusions are an easy example. Taking literally the admonitions not to consume blood as a biblical prohibition of medical blood transfusions, hundreds or thousands of Witnesses have denied this proven medical treatment for the fear of eternal destruction. The policy was to disfellowship anyone who accepted this proven medical procedure. The new stance is that it wont get you disfellowshipped. It would seem that the Governing Body no longer feels it will cost a person eternal paradise. Whether they erred in issuing the old policy or the new, and one of them is certainly wrong, the bible has rules about accidental blood-guilt.

That's not really the point here. Blood transfusion, along with every other baseless stance, are tangents of a much bigger problem. Watchtower belief systems have expanded over time. They are tweaked to close gaps, explain inconsistencies, and make exceptions... Just like every other religion.

While at one time Witnesses may have moved in the right philosophical direction in removing those Old World, non-Christian practices, new ones are now just as tightly woven into their beliefs as those they sought to remove. So what progress has actually been made?

To be frank, none. It's the same old song-and-dance. Indecision about blood transfusions, the repeated revision of the 1914 Generation doctrine, financial consolidation, child abuse scandals, power struggles, organizational splits, government collusion, scientific suppression... the list goes on for quite a while. And it all points to the same thing - Jehovah's Witnesses, as an organization, are as likely to veer off course as any other mainstream religion.

Religious organizations peddle fairy tales as fact that no one really wants to dispute, and being a system of cognitive stasis at their core, they are dependent on followers who don't ask questions. It's the ultimate long con. One would think we'd have looked behind that particular curtain by now, so why does it persist?

Conformity with social groups, even in the face of empirical falsehood, is usually the safer bet for the individual. It doesn't accomplish much to be an outlier because of an inconsequential point of contention, and psychological experiments have demonstrated that even clearly false information is readily assimilated by people to avoid becoming an outcast. This acceptance of group paradigms is known as conforming behavior.

Harvard's Herbert Kellman has identified a number of these behaviors, of which Internalization is the most common. Internalization is analogous to "making the truth your own". It is the practice of making beliefs integral to one's thought processes. Other conforming behaviors may only be an external display, but Internalized beliefs have the deepest and longest lasting hold. Also called Informational Social Influence, subjects turn to peers for accepted truth by which to guide their own thinking. Our experience among Witnesses is hard to characterize any other way. The Society is very clear that Witnesses must be unified in their thinking, and seeking outside validation is reason enough to be shunned.

We sometimes refer to this dedication to the charade as "drinking the kool-aid". It's most predictable in groups that also restrict your socialization outside the group. The aforementioned conforming behaviors become requisite in the face of banishment. Time and again, we encounter former Witnesses who have struggled to cope with living in a new and strange social environment. Hardly a one of us will claim that it was easy to make that transition. Sadly, far too many of us have fallen to destructive coping mechanisms like drugs or alcohol, or even suicide.

It's humbling to admit that we were duped for as long as we were. But the comforting thing is that its in the past. No one there can impede our progress forward into an enlightened and fulfilling life.

What else could smell as sweetly?

Breaking Cycles, Part 2

In the previous post, I discussed the problem of inviting hurt into our lives by dwelling on injuries of the past. It really shouldn't be any surprise that feeding that flame of resentment is toxic. It steals our joy from us, prevents us from pursing our nature, and renews the victimization we once suffered.

Other reflections are for the purpose of ignoring certain realities. The Watchtower Society spends inordinate amounts of time and column inches extolling the virtues of meditation. Constant reflection on God's word, and the extra-biblical publications distributed by Witnesses, are the only way to prevent consumption by this wicked system. Why, it's best to start the day with spiritual reflection, and on your coffee break. May as well bring the iPad in the can with you so you have something wholesome to read while you do something unclean.

These practices serve as blinders. Their sole, and very effective, purpose is to completely occupy one's time so that critical thought is a practical impossibility. There just isn't time to examine anything else.

For one reason or another, we all went searching for more information. For my part, I was simply lazy and didn't care about the Society in my twenties. I was content to be unplugged from the constant reminder that I was sinful and inadequate. It wasn't yet important to me to really validate what I knew or didn't know about the Society. That would come later.

All I could be bothered with at the time was avoiding discussions about my past as a Witness and, with far more determination, preventing a future as a Witness. Even hearing the word "witness" from the television caused me substantial anxiety. I wish that was a joke. It's this particular trigger word that has largely prevented me from enjoying crime dramas.

It took time to learn to think again. The once pervasive reminders I endured of Christian thinking were harder to slough off than I'd like to admit. Keywords, like the one above, practiced responses, patterns of speech... all of it had to be unlearned. Oddly, defending other religions was even a practice I had learned. It was ingrained in me to defend the right to believe, even if it was a contending faith. Thus, when the documentary Going Clear debuted on HBO, I was hesitant to watch. But I did.

By the end of it, I was shaking with fury over the undeniable similarities shared between Scientologists and Jehovah's Witnesses. No, we're not talking about anything so trite as a religious belief. We're talking about the hierarchy of their organization, their own jargon, prevention of free thought, and expulsion of apostates. In either case, you could transplant the beliefs of one into the organizational structure of the other and still have a functional tax shelter.

Here's the thing that really only starts to make sense when you've been away from it for a while. Witnesses could be asked to compare their beliefs and practices with Scientology, and I'm certain that they would almost unanimously agree that there were no comparisons to be had. What they would say Scientology does is to pervert faith and belief. But what they would say Witnesses do is to protect their Christian brotherhood. In actuality, the only differences between the two are the jargon they use to embody the philosophies of these practices.

SEAORG, for example, is the equivalent of Bethel. Both encompass the managerial departments and personnel of daily operations, including Ecclesiastical development. Members of both are permitted to marry, but must resign if they wish to have children. Both work unusually long hours in performance of their duties. Both are given small allowances for basic needs. Both are provided room and board as part of their service. These are functionally the same entities under different names.

What Witnesses call "apostates", Scientology calls "suppressive persons". These people are shunned by other members of the church; often losing contact with faithful family members, and enduring legal battles to maintain custody or contact with minor children.

Dissenting thought is not permitted. Openly questioning the teaching of the church is not permitted. There is no transparency above the level or position a person occupies in the church at any given time. There is no financial accountability.

But as long as one persists in the cycle of reinforcement, none of these glaring issues is worth examining. They are casually dismissed, explained away, or ignored wholesale. It is the goal of this indoctrination to make followers so incredulous of the outside world that any challenge is avoided. Watchtower has become very good at this. Very good. So good, in fact, that followers must often resort to semantics to differentiate themselves from "false religion".

For example, Witnesses do not "shun". They "disfellowship". Disfellowshipping is the prohibition of contact with rebellious, unrepentant sinners. Thus, the disfellowshipped person is not allowed to pollute the spirituality of obedient members of the church. Now if that sounds a lot like shunning, don't be alarmed. Except for being exactly alike in practice, they have nothing in common.

See? Semantics.

The cycle is one of denial. Denial of understanding. Denial of truth. Denial of reality. For as long as a person commits themselves to that cycle, there is no opportunity for growth.

Damn. To be honest, I wish I could go back to the start of my life and hit the reset button. Who knows what kind of person I could be now if I hadn't been strapped on that merry-go-round so early in my life.

I've got no clever turn of phrase to express that...

Breaking Cycles

I try to be active in the ex-JW community for the sake of those mired in their hatred of the Society. The sad reality is that there are a vast majority who have become stuck in a cycle of animosity towards Watchtower. That animosity certainly has merit, but I'm reminded that we sometimes assimilate that into the very definition of ourselves.

We probably know people who tell the sames stories, make the same complaints on a daily basis. The subject matter isn't actually important, but the fact that it occupies so much of their time and personal context that it is actually part of their fabric. Dyed in the wool, as it were.

The closest correlation that I personally have is actually at the opposite end of the emotional spectrum. As a teen, I developed an intense crush on a young sister that was close friends with my cousin. We became friendly ourselves, eventually becoming pen pals and writing letters for nearly two years. To say that I loved her would be accurate, if not a little askew. Those feelings were one sided, as they often are, and I was left contending with this pervasive occupation of my thoughts.

At least for a time...

That crush eventually began to wane, but I was not ready to let go of it. She had been my very first serious romantic interest, and that was precious to me. So much so that I was distressed at the thought of losing it. Even as unfulfilling as it was to be the only one who felt it, the idea of letting it diminish caused physical anguish. That led me to a cycle of self-abuse that itself was difficult to break.

This being back in the days when cell phones were also handy bludgeoning tools, I had a few photographs from her high school to keep the image fresh in my mind. When I felt the rush of my feelings beginning to fade, I would look at those images and dwell on the small amount of time we'd spent together. I was willing myself to feel emotions that had long passed their sell-by date. I was hurting myself because I somehow concluded that overcoming those feelings somehow stole something from me, and that thought terrified me.

I see the same pattern of behavior occurring among apostates. Complaints that are years or decades old are still being repeated. This is usually knowledge that is part of the compendium of apostate information. It's even in the Welcome brochure... But some people are so inured to this information that they cannot pass an opportunity to wallow in it again, leaving behind the same comments they've left for years, renewing the acuteness of their hatred.

Like me and those school photos, apostates often absorb and dwell upon those words that once so succinctly enveloped the depth of their despair towards Watchtower. They stare at that old injury until their memory is keen enough bring back the hurt that went with it. Thus, they start the cycle anew.

It may all seem rather obvious, but that isn't healing. True healing comes in the form of letting the past be past. Purposely inviting hurtful histories into the present forces us to relive the injury and go through the healing process again. With it, you have the same emotional burdens.

I think we all want to be free of Watchtower, but far too many of us keep inviting them back to relive old times. What we lived through certainly shaped us, but it doesn't define us, and we don't have to give Watchtower that leverage over us. Look for ways to be productive, to use you experiences to help other people. That is the biggest middle finger you can give them.