I really appreciate your responses. I wish you’d stop thinking you’ve been shunned. You and your wife are the better people here. As I see it they’ve shunned themselves. Look upon them with pity.
I’m not sure if you think I walk around with my head hanging and feeling like a victim, but I don’t. I bring it up here because it is in the context of this AMA, and it is a fact that we are shunned by all JWs, but by no means do either of us feel lonely. We are now free to be friends with everyone (other than them, of course) and we have more friends now than we ever did while in the JWs. Life gets better and better. We do see our families with pity, though there’s some anger there too, but we understand why they do what they do so it lessons the emotion on our end. They’re the mislead cult victims, we’re free.
I realized I didn’t mention this. The pants thing was back in the late '60’s-early '70’s and it may have been her mother’s restriction, not the JW’s. But it happened at the same time as the conversion.
StG
I’m not Mike, but as someone else who was excommunicated and shunned, I have to say this isn’t a realistic emotional response. I know they’re wrong, and I know they’re blinded by a hateful doctrine that hampers their choices, but they still CHOSE to reject me, shun me, and pretend I don’t exist. It’s unrealistic and unhealthy to pretend that their choices (limited and wrong as they are) didn’t hurt me. That I’m in a much better place now doesn’t make their choices magically more benign or helpful, especially since the “better place” I’m in would make them all shudder in horror at the sinfulness and worldliness of it all.
Do JW’s honestly believe they can “cure” homosexuality? I ask because when I told one on the street that I would never join the group because I’d have to cut off all ties with my sister, her wife and their family, the JW’s response was “If you have a relationship with Jehovah and your sister sees how happy it makes you, she’d do the same and renounce her former life.”
I was totally speechless for a moment (and it takes a lot to do that) and replied “You obviously don’t know me or my sister.”
What are the prevailing attitudes about non JW’s - are we largely regarded with contempt (those pathetic sinners…) or pity (I genuinely feel sorry for them because they’re not following the One True Religion)?
A lot of holidays in Spain have religious roots that most people, both local and immigrant, forget about or are happy to just take the social and civil parts. The Muslims stay away from the immense majority of those, with one exception: the Christmas parades. Those see kids of every religion, color, language, nationality… 
I like watching the parades, but watching the kids watching the parade is what makes me leave the house when it’s stupid cold outside.
Good questions Annie and Cardigan. Today I work from 9am-10 or 11 pm but I’ll answer when I get home if I’m not brain dead.
One more question. Do JW’s discuss among themselves the disparity between their membership numbers (~ 8 million) and the doctrinal belief that only 144,000 are going to heaven? Presumably all 144k are JW’s but even so that’s just a small fraction even of JW’s. Do many members think to themselves ‘yeah, I’m going to be one of the anointed…but that bitchy Judy Johnson in our congregation - you just know she’s not going.’
Got a minute before dinner and this is a quickie. They believe that 144,000 will go to heaven, yes, but that they will rule over the earth. The earth will be populated with the survivors of Armageddon and those resurrected by God back to the earth. The majority of JWs want to live forever on a paradise earth, not to go to heaven.
I have read a lot, and I mean a lot, on Scientology: what I have read in this thread about the JWs is nearly indistinguishable, right down to the point that Scientologists look almost exactly like ordinary people.
My great-aunt Edith is among the 144,000. I’m assuming my grandparents vacated their places when they were disfellowshipped. One of the saddest things my mother told me was how she learned as a child that there was a heaven, but that she would not be going because it was full. Imagine telling your little girl that you were going to heaven but she never would. Despicable.
I don’t know about in the distant past where many groups thought you could pray away the gay and stupid things like that. However, as far as I’ve known they haven’t claimed to “cure” homosexuality, per se, but they don’t believe that you have to act on your sexual urges. In other words, what that JW was effectively saying is that if you have this magical relationship with Jehovah your sister will want to pursue that happiness even if it means denying her sexuality altogether.
Unmarried heterosexual members of the congregation are forbidden for acting on their urges. The same applies to homosexual members. Of course their stance stands to drive gay members to try to live hetero lives and they get married and have kids and one day they can’t take it anymore and lives get hurt. I knew a guy when I was young that seemed gay to me and his brother committed suicide. I always wondered if maybe he was too. Of course, the guy I knew didn’t want to deny his sexuality so he was disfellowshipped and shunned. I didn’t know him well, just met him a few times, and he was a really nice guy. He was so sincere in his beliefs too, or seemed to be. They destroyed all of that because of one aspect of his being.
This is something that really bothered me as I got more emotionally healthy. We were supposed to be motivated out of love for neighbor to preach door to door and try to save lives. However, that preaching work was motivated by a need to get so many hours in each month, as you had to report all of your time spent, magazines placed, return visits, Bible studies, etc. and someone would look at it. Okay, before I spin too far off the subject, I noticed that it wasn’t love of fellowman that was driving the work.
You outsiders are called “worldly” people, and instead of “worldly” meaning well traveled, educated, open minded, etc. it meant dirty sinner. We looked down on the same people that we were there to save, and it made no sense to me. We could literally stand at your door that we knocked on and admire your beautiful home and talk about how in the “new system” after Armageddon we’d love to live in this house. Of course, that meant that the people in it would have to die a brutal death at God’s hand in a war against this world, but hey, we would get to enjoy your house so it wasn’t all for naught. I’m truly embarrassed on a level at the way I thought of other people.
We, as JWs, caught a lot of crap from outsiders. We had a persecution complex regardless, but it wasn’t without at least some merit. That creates a very us versus them mentality as well. I was made fun of and bullied relentlessly as a kid for many reasons and would have been without the JW reason (I was poor, skinny, wore glasses, excelled academically, etc.), but the JW reason just added fuel to the fire.
So yeah, contempt it was, unless of course you were interested in our message. Otherwise people would “wipe the dust off their feet” after leaving your house as Jesus instructed his followers to do when going from town to town. We just couldn’t believe how you old goats (see the sheep versus the goats in the Bible, sheep being meek and teachable, and goats being stubborn and worthless) didn’t want to see what we saw, or were so blinded by Satan that you just couldn’t.
Now, that’s kind of a rundown of the attitudes of many. Clearly there are some that just love people and want to help. I can’t speak for the intent of all. I also realize that many parts on the meetings were geared toward showing love. It just didn’t seem to always trickle down to the attitudes of the individuals they were aimed at.
I watched “Going Clear” with my brother in NYC in my first act of rebellion against the JW’s, daring to show love to my brother. I was just an awful person for doing so. (sarcasm)
Anyway, from watching we all decided that although there were similarities, Scientology had two things that really set it apart from the JWs. Scientology has been known to squelch those that leave with violence, which JWs have never used to my knowledge. There is no threat of bodily harm. Shunning is seen in both though. The second thing is that in Scientology they really bury the lead and don’t tell you the whole Xenu story until you’re really deep into it, too much to just walk away from.
As far as the manipulation and cult like undue influences, they sure use a lot of the same tactics.
Oh, and if you’re interested and like podcasts, Oh No Ross and Carrie did a series on Scientology that was really good. They literally tried it out and it was eye opening. They really take the control up a notch from JWs. I really think that they’re worse in most respects. The good thing is that they’re a relatively small group and that limits their reach.
Yep, disfellowshipping would end one’s anointed status, I believe. Funny, as God supposedly interacts with them to anoint them as one of the 144k through his holy spirit, but it is a man made earthly organization of JWs that really determines it through things like disfellowshipping.
It’s pretty messed up to think about the conversations that result from such a limited calling, isn’t it? There are husbands and wives that are willing to accept that one will go to heaven, and the other will live on earth and probably have a new life, maybe a new spouse, in the “new system”.
Fun Fact: JWs have an annual memorial of Christ’s death, the whole bread and wine thing. It is done once a year only. During that commemoration only those with a heavenly calling, those of the 144k, are to partake according to JW doctrine. The rest of us were always there just to observe and show respect and appreciation for the benefits that such future plans will bring.
So, they count that number in each congregation (usually nobody partakes, from my experience) that do partake of the emblems, the wine and the bread, and they compile that number each year. The numbers kept going down as I was a kid, and the belief was that as the number went down the 144k was close to being sealed and the end would come through Armageddon. That number was down pretty low, let’s say maybe 6,000 just for kicks. I’m not sure and would really have to do some research.
Anyway, now that number has been going up for years. Oops, that’s the wrong way. I’m pretty sure it’s up closer to 12,000 now, but I may be wrong. I don’t exactly get the information anymore. I do know though that now they are discounting those that are claiming to be of this number as it goes the wrong way. They now claim that some are misrepresenting themselves due to mental illness, lol. The whole cult is a mental illness of sorts. They’ll do anything it takes to discount these ones because it makes them look like the false prophets they’ve always been. They keep predicting the end of the world and it is still here, and now one of the things they watched as a sign of the diminishing time left for this world is going the wrong way.
This story is so sweet it makes my teeth hurt.
Thank you for sharing your story.
This is exactly how my mother described it to me as taking place 60 years ago. Interesting. Even then, there were some who partook and some who didn’t, but I don’t know how they decided.
Oh, I forgot about this. There’s a scriptural verse that they use that says something about God’s spirit bears witness to their spirit or something that they cherry picked and used to basically say that “they just know”. It was also kind of always implied that any regular human, by default, would rather live on a paradise earth, so if you want to live in heaven as one of the 144,000, it must be because God is calling you to.
There was never anything provable or concrete in that whole thing. If you partook, that was an outward symbol that you thought you were chosen to rule as one of those in heaven. Anyone that saw you partake would start telling everyone and people in the congregation would then talk among themselves about you and decide whether God could have really called you or not. Unofficial talk, more like gossiping, but JWs LOVE their gossip. They don’t have much else to talk about.
Do you still have a belief in any kind of a deity? I’m just curious because as an atheist myself, my rejection of the religion I was raised in (Catholicism) was based on evidence and rational thought which ultimately led me to reject all claims that a deity exists.