u/DumpsterEnFuegoo

You already know the spiel. We were all born imperfect, but Jesus came to earth and sacrificed his life as a human so we could be forgiven of our sins. 144,000 chosen will rule with him in heaven. All the Bible stories are true and provide perfect morals and life lessons for us. The earth will be cleansed of wickedness and be transformed into a paradise where righteous people can live eternally.

Even if you still believe all of that is true, why is it necessary to give up so much of your freedom and autonomy now to reap those rewards? Why allow some random men to dictate everything you believe and every move you make in life? Why put yourself through so much strife week after week after week? Constant busywork. Preaching that nobody really wants to do. "Always have plenty to do in the work of the lord" taken to the farthest extremes and telling people that they'll never be good enough because there is ALWAYS something more they could be doing. Meaningless stuff that when you really stop to think about it, you begin to wonder if God actually cares about any of it. More than anything, the bible stresses faith far more than works. Any works that are mentioned are those that come from YOU, from your own heart and desire to help in a practical way. So then how can it be justifiable to have those works come from a structured system, an almost corporate job function where hours and other data points are tracked, and your value as a member is attributed to those statistics? It is ASININE how they don't understand the cruelty and cultiness of their theology.

When I finally started to wake up, when COVID hit and I quit preaching and slowly stopped going to meetings, I had the most peaceful realization that really changed everything. God didn't actually care that I wasn't turning in any time. God didn't care that I hadn't been going to meetings in a while. I could still stand outside, gaze at the beautiful blue sky with those cotton candy clouds passing by, and feel that God still loved me. It was an incredible moment, and it allowed me to finally get comfortable with my own freedom.

No ethical belief system should take away your right to decide for yourself what faith looks like to you, who you love, what you do for a living, how much education you get, or what kind of relationship you have with your family. Only cults stick their hands in those things. I don't think anyone has a firm grip on the full truth about life, but we should all be allowed to spend our lives searching. David Splane doesn't have any more right to tell you what's true than your mailman or some other rando on the street.

Even if everything they say sounds legit, don't let anyone tell you the one path to salvation is theirs. Anyone who claims that doesn't know shit.

I used to think I was so happy as a JW. I was told over and over and over that I was living the best life, doing good things, pleasing God and securing my hope for the future. This all made me really genuinely happy as a kid, and I thought that happiness would last forever, that as long as I stayed in the org that I would never want for anything.

But my real, genuine happiness slipped away from me year after year, especially after I got baptized. I had no clue why. It didn’t make any sense, and I was afraid it might be a physiological problem that I’d eventually have to address.

If you were anyone in my congregation though, and you asked me if I was happy, I would’ve said yes, 100%. I had no reason to be sad. I had the truth. I had countless friends. I had real hope in a hopeless world doomed for destruction. What more did I need?

Here’s the thing though- all that “happiness” was manufactured. All of those reasons I had to be happy- all of them were baseless and shallow. The truth? Nope. Friends? They’ll drop you in a heartbeat if you take one step out of line. Hope? PROVE IT. How do you know this hope is any more real than the hope other faiths offer?

Nearly every emotion a JW has is something they’ve been TOLD to feel. “Doesn’t it warm your heart to be here with all your brothers and sisters? Isn’t it beautiful to see your Bible student making spiritual progress and taking a stand for the truth? Don’t you feel moved by all the suffering we see in the world to share the good news with as many of your neighbors as you can? Don’t you feel refreshed by your spiritual routine after making it through another day in Satan’s system? Don’t you just LOVE our rich spiritual heritage, our worldwide brotherhood, our spiritual paradise???”

Every single day of my life I felt like I was hearing that shit. Nothing was allowed to be mine. It was a collective feeling, a prescriptive set of emotions that had to be spelled out and appropriately displayed in front of others, otherwise you were being dramatic and not demonstrating the fruitage of the spirit. I was never allowed to express myself in a way that wasn’t clean or tame or “spiritual”. I wasn’t allowed to be human, a fledgling adult figuring out who she is and what she really wants and needs out of life.

It’s pretty obvious to me now that JW life does this to just about everyone. You are allowed to feel one way about the organization- that it’s the truth and it’s the “best life ever” and the gb may as well be Jesus himself walking the earth at this very moment. You love the org, every single fucking person in it, and the GB and anything they shit out for your consumption. You love public speaking, including knocking on strangers’ doors, attending the same boring meetings week in and week out, and reading the same boring religious crap you’ve read a thousand times before. You hate anything and everything the org hates, even if you secretly love and want it. Holidays, tattoos, sex, education, money, doesn’t matter. You set aside all your likes, dislikes, interests, and passions for the sake of the org.

Every single JW’s “new personality” is really just a fake persona. There’s different levels of how deep that fake persona has reached, and the more PIMI someone seems to be, the deeper that persona has dived. So many of those people have deep, deep sadness inside, if for no other reason than they are so tired of waiting for a promise that seems further away every day instead of closer. They won’t ever live to see the excitement of those bunker videos or the vindication of those depictions of Armageddon.

There is nothing joyful about JW life. It is all manufactured bullshit, prescribed emotions, CGI-level fakery, false friendships and a hope which they’ll never live to see play out the way they imagined. It’s like spending days eating fake food, only thinking you’re getting real nutrients but actually starving yourself half to death. This is why so many PIMIs end up in pits of despair like I did, despite being told we were among the happiest people on earth.

A lifetime of misery dressed up as joy. I can hardly think of anything more cruel.

The elders in my old hall would never fail to bring that up when it happened. Pioneers and wanna-be pioneers would SALIVATE over it. 20 new names read on the auxiliary pioneer list for the month. And if the CO happened to be visiting that month- jackpot. Errrrrbody was making their hours, you couldn’t tell us nothing.

😂 oh the stupid little things JWs got excited over cause we were allowed so few joys in life. Pitifully hilarious.