#jwprotest

My mother comes from a family that is three generations of deep indoctrination which is pretty significant considering the cult of Jehovah’s Witnesses roots only goes back to the 1870’s. These strong ties to the history of the Jehovah’s Witnesses means my mother and her family are strict believers that are completely unwavering in their faith. My mother is a embodiment of “Be Steadfast and Unmovable” never questioning anything that she has been taught. To her if it is in the “New World Translation” of the bible then it is factual and true. If it is proven to not be fact, then you are interpreting scripture wrong or the scientific method used was inhibited by some unaccounted external factor, possibly even Satan as an influencer. My mother is the definition of cognitive dissonance.

My father on the other hand, his family was converted when he was a young child. He remembers a single Christmas and birthday before Jehovah’s Witnesses knocked on his parent’s door resulting in his family being converted. Imagine as a child, you have all these friends and yearly celebrations that all children look forward to and suddenly that is all ripped away from you as you have to cut off all your friends and non-believing family, stop celebrating Christmas, Easter, birthdays, mother’s day, father’s day etc all because your parents are brainwashed by some people that knocked on the door one day. It must have been a confusing and awful time for him to adjust.

Because my father had experienced a world outside of being a Jehovah’s Witness, he was a questioner. He is quite an intelligent person and he spent a long time going through a studying and questioning stage which led to him being quite knowledgeable on a vast array of subjects and topics. However something must have snapped in his mind when he was trying to make a sense of the knowledge he was taking in, because all that study and research sadly resulted in him doing a U-turn straight back to the religion. My guess is that it was fear, fear of the doubts that were developing, fear of losing his wife, his child, his entire family and every one of his friends. I know personally it’s excruciatingly painful to mourn people that are not dead or even dying so I can truly understand those fears he must of had. My parents are good and decent people, they wouldn’t harm a single person unless that person had known Jehovah and turned their back on him. That is an entirely different scenario to them.

Jehovah’s Witnesses tend to classify non-believers into a few different categories. First there are Worldly People that have never known Jehovah which is not good, but they are tolerable, and as Jehovah’s Witnesses we should aim to be nice to them and attempt to educate them about Jehovah. Believers that are having doubts are a big problem, however they are savable so be nice but not too nice and attempt to squash the doubt with love whilst reminding them that if they leave, they will lose everything, essentially holding them hostage. Those that choose to leave (as in not disfellowshipped, I will be covering this in a future post) are classified into two categories, Inactive and Apostate. Jehovah’s Witnesses have no scriptural grounds to shun Inactive people however they do so anyway, and this behaviour is not discouraged by the “Governing Body”. Apostate however are the very pinnacle of a terrible person. No one can be worse than an Apostate, the person maybe a good and proper member of society but Jehovah’s Witnesses see them as worse than child molesters and murderers because they “actively work against god”.