The other religion-centered question that was posed to me was this:<\/p>\n
What kind of negative influence did the religion have on you?<\/p>\n
This question, asked by a relative, was not asked in the spirit of sincere inquiry, but as a challenge. The reason for the challenge was because of something stupid I said. See, I was first asked why I would decide to leave the religion and, further, make my findings available on the web. My answer was two-fold: I left the religion because it is not true and because it has had a largely negative influence on my immediate family.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not sure why I allowed my answer to ramble. The first part (because it\u2019s not true) certainly would have sufficed. For example, if someone says: \u201cWhy don\u2019t you believe the Earth is flat?\u201d, a full, complete answer would be: \u201cBecause it\u2019s not true\u201d. You shouldn\u2019t have to supplement it with \u201cAnd because believing it\u2019s flat is bad for my health.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nevertheless, that\u2019s what I said, and that\u2019s what my family member decided to jump on. I was soon reminded, however, that it\u2019s impossible to ever point out to a Witness that their religion has a pernicious effect upon its members. This is because all evidence provided is dismissed into one of two categories: 1) You can\u2019t blame the actions of some elders\/pioneers\/Bethelites on the religion as a whole. And 2) Your claim isn\u2019t that bad. <\/p>\n
Let me explain this with examples. <\/p>\n
First, when I argued that one member of my family was subjected to child abuse at the hands of her (elder) father, my relative said: \u201cOh come on, you can\u2019t point out what he did to his children and say that that\u2019s a problem with the religion. He was acting out of line with what the religion teaches.\u201d But this is a total cop-out. Matthew 7:16 declares \u201cBy their fruits you will know them\u201d, and Jesus claimed that the identifying mark of his true disciples would be that they have love among themselves. Additionally, Witnesses love pointing out how united they are, so even if I was to grant that some elders have acted out of line with the official doctrine, this only serves as evidence that they are not united.
It\u2019s funny, really, because as I ran down a litany of offenses elders have committed against my family, the person with whom I was talking knocked them all down as exceptions, aberrations, to the religion at large. Again: cop out! If I could list off a dozen elders that pushed their own opinion, abused their kids, empowered pedophiles, were over-eager to disfellowship, pushed their own opinions or caused members of my family to leave the meeting crying\u2026then who\u2019s to say those are the only twelve elders like that in the whole world?
My brother-in-law once compared the religion to a job, and I think his description was apt. Allow me to use it here: if your supervisor molested your kids, would you continue to work for him? And if you quit, would you keep silent about it?<\/p>\n
Second, other arguments I threw up were swatted down as \u201cnot that bad\u201d. It\u2019s hard to qualify this. Especially in the mindset of a Witness, there is almost nothing a person could endure as a Witness that qualifies as \u201cthat bad\u201d. For instance, many Witnesses died in Nazi-sponsored concentration camps. To a Witness, this is well worth it, as such people are practically guaranteed a place in paradise (sorry, no virgins in this paradise \u2013 quite the opposite, some Witnesses think that resurrected folks will be prohibited from sex). So, when I complained of being an outcast in school, not celebrating my birthday, wasting time in a pointless volunteer work and subjecting myself to the whims of elders, Witnesses just chalk this up to the kind of life we must endure in this wicked world. They argue that not celebrating a birthday isn\u2019t that big of a deal (and maybe it\u2019s not) and, further, that by not celebrating one\u2019s birthday, a person is helping cement their relationship with Jehovah. And while most Witnesses would sympathize with being an outcast at school or work, they would say that such things are persecution orchestrated by the devil & that God will reward us appropriately in due time. <\/p>\n
At any rate, I ended this portion of the conversation by stating that the negative influences were not what caused me to leave. It was, plain and simple, the fact that the religion is not true. <\/p>\n
In a future post, perhaps, I will cite specific cases of how the religion was detrimental to my life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The other religion-centered question that was posed to me was this: What kind of negative influence did the religion have on you? This question, asked by a relative, was not asked in the spirit of sincere inquiry, but as a challenge. The reason for the challenge was because of something stupid I said. See, I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-52","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-free-thinking"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":71,"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52\/revisions\/71"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}