Leaderboard

Not interested in the video, but interested in sharing my thoughts on any questions you have about your journey. For instance, I would caution very much against allowing your faith to be undermined by whatever challenges your children or grandchildren are facing. My journey from faith coincided with the autism diagnosis of my son and the illness and death of my sister from ALS. To this day I struggle to explain to people that the coincidence of timing was just that, a coincidence. They think I'm angry at God for allowing my son to have autism or my sister to die. The truth is my rejection of faith had a lot more to do with the paucity of evidence for the claims of and about the first century church. Gonna stop here because I see a lot of posts have gone up since I started replying to the thread, so let me read them before I answer. But you are far from alone, Charity. I've walked this walk. Happy to discuss.

According to Genesis 1-3, God creates a paradise and many different kinds of awesome life and everything is perfect. What a great God He is. Then everything is corrupted because of one single act of two humans (one who was deceived and the other who followed suit). All mankind has now become evil and worthy of death and is therefore in need of redemption. Now there are wars, murders, rapes, natural disasters, genocides, dreadful diseases and disorders of mind and body, hatred, lusts, etc. - SO MUCH pain and suffering century after century which God knew would happen because of Adam and Eve's disobedience. Why was such a cruel and severe punishment so necessary? All of this is explained away by saying “a loving God gave Adam and Eve free will,” so everything is their fault – not God’s. I now call that statement into question because God was GOD and so much GREATER than them: - God was incapable of doing evil, but Adam and Eve were created capable of doing evil. - God had foreknowledge of all that would happen if sin entered the world, but Adam and Eve were only told of “their death.” Who was in a greater and more powerful position to have the responsibility of the whole world placed on their shoulders – God or Adam and Eve? Yet God placed it on humans. I used to think this was how highly God thought of the perfect man He created, and they just went and blew it. Now, I’m thinking they were doomed from the beginning to fail.

https://www.reddit.com/r/exjw/s/toPjST02Yg This thread talks about all the social advantages there are in being in a cult. Many “friends” easily accessible. This person talks about the JW app where they are connected to 500 people and are “friends” with 100 of them. Another insightful comment describes that as “forced connections with people whose real personalities are hidden under a facade”. I think many people trade their souls and morals for this fake connection. I certainly lost about 100 percent of those fake connections when I decided that the path of lifetime service to prop up “WOW” TM and self inflated nincompoops was not the best for my family. How many people disagree with the tenets of TWI but are too afraid to leave because of their “friends”???? Heres a tip. They are not your friends. They are less your friends than the neighbors on your street for the most part and than your average person in a community. Those ties aren’t worth the sacrifice. The juice is not worth the squeeze IMO.