I escaped Jehovah's Witnesses | Talk Beliefs Podcast

[Music] i'll deny it but that's the way i spawn a bowl of yours david thanks so much for coming on to talk beliefs all the way from california you are a songwriter and performing musician and have a deep interest in cults and cult psychology having grown up in the jehovah's witnesses jehovah's witnesses are the the modern day group which started in the 1800s with a preacher named charles russell charles tase russell and his partner who was nathan barber russell studied with them and he was intensely interested in bible chronology you know the group that he started almost bears zero resemblance to jehovah's witnesses today which are a high control um legalistic almost militaristic in some ways organization with a lot of authoritarianism and hierarchy that the the light keeps getting brighter so the the informational you know the spiritual light from god as revealed through the watchtower society gets brighter it only gets better in fact that's not the case it's very interesting that uh the watchtower has doubled down and sometimes gone back on policies so sometimes a policy will be one thing and then a decade later it changes so the the witnesses might see that as the light getting brighter but then it'll change back to the policy it was before um if i may read one paragraph this is a standard sort of paragraph from a 1950s watchtower and it says jehovah's visible organization can use you but can get along without you too but you cannot get along without it fruitless ones are eventually pruned off and never missed as new ones are grafted in pruned off branches soon wither and die being cut off from the circulating life-giving sap so it is with jehovah's visible organization all must associate together get the life-giving spiritual food that god circulates to his people through the organization get the new truths that take away old ideas and the admonition that keeps down queer personal ideas don't become a withered branch or a paralyzed foot don't amputate yourself from the organization and commit spiritual suicide i can only assume that growing up jw meant you did what most good jw's do lots of meetings going door-to-door with magazines or standing with magazine carts on the streets now you grew up in new jersey and went to public school so how much of your jw upbringing affected your everyday life well the reality is that in a cult um you have your your your cult identity i really struggled with a lot of uh self-esteem and self-worth issues and guilt issues over a thousand things but that's part of it is that you have like a split personality you have the church you and then you have i went to public school promote for the most part the school year um and you know there is there is a split there and also it's it's funny because even while you're you're in public whether it's school or elsewhere um and you can be you know having friendships um it's a it's a strange way to grow up because you you know that you are supposed to save people's lives all right and it's inculcated in you you're managing their salvation you're managing their their trip to paradise well you've left the witnesses and are doing something that you really love uh wes what would you say to anyone watching this who may still be inside a high control group like the jw's and are thinking of leaving i'd say hang in there because there is a lot of good stuff outside the organization uh you know there's there's love there's hope there's faith if you if you are led to have faith if you so choose um you know there's there's all that stuff outside of the structure of the organization of the watchtower society there's a whole life waiting for you have to get through the the hump of letting go of uh the problematic parts of the organization [Music] just like my family and friends but not sure if i lied to who i should [Music] scared like a traitor who stopped a whole life

Channel: wesley david

Views: 6,874

Rating: 4.7876105 out of 5

Keywords: jehovahswitnesses, exjw, cult, cults, cultsurvivor, talkbeliefs, atheism, science, philosophy

Id: YomL7ahNaIo

Length: 5min 44sec (344 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 14 2020