Hourglass 2 Outpost

Eden 2
Outpost

By profession I'm an electrical engineer and I design analog integrated circuits. I work for an instrumentation company named LeCroy Corporation. Until 1998 I worked for Tektronix Corporation, another instrumentation company. I was born in 1951 and finished high school in 1969. I received a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering in 1982 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Master of Science degree in 1985 from Oregon State University while working at Tektronix.

In 1975 I married a JW. We began to divorce in 1994 because of religious and other differences. I have one daughter who was born in 1985 and lives with me.

Nutshell summary of my religious experience with Jehovah's Witnesses:
I was raised as a Jehovah's Witness and was baptized in 1967 at the age of 15. Until 1967 I had no inkling of trouble with JW religious beliefs. I was a true believer and thought that the Watchtower Society was Jehovah's channel for dispensing spiritual food to mankind. Shortly after my baptism the Society decided that organ transplants were unscriptural. I strongly disagreed with this. After that I gradually became aware of difficulties with an increasing number of Watchtower teachings. I stopped going in field service in 1983. After that I gradually left off attending meetings. In 1987 I had some discussions of Bible-related topics with a local elder, but he couldn't answer any of my questions, which concerned the Bible's Flood and Creation accounts. He suggested that I pose the questions to the Society by letter, which I eventually did in a limited way.

Toward the end of 1990 I started doing research in the various science-related fields in which the Society had taught something -- the Flood, evolution and a few minor topics. After about a year of research I concluded that if God exists, he is not interested in mankind, and that in any case I wanted nothing to do with him, and certainly not with Jehovah's Witnesses. This necessarily caused a good deal of family stress since my wife and many of my friends and relatives were JWs.

Having come to that point of disbelief, I told my stepfather (a JW elder) and my mother (a longtime JW) about the results of my research. They were unable to answer any questions, but my mother challenged me to investigate the fulfillment of Bible prophecy with respect to the "last days." I began to do so, but also began for the first time to look at what JW critics had to say. I was in a quandary about what various groups said, not knowing what to believe, so I looked into a variety of subjects. Eventually I came upon a book that went into the JW "Gentile times chronology" and Bible history. This was Carl Jonsson's excellent The Gentile Times Reconsidered. It showed how perfectly the Bible and secular history matched up with respect to the Exilic period, and so I concluded that Jehovah existed and was the God of the Bible after all. However, this restored faith also deepened my lack of confidence in the Watchtower Society, for the obvious reason that the Society says that most secular historical dates for the period are wrong. This presented the problem that the very information from the Bible and secular sources that restored my faith also indicated that the fundamental teachings of JWs -- 1914 and related doctrines -- are quite wrong. With the cornerstone 1914 teaching gone, there is no reason to think that the Jehovah's Witnesses are anything but an odd religious group.

Here is a more detailed and chronological account of my background:
I was born in 1951 and raised as a Witness. I have one brother, who left the JWs in the 1980s. My mother and father were raised as JWs as were most of our relatives. My parents were divorced in 1969 and my mother remarried the man who is now my stepfather and has been more a father than my real one. They are strong Witnesses, he being an elder. My real father was an extremely active JW for most of his life, but in the 1960s pretty well dropped out. Unfortunately he seems to have had a congenital birth defect (his mother almost died of the Spanish Influenza while pregnant with him in 1917), which caused him to have personality defects that caused him and those around him great difficulty, and led to my parents' breakup.

When I was growing up I took "the Truth" pretty seriously, and thought I believed it. I remember reading a book that pooh-poohed religion because it was inherently illogical, but I thought that it was great that my own religion was so eminently logical. I mean, we could prove everything from the Bible! My family had been involved with the Witnesses for a long time, my paternal grandmother becoming a Bible Student in 1920 and the people on my mother's side knowing about the Bible Students since about 1909. My father's mother got wind of the Bible Students because her husband had, on general principles, defended a Bible Student colporteur who had been tarred and feathered in their rural Oklahoma town in 1918 during the WWI hysteria. My grandfather never took to the religion, but my grandmother later claimed to be of the anointed.

My paternal grandparents had 11 children, 6 or 7 of whom became JWs. Most of their offspring in turn became JWs, and most had large families, so I have literally hundreds of JW relatives. On my mother's side, her aunt and mother became JWs in the early 1930s, and about half of their families are in the religion. My uncle attended the first Gilead school in 1943, has been a missionary in South America all his life, and is now a Branch Committee member in Colombia. My father was in Bethel from 1938 to 1946, served in what is now the Service Department answering correspondence, and knew all the major players in the Society. He was a very good administrator for conventions, and also headed up the plumbing department for several of the big 1950s conventions at Yankee Stadium. I spent quite a bit of time in the Brooklyn factory when I was little, playing in piles of paper discards from the magazine trimming machines while he worked. Nathan Knorr came to our home once in connection with dedicating a new Kingdom Hall for which my father had been appointed Congregation Servant.

The first trouble I remember having with the Society's teachings was when they came out against organ transplants in 1967, just a few months after I got baptized. I completely disagreed with the reasoning set forth in The Watchtower, although I never made an issue of it. I thought it was a very stupid argument and it damaged my faith in the Society.

My father's personality problems were manifest largely as an inability to get along with other people. To make a long story short, he almost drove my mother crazy. She committed adultery with a man we were renting a room to and was disfellowshipped in late 1969, and married him. When my parents broke up I lived with my mother and new stepfather, but my brother lived with our father. When the divorce occurred it became evident that my father was just as morally culpable as my mother for the situation. Further, he went around gossiping to all their former friends how "badly" my mother had treated him all during the marriage. My brother and I spoke to the Congregation Servant (this was before the elder arrangement) but he said that because my father's actions were not disfellowshipping offenses there was nothing he could do. But he also refused to counsel my father to stop his un-christian activities. So my brother and I went in to Brooklyn Bethel (we lived on Long Island) and spoke to an official in the Service Department named Harley Miller, with whom my father had been friendly during his days at Bethel. We explained the situation for about two hours. He too said there was nothing to be done. The episode left a sour taste in my mouth about so-called justice in "the Christian congregation."

In 1966 JWs first learned of the "significance" of 1975. At a circuit assembly in 1967 we were told that the end was going to come before 1975, so it was extremely important to follow the Society's directions to get salvation. This expectation, along with the Society's extreme negative comments about obtaining higher education, caused me to forego college after finishing high school in 1969. I gave up a scholarship as well as offers of financial help from some non-JW friends of the family who were well-to-do. From 1967 onward, 1975 figured prominently in the thinking of most everyone I knew. In my own mind it was kind of like a black wall I couldn't see beyond. We so much hoped everything would be over and release us from our labors and from the pain of seeing the world in a sorry state. At least, most of us did.

In March 1971 the Society published a WT article which said that the human heart -- the physical organ -- was literally the seat of emotion. It held "conversations" with the brain, which was equated with the mind. Upon reading the article I became agitated, thinking this was among the most stupid things I had ever read. I thereupon decided that the Watchtower Society could not be trusted. I remember being out in service one day with my best friend, doing magazine placements. He tried to explain to one woman about the article, and she looked at him like he was absolutely crazy. I just wanted to melt into the sidewalk. I argued with my father about the article. He thought it was great and cleared up a lot of things! To top it off, the summer district assembly program included a demonstration where a giant green brain on one side of the stage lighted up and talked to a giant red heart on the other side. The dialog reflected the emotional side of a person arguing with the intellectual side.

About 1972 I began having trouble with the Society's teachings that had to do with the length of the creative days of Genesis. Why did the Society teach that they were exactly 7000 years long? This was important because 1975 was supposed to be at the end of exactly 6000 years of human existence. I wanted to know precisely why they were teaching that, and so I researched it in the Society's publications. I could find no explicit explanation anywhere, and concluded that the reason they taught it was based on certain unstated assumptions. I reasoned that since we knew we were about 6000 years from man's creation, and that we were in the generation of 1914, which was to see the end of the system of things, it was a reasonable conclusion that exactly 6000 years would be a significant number. I couldn't find any Brothers who could confirm this, so I wrote to the Society. To my astonishment, they confirmed it.

So here the Society had admitted that this most important date -- 1975 -- was based on little more than an assumption. I naively assumed that some sort of explanation of this would be forthcoming in The Watchtower but it never was. Over a period of time I realized that the Society was not going to tell JWs the truth about this. Since then I've learned that the 6000 year idea can be traced back to antiquity. It appears in the writings of the early "church fathers," 2nd century B.C.E. rabbinical writings, and Plato. Traces can even be found in 6th century B.C.E. Zoroastrianism. Even Charles Taze Russell admitted that the idea was a "venerable tradition," but he held to it nonetheless. In early 1994 I sent Governing Body member Albert Schroeder a detailed explanation of this material so that the Society would be aware of it. Schroeder never answered my letter, and told me in a later telephone conversation that he never would.

These things made me lose interest in attending meetings, and in early 1972 I almost dropped out. But since I was still living at home I was required to go to meetings. Eventually I put out of my mind the things that had bothered me, made a comeback, and was a reasonably good member of the congregation from about 1972 to 1977, becoming a ministerial servant in 1975. In 1975 I married, and in 1978 I went to college. Religion went on the back burner.

About 1976 one elder took my best friend to task for not handling business taxes properly. My friend had screwed up, being new in his business. When the problem was brought to his attention he took steps to correct it, but this idiotic elder decided to try to get him disfellowshipped. Apparently there was some bad blood going back many years between their families, and the elder used this as an excuse to do some damage. The body of elders (my stepfather had become one of them by this time) couldn't decide whether to disfellowship or reprove my friend, or just forget the whole thing. They went around and around for months, like the Keystone Kops, causing a great deal of talk and trouble in the congregation. They finally decided to reprove the poor guy, then disfellowship, then reversed themselves again. Finally the Society was called in, which called in another elder body, which decided that the matter never should have been brought up to begin with since it is not the congregation's business whether someone handles their taxes properly or not.

This affair made me question the Society's claim that elders "are appointed by holy spirit." What they really mean is that if a local body of elders properly applies the qualifications set out for elders in the Bible, then it can be said that, in a certain sense, elders are appointed by holy spirit since God himself set out the standards. This reasoning, of course, leaves much to be desired since anyone can claim that he is following the Bible, but that has no necessary connection with whether he is in fact following the Bible. It is clearly a "feel-good" line of reasoning and is without substance. The Society applies the same line of reasoning to the claim that elders, including Watchtower leaders, are "directed by holy spirit" in performing their duties as spiritual shepherds.

Let it suffice to say that this understanding is not what the average Witness has of the process of appointing elders, and it is not the impression the Society gives. Nor was it mine at the time, so I questioned a number of Brothers about it, and none were able to give a clear answer. Every one claimed that elders really and truly were appointed and directed by holy spirit, but they could not tell me why, if that were true, the situation of the Keystone Kops elder body could develop. So I wrote to the Society, and they had the local Circuit Overseer, Wesley Benner, talk to me about it. We had a very good talk, and he explained to me what the Society really meant by its claims. To sum it up, I asked him point blank: "In one sentence, is it or is it not true that elders are *directly* appointed by holy spirit?" He hesitated, hung his head, looked away, and answered, "No." I then determined in my own mind never to trust the Society again, but because by this time I was already distancing myself from the Witnesses, at least in my own mind, it only added to my desire not to be associated. But being completely entwined by family and social ties I couldn't see myself doing anything about it. Shortly after this I decided to go to college, and so I put religious problems on the shelf for four years.

After the autumn of 1975 passed without "the end" coming, I began having vaguely formed second thoughts about the Witnesses. I never said anything, like most JWs back then, but I was very disappointed that the end had not come. I never even put it into a solidly formed thought (likely because to do so would have forced me to confront the issue) but I know that the disappointment had its effect. I kept having thoughts about what it was going to be like in 20 or 30 years, after lots more disappointment had set in. But I put them aside, and was able to put off the inevitable by burying myself in my college work.

During all these years, I kept finding information from a wide variety of sources that suggested that my religion was not what it was cracked up to be, and that my religious organization was not telling people the truth about many things related to science. In the manner of so many people who don't want to face unpleasant facts, I kept telling myself that, after college was done, I could attack and solve all the things that were giving me trouble with my faith. Little did I know how severe those things would prove to be.

For many years the Society said that a college education is unnecessary and dangerous. It spoke disparagingly of any JW who went. During my first year at MIT, I got to feeling pretty bad about what was being said in The Watchtower, and on a number of occasions I complained to my parents about it. One time my wife and I visited my parents on Long Island, and it so happened that Governing Body member Albert Schroeder was visiting them for the weekend. Since I was feeling pretty resentful about the Society's comments on going to college, my parents suggested that Schroeder and I have a talk. He was very friendly and we had a fine conversation. To my surprise he told me that I shouldn't pay too much attention to what the Society said in print about college, and that if it was right for me I should be satisfied. This placated me for some time.

While in college I took an anthropology course for which a term paper was required. I decided to combine my interest in Noah's Flood with this requirement by writing a paper showing that Noah's Flood was a real event. I planned on including material about legends as well as physical effects. I figured that the MIT library would have most of the material on hand that was referenced in the WTS publications that dealt with the Flood. It did, but I was hardly prepared for what I found. I found that most of the references were to virtually worthless popular accounts (although the impression was given that these were of real scientific value), or they were quoted out of context. The majority of references were misrepresented in some way, so that I could not use them in my paper. I gave up on the Flood theme and thought that writing a defense of creation against evolution would work well, so I looked up those references, too. I mostly used the books Did Man Get Here By Evolution or by Creation, and Is the Bible Really the Word of God?. But I found almost the same thing with the references that were supposed to knock down evolution as I had found with those used to support the Flood. Since the end of the term was rapidly approaching I nearly panicked, but lucked out and found a book written by a lawyer (Darwin Retried, Norman MacBeth), which used quotations from various scientists to poke at evolution, but without distorting them. This was barely adequate to let me write the paper. This experience further eroded my opinion of WTS scholarship and intellectual integrity.

In 1982 I graduated and we moved to Oregon, where I had gotten a good job with an electronics company. We fit in pretty well with the local congregation and rapidly made friends. In late 1982 the Society printed Awake! articles which claimed that the design of animals implied a designer. It pointed out that some people objected that some animals were predators, and so how could this be evidence of a loving designer? Then it said that this question did not affect the claim that "design requires a designer" but does involve a moral question about how man and the animals got into their present bad state. It said that animals kill and eat each other because of Adam's sin, and that animals were not designed to kill and eat each other but that some do so because they "adapted themselves to eating flesh"! How they were supposed to "adapt" themselves this way was never explained. I suspect the Society got reamed about this because a few months later they printed a couple of readers' responses that pointed out how stupid these arguments were. The printed reply skirted the questions and lamely concluded, in effect, "We don't know what we're talking about but we believe the Bible." This bothered me greatly, not only because of the Society's obvious gross incompetence that was being paraded as "Bible knowledge," but because of the implications for the morality of God.

About a year after that I found that I just didn't believe much of it anymore. I remember one day, sitting in a car in service with three other JWs, doing return visits and thinking how stupid this all was. Here we were, two people at a time going to a door that most likely no one would answer, claiming that this fulfilled Jesus' words about preaching the good news. It all seemed so futile, and I resolved not to go preaching that way again. I also quit going to meetings other than the Sunday ones and the assemblies.

About 1987 my wife was quite bothered by my "not doing anything about the Truth," so she convinced me to talk to a Brother who was about my age and who, along with his wife, had just come back from Bethel. So for about a year we talked about the Flood, Creation vs. Evolution, and a host of other things. I realized after a while that he had no answers, and so did he. So he suggested that I write to the Society about some of it. I put this off for about two more years, until in the fall of 1990 something motivated me to begin research into all the questions I had stored up. The research got intense. I began to realize that the Society could not and would not ever respond to the full content of any letter I might write (this has proved to be the case), and so I wrote some short letters to the Society. Most were never answered, perhaps partly because they were not very tactful. One, concerning the ransom doctrine, was answered after I wrote to someone in a prominent position at Bethel and called in a favor. In the letter the Society said that the Brothers disagreed with my conclusions but would not explain why. Then they referred me to some literature explaining why one should not ask "unprofitable questions." I wrote a reply but it was never answered.

By the end of the first phase of this research I had pretty much lost faith in God, and had completely given up on the Witnesses. In late 1992 I decided to look at what critics of the Society had to say. I found far more than I could ever have imagined. Up to that point I had mostly stayed away from doctrinal stuff and concentrated on science. I found that all of my complaints about how science-related things were dealt with were duplicated in spades in the doctrinal areas. I found that I was not alone in my complaints and that I was not off the wall in my criticisms, because many others had seen them too, and they were just as angry as I was. Of course, they had left but I continued to try to find answers.

In the summer of 1992 I discovered the Internet. Looking back, it was somewhat surprising how that came about. I had recently finished a long tome about Creation/Evolution and was thinking about what to do next. I was sitting at my work desk one day, feet up on the desk, when along came a good friend who started chatting about the newsgroups he was reading on Internet. He told me about the "origins" and "religion" groups, and so I found out how to get access. Lo and behold, I found a discussion of the Society's latest (1985) book on Creation/Evolution. It was being ripped to shreds, which tickled me since I had just got finished doing the same.

Ever since then I've participated in various Internet forums. I found that JWs who inhabit the Net tend to be much more open than other JWs to discussing hard topics. Perhaps it is because one needs to be a bit thick-skinned to begin with to enjoy the fray. Unfortunately, with the publication of the September 1995 Our Kingdom Ministry and because of the increasing presence of informed critics, many JWs gave up discussing doctrine on computer forums, although by 1997 discussions were in full sway again. Other comments by the Society have caused JWs to leave the Internet from time to time, but they usually come back.

To peg the time scale of my activities just a bit better, I began my intense research in November, 1990. By June 1991 I had completed first drafts of all my science-oriented writeups, as well as a piece on "God's Justice." I was agnostic and nearly atheistic at that point. I spent the next half year filling in the holes in my research. In December of 1991 my mother challenged me to do some research on the fulfillment of Bible prophecy in the 20th century according to the Society. Instead of diving right in, I decided first to take look at what critics had to say about JWs. I read a book (Witnesses of Jehovah, Leonard and Marjorie Chretian) that summarized the main complaints evangelical types had about the Witnesses, and that led to my purchasing what I consider the best of the "critical" books. Much of the critical literature is garbage, but these are gems: Crisis of Conscience and In Search of Christian Freedom, Raymond Franz; Apocalypse Delayed: The Story of Jehovah's Witnesses, James Penton; The Gentile Times Reconsidered, Carl Olof Jonsson; The Sign of the Last Days: When?, Carl Olof Jonsson and Wolfgang Herbst.

In the fall of 1992 my parents agreed to forward a short list of difficult questions to the Writing Department via my mother's close friend who was attached to the Writing Staff, and I was promised some answers. The only feedback I got was through my stepfather, who said that one of the writers had read the questions and decided that one was an "apostate question" and therefore that he would not deal with any of them.

In the summer of 1993 I decided to try to contact the Governing Body directly to get my criticisms of WTS teachings addressed. With help from my parents, who are personal friends of GB member Albert Schroeder, I forwarded a letter to Schroeder asking him for some time to discuss these things. Eventually he agreed to a telephone conversation, and in November 1993 we spoke for about 2 1/2 hours. I raised enough problematic issues that he saw were real problems that he agreed to address them in writing.

For example, I asked him to explain how the Society reconciled Jeremiah 25:12 with its chronology. He didn't have a ready answer, so we began to carefully consider the verse and its context. After first reading the verse I said, "According to this verse, when did the 70 years end?" He said, "in 539 B.C.E." Then he seemed to realize that there was a problem, and he had us go back to the beginning of Jeremiah 25. This tickled me, for here I was leading a GB member and former Gilead instructor through the Bible. We got to verse 12 again and he automatically said, "and that happened in 537 B.C.E." I pointed out that he had just agreed that the verse indicated that the 70 years ended in 539, not 537. This obviously flustered him, so I suggested that I send him a written summary of what we were discussing and he could deal with it at his leisure, which he agreed to do.

Another thing that made Schroeder sit up and take notice was my pointing out that many of the arguments in the Creation book were taken from the writings of a paranormalist. He was audibly shocked and agreed to look at my documentation.

Two months later I sent him a large packet of material documenting the basis for my criticisms. These criticisms were along the lines of some of what I've described above. By August 1994 Schroeder had not answered my letter, so I arranged to talk to him by telephone the next month when I was to be in New York on business.

Simultaneous with these developments, my marriage was going through the final stages of failure, mainly because my wife was unable to deal with the fact that I was no longer an active JW, and she had stopped treating me like a husband. In September 1994 I decided to divorce her because several times in the previous year she had told me point blank that she could not be my companion in life as long as I wasn't an active JW, and that if I taught our daughter my religious views she would divorce me for "apostasy." The divorce was finalized in early 1996.

During the last year of my marriage I began corresponding with two women via email, one of whom has become my wife. I met Julie at the end of 1993, when she responded to some posts I made on a religious newsgroup on the Internet, but we left off communicating for half a year. In the meantime I met her sister the same way and we quickly became friends. A couple of months after Julie and I resumed correspondence in July 1994, we admitted to each other that our marriages were dead and that we were about to get out of them. Later we made plans to meet in person to see if we were as compatible in person as by email. Soon afterwards, we met and then made plans to marry. In December 1994 Julie moved to Oregon and we married in early 1997.

The summer of 1994 was a watershed for me in several ways. At the beginning of the summer I began seeing a therapist to help me sort out the pressures of dealing with a failed marriage and a failed religion. By the end of the summer we concluded that I was very angry about one factor common to three influential forces in my life: the inability on the part of my father, my religion and my wife to admit error. This realization spurred me on to end the pain of my current circumstances and start life anew.

During that summer I hazily realized that things were coming to a head, and that's exactly what happened. At the beginning of September 1994, I internally resolved my problems with my father and decided to divorce my wife. Two weeks later I had a telephone conversation with Governing Body member Albert Schroeder while I was in New York. He said that he had better things to do with his time than deal with the issues I had brought up in our conversation the year before and in the material I had sent him. I asked him if he intended ever to deal with it as he had said he would, and he said he would not. I saw then clearly, as never before, that the entire leadership of the Society normally acts just like Schroeder. I therefore concluded that, despite my best efforts to find contrary evidence, the Witnesses are just one of a number of religions in which good and bad can be found, and I mentally divorced myself from the Society. So in the space of two weeks, my three major psychological pressures began to be resolved and my personal life began to turn around.

Julie and I married in early 1997. We've been fairly active in Internet activities, keeping in touch with many new friends and meeting them in person. Having come to grips with the closet-monsters left over from our JW upbringings, these past few years have been the happiest and most rewarding of our lives. With any luck the future will be as much fun.

• Some of my essays on Research on the Watchtower, Osarsif's excellent site.