A Good Question - Part Two

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 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.

I’m not sure why I allowed my answer to ramble. The first part (because it’s not true) certainly would have sufficed. For example, if someone says: “Why don’t you believe the Earth is flat?”, a full, complete answer would be: “Because it’s not true”. You shouldn’t have to supplement it with “And because believing it’s flat is bad for my health.”

Nevertheless, that’s what I said, and that’s what my family member decided to jump on. I was soon reminded, however, that it’s 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’t blame the actions of some elders/pioneers/Bethelites on the religion as a whole. And 2) Your claim isn’t that bad.

Let me explain this with examples.

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: “Oh come on, you can’t point out what he did to his children and say that that’s a problem with the religion. He was acting out of line with what the religion teaches.” But this is a total cop-out. Matthew 7:16 declares “By their fruits you will know them”, 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’s 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…then who’s 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?

Second, other arguments I threw up were swatted down as “not that bad”. It’s 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 “that bad”. 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 – 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’t that big of a deal (and maybe it’s not) and, further, that by not celebrating one’s 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.

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.

In a future post, perhaps, I will cite specific cases of how the religion was detrimental to my life.