ohmyjw

I did celebrate my first birthday in my life this year. And believe it or not, no one died and we had fun :). It felt very nice and I felt a relief that finally I don't have anyone that tries to govern every aspect of my life.

For me it was actually doctrine. We started to read more and more Bible, and started to find things that the JW publications got wrong. We started to ask questions. Then we encountered 1st hand what happens when you ask hard questions while being a JW. We got punished in the congregation for that, instead of receiving any answers at all. That prompted us to dig deeper and deeper, until we convinced ourselves that this could not be the true religion with all its lies and faults.

There were some funny moments, and there were some scary too.

• I once was attacked by a furious dog who jumped over the fence and grabbed my jacket. Fortunately it was winter and I have several layers of clothes on me, so he didn't hurt me, but scared the hell out of me
• There were times that people opened the door in, erm, uncomfortable situations. Pants only, straight out of the shower, wasted after partying, etc. We usually apologized and told them that we'll try to come other time
• Some people were very nice to us, and I had it several times that people invited me for a dinner. Almost all of those occurrences happened when we preached on the countryside. People in cities usually weren't so keen to invite us to their house.
• I had some incidents were people were really angry at us, yelled at us and even sometimes got physical. But nowadays it's very rare. I've heard that back in the day it wasn't very uncommon for JWs to get beat up while preaching.

It was about the "heavenly hope" (144 000 people that are meant to go to heaven) vs "earthly hope" (all the rest who would live on earth forever). While reading the Bible (verses like John 6:50-52, Ephesians 4:4, 5 and many others) we deducted that there was no two hopes, that either everyone goes to heaven or everyone will live on earth. This is in a direct conflict with what JWs teach.

They have a rule where a woman cannot conduct a Bible study or say a prayer when a baptized man is around her. And when the guy is not baptized, she is only allowed to do so when she wears a scarf on her head. Here's how it looks like (notice the guy in the background, if he weren't there she could conduct the study without a scarf).