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It was now too late to save the leg: so off it had to come. To all intense and purposes our actions were going to result in us living forever on this earth in paradise and with my leg restored (I would hate to live without it forever!) We were a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses (JW’s.)
Every name used and event portrayed in this account are either real or used by me as an autobiographic symbol. There is nothing either exaggerated or untrue in the following pages, although in the opening chapters the drastic events portrayed engage authors licence in order to try and express the despair and anger I feel in my heart, although they do portray my own experience to a realistic degree. I could clearly not be the child portrayed but the events surrounding her were not dissimilar mine, apart from the fact that I lived to tell the tale. Thereafter the events portrayed are done so to the best of my ability and are based on pure fact, hard as that maybe to believe.
Part 2 of this work is a complete dissection of JW’s doctrine as compared to their own Bible and to common sense as the reasonable person in the street would, I believe, perceive it to be. (Described commonly as a man on a 97 Clapham Road London bus)
I had been a part of this International group of millions for over 40 years I preached to tens of thousands at venues throughout Britain and abroad, spent thousands of hours talking to people on their doorsteps. I have conducted weddings, funerals, and religious celebrations. I have brought people in and I have thrown people out. I was total JW until one day I realised it was ok to doubt. So I doubted and despite all my life in, I confronted myself and realised as the old song goes ‘the king is in the altogether, the altogether and altogether as naked as the day he was born’. The whole thing was based on the most tenuous link to reality and yet was ruining the lives of millions, happy, they would say, in the knowledge that ‘soon’ God would kill off around 5,000,000,000 non believers. Yes, men, women, children, babies of all races and all other religions. Prisoners, sick people, their nurses and doctors. Judges, paramedics, shopkeepers, farmers, EVERYONE including you if you are not a JW and then god would lead the JW’s into paradise on earth. I woke up one morning and asked myself if that was possible and if it was would I want to be part of that genocide. No: and at that moment the JW’s dogma fell away from me as the shackles from a slave. I had been that slave indeed one of those millions of slaves.
I tell you now you will not believe the total magnetism of the JW’s or the vast international framework that exists to keep five million or so people in un-questioning servitude. The ORGANISATION as they refer to it.
I am told by my friend that once my story is written I shall feel better, assuaged of a demon so to speak. I will tell you, my reader on the last page if that proves to be true. At this moment I have no idea.
For the avoidance of doubt any reference made in this story to J.W.’s refers to the group who refer to themselves as Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Who are they? You may ask. Firstly you can decide if they should be termed a religion, a sect, or a cult. If you believe it then of course it is a religion or possibly The Religion. If you don’t care then you could call it a sect. If you fear or hate it then it’s a cult. I don’t fear it but to me it’s a very nasty cult.
They are adherents of a millennialism sect that began in the US in the 19th century and has since spread over much of the world; the group is a product of The International Bible Students Association founded in Pittsburgh USA in 1872 by Charles Russell.
The name Jehovah’s Witnesses was adopted in 1931 by Russell’s successor J F Rutherford. (Judge Rutherford 1869-1942), who sought to confirm the name Jehovah as being that of the true God and to identify those who witness in his name as God’s specially accredited followers. Rutherford equipped followers with portable record layers (‘wind up’ ones fittingly I would say) to play his sermons to people at their doors or in their houses. Under his leadership internal democracy was abolished and theocracy or God rule was introduced and directed strangely enough from the organisations headquarters in Brooklyn New York AND NOT HEAVEN.
Rutherford’s policies were carried on by his successor N H Knorr 1905-1977. He established The Watchtower Bible School of Gilead. (A thought has only just this second occurred to me here: They always name these things, putting their Watchtower magazine symbol BEFORE the word Bible.) To continue: this school was set up to train missionaries and leaders. He also decreed that all books and publications issued by The Society would not carry the names of the writers. Under Knorr’s charismatic leadership a new translation of the Bible was produced and a world wide web of adult training schools was set up to train JW’s to deliver talks in their own locality and from door to door. (You could argue that they created the model used so successfully by Amway)
Knorr was succeeded by F W Franz.
The JW’s have no association with other religious denominations and maintain a complete separation from secular governments. They regard political authorities as being allowed by god but used by Satan. Hence they do not, vote, join the military, salute the flag or stand for National Anthems. They do of course accept State benefits to maintain their lifestyle and use the freedoms and systems devised by what they view as tools of Satan to maintain their individual way of life. Wherever possible they, with great success, use the State to establish charitable status thus avoiding taxes. All other religions are, according to JW’s, tools of Satan and must therefore be avoided at all costs.
The ultimate goal for them is that god’s heavenly government, made up of the top 144,000 JW men and women who have died and been resurrected to heaven and who will in due course take control of the earth and the entire universe in a grand Theocracy which only the JW’s will get to see and live under forever. The rest of humanity will be destroyed by their god of love at a point in time called Armageddon. The date for this grand change and parallel annihilation of millions and millions of lives has been discussed, predicted over and over again by them through the years as you will see later on.
This work they say will actually be done by Jesus as the king of the Kingdom under the direction of the god of love who controls the Theocracy, Jehovah, but not the kingdom because Jesus controls that. Confused?
Well believe it or not JW’s have died in their thousands for this: in Nazi Germany, Communist countries and some of the more recently emerged African nations and in the UK during war times. These martyrs have been put to death for their allegiance to this Grand Theocracy. (I wonder if they were confused)
Most members of local congregation members, ranked as Publishers are expected to attend and take part in five meetings per week and spend as much time as they can going from door to door in defined areas trying to attract new members. This is well organised to ensure maximum coverage. Note is taken if no reply is received and they will try again at another time. The pioneer publishers will live on part time work together with hand outs from family and other JW’s and spend a hundred or so hours each month doing this work and go to the meetings The special pioneer publishers will go to the meetings and spend 150 hours per month doing this work and receive a modest salary as well as material support and handouts from family and members of the congregation. Basically one could argue that these people are the best Life Assurance sales people in the world because for a modest premium you will never die.
The JW’s have massive printing plants in strategically located cities around the world and their leading magazines Watchtower and Awake are distributed in the tens of millions each month together with millions of tracts, books, cassette tapes and videos. As with most religious organisations their business activity and true wealth is not publicly known but must be worth the Gross National Product of a reasonably sized country.
The three companies that run their activities are The Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania. The Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York and The International Bible Students Association. (I notice the word Bible comes in third place in each name, as I mentioned earlier.)
My Story
Like one of the Holocaust victims being herded into the gas chambers she offered no resistance to me. She was praying: can you believe that? Praying. The harder I pressed my thumbs into her throat and squeezed her neck with all my strength the more determined she was to gurgle a last utterance. Her muttering filled me with even more rage. She said “Forgive Andrew please Jehovah, please.
“Forgive me: who the hell was there to forgive me? This God of yours is not much good to you now is he you feeble minded little fool.” I was screaming at her as loudly as I could but she could not hear me anymore. Her hair lost its shine in that moment and her eyes glazed over, my wife was certainly dead. She was dangling from my hands limp and totally lifeless. Urine and faeces oozed from her disgusting remains. I looked up and down her corpse and remembered the happy times when I would call her shorty and swing her around playfully, me being six feet tall and her just five feet two, sort of like the long and the short of it.
It was the 21.February 1984. It was the day after my thirty fifth birthday. There had of course been no celebrations because she was still one of Jehovah’s Witnesses and they don’t celebrate birthdays. Anyway she won’t be having any more happy returns.
Our little girl had been the image of her and had she lived may have had the height of me and the looks of her mother. But she had not lived had she? No; she had not died in that terrible accident, no, we had let her die afterwards in hospital where she could have been saved for the sake of a drop of blood. We allowed her to die and for what? Nothing, she had died for nothing. We had actually sat back and convinced ourselves it was the right thing to do when all along we had it in our power to allow her to be given the medical treatment that may well have saved her. The medical staff, the police and even the Court tried to stop us from making this foolish stand in the name of so called religious freedom. They begged, reasoned and bullied us, but no, we knew better we had the TRUTH we were Jehovah’s Witnesses and she could not have even one little drop of blood.
Sue’s face turned grey very quickly not six inches from my own. Her neck felt cold to the touch even now. I felt neither happy or guilty no I felt nothing no elation no disgust just a cold determination to rid my life of every vestige of that evil and hate producing religion ashamed only of the hatred it had made me capable of. What had started as marriage of two young people full of hope and expectation had now certainly ended although it had been dead for ages. Just like our love life.
