This is Fifth and you're watching the ExJW Fifth YouTube channel. On today's episode, I'll
be speaking with Ben. Ben is a former Jehovah's Witness, also a former elder
and pioneer. He even worked with the writing desk in the Australian branch of
Jehovah's Witnesses and several of his articles were actually published in the
Watchtower and Awake magazines. So Ben, first of all I just really want to welcome you to
the channel and thank you so much for taking time out to speak with me.
thanks Fifth it's a pleasure to be on your channel. I'm looking forward to having a good
chat with you. -Likewise, thank you very
much. Let me ask you a little bit about your background with Jehovah's Witnesses.
What was your introduction to the
religion? -Sure, so my parents were
introduced to it when I was about 8 years old; my father was a window dresser
setting up shop displays, so of course most pioneers being window cleaners he
came across the witnesses all the time and eventually invited one back to the
house and started studying. My mother was reluctant at first and she gave the
witnesses a really hard time, but eventually she started studying as well
and I think they got baptized around 1978 so from that point on I
grew up in that culture. My father was never a serious sort of witness I think
for him it was more that he liked the people. He was very social and gregarious;
I don't think he ever really took it that seriously. I know when he studied
with me, he never took my study very personally, so I had to kind of
study for myself. So, in my teenage years I was very studious. I'd read a lot but
like - yeah, my dad was pretty casual about it all. He used to even fall asleep in the
study that he had with me but I was a very serious young person. I made a
friend with another older brother in the congregation and we used to even study
our books together, get right into all those old meaty things with all the
types in the antitypes and all the heavy prophecy stuff so
that was the kind of person I was. And so at 14, I decided to get baptized and even
from that young age I had instilled into me
the goal of pioneering. I had a few older brothers that sort of mentored me and
really sort of instilled those goals into me, so I was a very serious-minded young
person; never got into any trouble and baptized very young. Then about eighteen
I met my future wife. She moved into our congregation from a northern coastal
congregation here in Australia and 19 I was married. So yeah that's
how it all started. - I see, and now I would
imagine because you already have mentioned that you were very
goal-oriented even from a very early age, I would imagine you were reaching out
for even more privileges at that time, is that correct?
oh absolutely, so of course I was hoping to be appointed as a
ministerial servant and the brothers indicated to me that they were looking
looking at me in that way. Unfortunately, my courtship to my
future wife sort of threw a spanner in the works there, they viewed my wife
as kind of a - I don't know - a boy chaser or a cradle snatcher or something. She kind of
moved into our congregation and straightaway she's sort of after one of
their spiritual boys as it were, and I just remember our courtship, you know... it
should have been kind of the happiest time in your life but the elders at times
made it really miserable for us because we couldn't do anything right. If we were
seen holding hands we were straightaway taken out to the back room and counseled.
Everything we did we were counseled for, they just interfered with
everything. Eventually, it got so bad that the circuit overseer even got involved.
To his credit, he actually pulled the elders aside and said, "hey brothers, look, if the
parents are approving just stay out of it. Mind
your own business. So I thank them for that, but I just remember what
a miserable time it was just not being able to have a natural courtship just
because everything you did was so micro managed and everything was observed and
criticized and counseled. Anyway, we got married eventually
and then the brothers came to me and said, "look, you know, we would like to make
a ministerial servant but seeing as you're just married, we would like to give you
some time to settle into marriage." Which I thought was a good practical thing. So
I accepted that, but then they made me a ministerial servant so I would have been
about twenty, twenty-one, early twenties I can't remember exactly, and then that
sort of opened up some strange things for me and I guess through my story I'm
gonna be mentioning a lot of things that probably should have made me think about
the organization on a deeper level, should have made me question things but
I just sort of suppressed it all and I ignored a lot of things. So I found
being a ministerial servant in that congregation where I grew up very tough
because there our presiding overseer - as they were called in those times
He was one of those really old school elders that sort of felt the congregation
was his congregation, like he owned it. He was the chief and we were the
Indians, and so there was again this very very strict control of everything - how
everything was done, there was no freedom of opinion or how you might
carry out certain tasks but, you know, I coped with that and I thought he was a
bit of a Hitler in a sense and eventually when the opportunity came up
to move, I took that opportunity and got out of that congregation. Also because
I thought it was good to to move away from where you've grown up where
everyone views you as just a sort of young kid - to establish your own identity
I thought was important too. I progressed well, I was being given
public talks as a ministerial servant so I think I'd made good progress there,
but the opportunity came up to move to, another Kingdom Hall where there was a
Kingdom Hall flat available. So they were looking for a pioneer to move into that
flat and we jumped at that opportunity
as a newly married couple. - I see. Okay, so
once you moved into that flat and obviously changed congregations;
being able to be perceived perhaps in a different light than you had been
previously in your home congregation, what happened? How was your time
there at that congregation? - okay, so
part of the reason for leaving was, as I said, to get away from the this
very controlling elder and unfortunately what happened was it was a bit of the
out of the frying pan into the fire scenario. So when we moved into the new
congregation, it was all lovely. We were welcomed so warmly. The presiding
overseer there said, you know, how much he appreciated having us there but that
only lasted for a very short time and then his true colors came to the
fore and I realized that he was an even worse man than the man I had left. I have
to put this in context and say that, you know, I've worked with many many
wonderful elders over the years, so I don't want to portray a wrong picture.
Many of these elders I've worked with have been very loving, very
genuine men, but over time there have been some real bad ones, some bad
eggs in that mix and this one was probably one of the worst. So just to
give you sort of an idea of how he ran the congregation it was really like
with an iron fist. Everything was controlled to the minutest detail
and again we used to get in trouble for the slightest things. So it might be...
we had a anniversary party for someone in the congregation and he'd come up and
grill me and say, "you can't have anniversary parties! The society doesn't
agree with them." and I'm like, "well, where does it say that?"
and then he'd write letters and just make stuff up and say the society says
this and that. So any of his personal opinions he'd used the society and say
that's what was behind his opinion. There was another instance where
my wife wanted to do something fun for the kids in the congregation. So
she thought, "Let's do a drama with the kids! We'll use one of the
recorded dramas, we'll hire a community hall, we'll get the brothers to make up
costumes and it'll be a real fun school activity in the holidays for all the
kids. As soon as this elder heard about it he again straight away around to the
hall flat to grill us and say, "you can't do that! You know the society doesn't
approve of these kind of things! You dare not be doing it in the kingdom hall." and,
you know, we reassured him that no no, we weren't going to do it in the hall but
everything was just - it was just so hard to get anything done or anything nice
and joyful, there was such an oppressive atmosphere in that in that Kingdom Hall,
and then of course being a person who wanted to create a sense of community
and a sense of joy in the brothers and sisters there, I was always trying to do
things and always getting myself into trouble with this elder, and there were
other things too. Like I remember a time where a sister had this emotionally
abusive husband and at one point it got so bad that he basically kicked her out
of the house, threw all the clothes and stuff on the lawn and locked her out of the
house and she was good friends with my wife. So she called my wife and we went
and got her and we invited her to stay with us for the night just until she got
herself sorted out, and again as soon as this elder found out, he was around to
our place grilling us, telling us how inappropriate it was because we were
interfering in their marriage and, you know, all we were doing was just this
humanitarian thing. This sister was out on the street and we just gave her
somewhere to sleep for the night and we were sort of punished for it, but it sort
of all came to a head at one point where there was a couple of other ministerial
servants in the congregation that were also feeling that, you know, this just
wasn't right the way he was doing things and oppressing everyone. And one in
particular was an ex elder who'd moved in and was a servant and so he had a lot
of experience and he also could see that this was just not right. So three or
four of us I think it was, we decided we needed to do something, we
thought, you know, God's Spirit wasn't working this congregation and we didn't
feel like we could talk to him because he would just go nuts at us. We
didn't feel like we could talk to any of the other elders because they all just
seemed to be under his control as well. They just seemed to be his "yes men" as it were. So we
decided the only thing we could do is go to the circuit overseer. So there was a
circuit assembly coming up and we all went to the circuit overseer and we
explained what was going on in the congregation, explained how we felt about
it. The circuit overseer sort of thanked us for that and opened up an
investigation and I remember how crazy that whole assembly was. The whole
weekend was just interview after interview. So what they did was the
circuit overseer got the district overseer involved who was serving that
assembly and the two of them got each of us in turn on our own separately and
just grilled us for hours on end about the situation, and after that they interviewed us
all, and then they sort of went back and interviewed us all again based on the
other information they obtained. So initially we thought, well this
is a positive, you know, the society is listening to us and we're going to do
something about it, but of course what happened was that it all just went back
to him and I'm sure that the circuit overseer, you know, gave him feedback and
some counsel. I don't know what was said to him.
Nothing was actually done about it in any practical way. So the fallout from
it was that I guess maybe because I was sort of one of the chief instigators of
it, he really directed his animosity towards me even
further. So at the time, as I said, I was doing public talks, I had my own book
study group, I was almost doing everything an elder
would be doing and all that was taken off me because I'd gone behind his back
and acted disloyally. So basically he dissolved the group I was in and he put me
in his book study group where he could keep an eye on me and keep me
under control and this is the bizarre thing Fifth, I was not removed as a
ministerial servant. So I was still an appointed man but I was treated like a
disfellowship person for all intents and purposes. So he wouldn't let me take the field
service group, I was barely allowed to answer. When I did answer he just sort of snarled
at my comments and looked at me disdainfully. I wasn't allowed to do anything.
So I had no privileges anymore, even though I was still a ministerial servant. It was
like I was put in the naughty corner as it were for speaking up against him and
I think - I can't remember exactly how long this lasted but I think I was in
his group for a year or two and the whole time I just had to sort of put up
with it and think, well, you know, just wait on Jehovah this will get sorted out.
It just went from bad to worse really. Eventually a special pioneer elder was
sent to the congregation and then it finally was sorted out. What ended up
happening was that virtually the whole elder body was removed as elders. A
couple of other new brothers moved in along with this special pioneer brother
and so at the time - again that appeased
my doubts and my concerns. I thought, yeah this is - even though it took so long - this
is evidence that Jehovah eventually fixes things up, that he's really in
control. So a mental conditioning remained for still a long time even
though that experience was just horrendous. There was no evidence of
God's Spirit working in that congregation at all, but I thought now it
had been fixed, and then not long after that I was appointed as an elder
myself, and at around the age of I think about 27 28 I was at that time. So
what happened then was interesting because for a while I served with
that special pioneer brother who was a very good brother. We're still actually
very good friends. He moved on from the congregation after a short while and
then a new presiding overseer had to be appointed. You know, the interesting thing
is that there were two very experienced elders there, but they
didn't get on both had very strong personalities and I think if
either of them had been appointed the presiding overseer, there would have been
a lot of tension and drama because of the other one disagreeing all the time and
not supporting the leadership of the other brother.
so as crazy as it seems, I, as the youngest elder on the body, was appointed
as the presiding overseer. Not because of any skills or experience
On my part, but literally because I was sort of a compromise candidate. I was the
one who could maybe keep the peace between these other strong-minded brothers, so
I was kind of really thrown in the deep end in a sense, being appointed presiding
overseer at a very young age. -I see, so
obviously that would have been a lot of responsibility; even being an elder
at 27 and all of the duties you would have had at that point in addition
to being married and all of that, that was a lot on your shoulders. What
was that experience like for you? How did things
proceed from that point forward? -it was
good for quite a while. As I said, those brothers were good
brothers, as I said there's been a few bad elders I've worked with, but that
team of elders were genuinely good men to work with, but being an elder
is stressful - like just the amount of work, the amount of emotional energy...
because I was also living at the kingdom hall flat because I was pioneering as
well. It was like I was on call 24/7, so eventually that did wear me down and I
almost had - what you might call a nervous breakdown in a sense, and I eventually
moved out of that Kingdom Hall flat and to another congregation, but I guess the
big thing that stands out to me from that time in my life was just being
thrown into this whirlpool of committee cases after committee cases all the
time. It was funny, when I was first appointed as an elder and I got
the keys to the filing cabinet as it were, where we kept all our records,
I was a bit shocked as a young elder to see...with judicial cases, they
are always filed in particular yellow envelopes that were all sealed, and so
the first time I went into this filing cabinet, there must have been - I don't know - 30
or 40 of these yellow folders and they were thick with notes; just all the judicial
cases over the decades in that congregation. I just thought, wow!
There's just so much stuff here and that didn't stop during my time as an elder
there. I served on - I don't know how many but it just seems like every few months
there was another judicial case and that's probably one of my big
regrets now looking back, that some of the ways we handled those cases. I
mean at the time we were following policy and procedure, at the time I
thought I was doing the right thing but looking back now I can see that some of
the decisions I made really affected families, tore families apart in a
sense because of the shunning that followed. I've tried to now go back and find those
people and apologize as much as I can for the part I played in some of
those things. There was one particular case that really still weighs heavily on me
because I've never been able to find the man and he was a good friend of
ours at the time. We used to be around at their place for dinner every week we had
a young family with young kids, we had gotten on really well with them, and
anyway, he was disfellowshipped for the most minor of things, you know? and the
only reason he was disfellowshipped because it happened a couple of times
and we were following procedure and the book says, you know, if it's more than one
occasion then you have to question their repentance, but of course we had no idea
whether he was repentant or not, you can't judge that in a person. We were
just following procedures. So he was disfellowshipped and that was the end of
that friendship of course for me and I don't know what happened with his
family but I presume that he hasn't seen his kids for a many many years, I certainly broke up
that family and to this day it makes me very sad that I had a part in it.
So there were many cases, there was also a case of child abuse. So again
I was only in my early 30s I think when I got that one, so again very
inexperienced. I didn't know how to handle that it was a very difficult case.
Luckily it wasn't a severe case it was more
sort of the early stages of inappropriate touching it wasn't
the full-on child rape or anything like that, but still looking back now, I can
see how ill-equipped we were to handle it. We did what we were supposed to
do which was to ring the branch office and they gave us some guidelines, we
followed those procedures. The man stopped attending meetings so we
didn't really pursue him in the sense of taking judicial action or anything, we
just sort of let the matter rest, but the thing I deeply regret is that we
didn't really give the victim the support that she would have needed. We didn't
encourage her to go and get counseling all we really did was, you know, for a few
meetings just check on her to say "are you okay? Are you doing alright?"
Read some scriptures to her, and that's all we did. There was no long term help and
years later that all came to a head because she actually decided to do
something about it herself. So she started legal proceedings. So, I got a
call last year when I'd already left the organization from one of the elders, the elder who wa
actually the chairman of that committee, and it was interesting, now I could see
from the other side of the coin just how things proceeded from his point of view
so he rang me up, and he told me, look, you know, the police are going to call me
about this case. We have to make some statements, we may have to go into court
and testify, but what really struck me was that this elder - his chief concern
was that we got our stories matching, got our stories straight. So that's
the reason he was willing to give me a heads-up. He basically told me
what he had told the police and he wanted to make sure that I was going to
tell the police the same thing, and his chief concern was that we looked good to
to law enforcement, that it looked like we handled everything correctly
and what he was suggesting, as far as you know, the statement that would be given -
was it true? -No. I didn't agree with it
I don't think - I mean we handled things correctly in that we followed
procedure, but I didn't agree that we handled things correctly from the point
of view that I now have in hindsight. -Sure
I don't think we could have done anything different at that time because we were
only doing what we knew how to do, but looking back on it I could see that
we didn't handle things properly and I wasn't prepared to say that we did. So
when I went to the police I gave them quite a different statement and I told
them how I felt from my current perspective, but that went to trial
and then the man was dealt with, and he he was found guilty, and so that all
turned out well, but yes, it just really opened my eyes up to the fact that
the other elders on that case were more concerned about how the
organization looked versus what we did
for the victim. - how long was
that period of time, from when you were made aware of the allegation or the
reporting of the inappropriate touching to when the police ultimately got a hold
of it and pursued that case legally? that's a good question, and that's why
in hindsight it really concerned me, because this case happened in around
2003, 2004, I can't remember the exact year. So it would have been well over ten
years ago before it actually came to court. So - now in that time, there's no
telling what that man could have gone on and done, and again our concern was he
wasn't part of the congregation anymore. So we felt, okay, the young ones in
our congregation weren't in danger but we weren't at all concerned about what
he might be doing to kids outside the congregation.
Now, I don't know, I never even thought of that at the time, it didn't come into my consciousness.
of course now it does. Now I just see, well, you know, we should have gone and
reported that to the police because they might have been able to do something
much earlier which may have prevented him abusing other children. So I don't
know if there were any other cases that certainly didn't come out in the trial
and hopefully that was a one-off case, but as we know with pedophiles
it is a sickness that usually doesn't
stop at one case, does it? -Of course not -Yeah, so
that really disturbs me, that in following those procedures we did - and
never putting that to law enforcement at the time, what could have
happened in those intervening years. -so
you had that case and you said several other difficult judicial cases at that
time but that didn't throw you too far off balance, right? You continued plugging
along continue serving as an elder and eventually even attain higher privileges
is that correct? absolutely yes, so any sort of doubts
I had or whatever of just again just sort of shoved under the rug, just carried
on serving loyally, again, being a very serious-minded elder, so eventually I was
giving talks on the circuit and district convention level, also around
that time I had the privilege of joining the writing team and doing research for the
society, so one of the elders who was in my congregation where I grew
up who sort of mentored me when I was younger, he was he was kinda the
coordinator of that writing team that we had was where I live we have the
national library here, and so the the writing desk in Bethel would often
use us to do a lot of research here because we had access to the materials
and the library here and all the journals that we needed, so this
brother who took me under his wing, as it were, he encouraged me to start doing
some research with him. so eventually I was
sort of invited to become a part of what they called the writing team and we
used to work along with the writing desk at the Bethel here in Australia. so
I'm happy to tell you a little bit about that, I think it's an area that people
probably are not really aware of how it
all works. -Right
I think people are interested to know how these articles get written. so what would
happen is sometimes we would get an outline from the society and we'd get
asked to research and write that article but more often than not our main
purpose was to actually come up with ideas for the society. so we would talk
amongst ourselves talk to circuit overseers, have our ear to the ground as
to what, you know, things happening in the congregation and see what concerns the
brothers had, and we would come up with an idea for an article. so then what
would happen is we'd write - we would put together like a one-page brief or
one-page outline just outlining the main points of the the article and what
the, sort of, thrust of it would be, and that would get it sent to the Australian
branch who would then send in on to the Brooklyn Bethel, and then we'd wait for
their approval. so they'd send a document back saying it might say, "no, we don't
want that article at the moment", but more often than not they'd like the idea and
they'd say, "yes, we give you approval for this article to be written", and they
would give us direction as to what the article - where
the article would be used and how big it would be, so they might say, "well this would be
a two-page article in the Awake! magazine or this might be an eight page cover
series in the watchtower, so they would direct how they wanted that article, and
often they would have other brothers in other writing teams around the world
also at the same time working on a similar subject,
and then they would often combine the two articles or the different amounts of
research into one article, so that's kind of how to how it worked.
then, once we got the approval for the article, then we'd get stuck into
research. so we sort of had an idea of what we wanted to say and the points we would
want to make, we'd go and research and find, sort of, material evidence to
support the things we were trying to say, support the arguments we were
trying to make, and this is where I learned looking back now from my
perspective just how poor the society's academic credibility is in a
sense. so at the time I thought - at the time I was very impressed by the
thoroughness of how we did things, so even just for a couple of pages in a
magazine we would send in a very thick binder of all the photocopied articles
that we'd researched and that we were quoting from and it all looks very
thorough and academic but looking back now I can see it wasn't, because what we were
actually guilty of doing was just basically using confirmation bias at the
time. so instead of - to give an example - instead of, um, let's say we were looking
at a particular issue and writing about a particular issue, instead of researching
and finding out, okay, what are all the experts saying about this issue,
for or against, what are both sides of the story,
we had our particular angle that we wanted to present and we were just looking
to basically quote mark, and we were looking for a quote that would support
our position and pretty much just ignoring everything else that didn't
support our position, so that's basically what I did as a researcher, I was
basically "quote mining", I was looking for something that I could use to support my
argument. I wasn't looking for - where does the evidence lead,
you know, what do the bulk of experts say is the case in this
particular scenario? -I see, I have a
question about that. so, as you were doing this research and you were kind of just
picking out things that went along with whatever it was that you were trying to
say, which of course would have been in harmony with what the organization kind
of already taught, did that ever bug you, you know, did it
ever bother you to realize that maybe the context is really this and
maybe the rest of this article besides that quote I took is carrying another
message? - no it didn't because at the time
I didn't understand, I didn't have the critical thinking skills at the time to
understand what I was doing, at the time I'd never heard of confirmation bias.
I didn't know about these cognitive fallacies that we suffer from, so at the
time I saw nothing wrong with what we were doing, it seemed totally normal
to me, and that was the training I got at the time, it was very minimal. I should
have been taught how to access context, how to understand what the author was
saying, and looking back at the notes I got, the very brief sort of
training I got, we were instructed to make sure that we were quoting
in context, that we weren't misrepresenting the author, but again
that was like something on paper that we really didn't apply that well in
practicality. -I see so, would it be
possible for you to just give a specific example of a time where you were just
looking for things to support the point
that you were trying to make? -Sure. I'll
give you an example. It was to do with a very sensitive subject,
it was homosexuality, so this was in the early nineties. At the time, there was
this idea floating around that homosexuality was a genetic thing, that
people were sort of born that way, so they couldn't help being homosexual, so
we were writing an article to sort of investigate those kind of things, and of
course the the thrust of the article would be that, you know,
it doesn't matter if you had genetic tendencies, you could still fight those
things. You know, it would be like if you were genetically disposed to be violent or to
be an alcoholic. You could control those things, so it didn't matter if you
had tendencies. But this idea that it was a genetic thing, I guess was maybe a
Little bit, could be potentially damaging to the Society's position, so we were
trying to suppress that idea as much as possible. So anyway, in the research I was
tasked to find out what was the scientific evidence behind this, was
there a genetic factor? So I looked up a lot of a science journals, a lot of
studies that were being done at the time, and the evidence was not clear. The
evidence was that there's definitely some kind of factor there, that people do grow
up from a very young age having this sexual identity where they're
attracted to the same sex, so that was definitely clear. But what I did, was, when
I was looking at the studies, I found out that most of the studies were actually
funded by organizations that supported gay rights, so I took that as meaning:
okay, these studies are not valid so I basically put the case
forward that none of this science can be trusted because the funding comes from
someone who's biased and so that was basically the thrust of the article, that
we just ignored all the evidence because the science couldn't be trusted because
Of where the funding came from, and to a point that's a valid argument in the
sense, yes, there may be some biases in the research and that needs to be taken
into account, but we just ignored all of the actual data, all the actual
evidence that was uncovered because of this perceived bias that we couldn't
actually prove was there. It was just that, the wrong
people were doing the funding, so I think that's a good example of how we
would find information that supported our argument and even if
we found evidence that didn't support it we would try and write that evidence off
in some ways as not valid because it didn't fit our viewpoint of the
world. -That's very ironic because clearly
the way that you guys were going about doing your research and, you know, finding
things to support your argument would've Been very biased, but it's very
difficult to make that correlation when you just assume that everything on this
side is correct and there's no - this can't be called into question, but
somebody's up to something on this side, and they're trying to pull the
wool over our eyes. -Well, when you think
you have the truth, then you don't think you're being biased, or you don't think
Your bias matters because it's the truth so whatever bias there is, is the right bias.
The other thing I would point out, is that, that I thought was interesting,
was, we were directed to write to a certain audience, so the articles were
written from the point of view of a sort of mid grade high school, sort of a
fourteen, fifteen-year-old level of reading, so that's what it was
sort of targeted towards, so it seems like very thorough and academic, but it was
kind of dumbed down a little bit towards a sort of more teenage kind of
audience, and we felt that was sort of More representative of the whole target
audience, from young ones to older ones that we were trying to approach. And it's
interesting looking back now at the material the society is producing, I
don't know how much has changed since then. I don't know if the direction is
different because I'm out of the loop there now, but I would say that dumbing down
process has just gone to an extreme now, when I look at the material that's
being produced, you know, when I was, well, when I compared with the articles that I
was writing, which were, I guess they weren't long form of
journalism as you might see in a proper academic journal, but when you did a
cover series at least you were sort of getting into some meatier aspects of the
subject. We had two or three articles over, maybe, 8 or 10 pages where you could
really develop a theme and get into more detail. And you compare that
though to the older magazines from the 50s and 60s; it was was much shallower,
much less in-depth in those times, but now it's gotten even worse. I mean,
they've cut the size of the magazines to literally half, and there's no depth to
these articles anymore, and in fact what I noticed is that most of the actual
content now is these charts, pictures, cartoons, illustrations; it is all just
graphic in nature the actual amount of text I think would probably be reduced
to a quarter of what we would have actually written in terms of text for
those old articles. -Right, so you're
able to see that now with your current perspective, right? You see to what extent
they're dumbing down the information, And many times that is a
criticism of the articles is that, you know, they speak to the audience as
if they're children and now it sounds like that was very purposeful in nature.
Yeah, the other thing too, is that I remember, the Society never liked to publish
articles on subjects that they're uncomfortable with or that could be in
any way controversial. So, I remember there was a couple of
outlines I submitted, which didn't get approved. One was an outline on
alternative medicine, so I wanted to, it's something that always bothered me
and it's one of the things that helped me wake up later on, was just
how many of the brothers and sisters were always pushing these really strange
pseudo-scientific alternative remedies for things, whether it was
homeopathy or chiropractic Remedies or I don't even know what
half of them were sometimes, but there was one brother in our congregation
that used to have a special machine that ionized water in a special way and
made it into magic water, if you like, and it could cure everything, so there was
always these remedies and all the brothers would jump under these things,
these bandwagons, and it really disturbed me because even though I didn't
have critical thinking skills at the time, I was always passionate about
science. I did very well at school with with mathematics and science. I could
see that a lot of this stuff was pseudo scientific nonsense, and it disturbed me
how brothers can really fall for all this stuff, so I wanted to write an
article just looking at the dangers of alternative remedies, and it
wasn't going to be an article attacking it per se, just taking an approach of, you
know, just weigh up the evidence carefully, just look into a bit more
thoroughly, don't just be gullible and accept these things, and I think at the time it
was just too controversial, the brothers just didn't want to go anywhere near it,
and I think because probably 90% of brothers in Bethel were on some kind
of alternative remedy at that time, including the brothers that probably had to approve
that outline, so It was never going to get through, and a couple of years ago
we actually finally, after all these years, had I think one or two paragraphs
in a Watchtower study article warning about the dangers of
not looking at the evidence. It was literally one paragraph in the Watchtower
and I thought finally, yes they've addressed this issue but, you know, it
could have been a whole magazine article. There was so much to say about that.
There was another one I wanted to write about propaganda, because again, even
though I didn't have the necessary schooling, I.....
I forgot to mention, so when I was - As a young person when I finished
high school, Of course, I started pioneering straight out of high school, I
got a very good tertiary entrance score, I could have gone to a university
and done practically anything I wanted to, but of course I sacrificed all that
For pioneering and I was even interviewed at an assembly at the time. I
was put on the platform and put out as a good example, look at this young brother
he's had very good academic achievements, but he's sacrificing a career
and a university degree to go and pioneer. Again, now looking back from my new
perspective, it shames to think that I was used for propaganda in that
way and I might have influenced other young people to sacrifice an education
to pioneer as well following my example. But anyway going back to this sort of...
I was scientifically minded, but I didn't have the critical thinking
skills because I never went to university or college, as I believe you
call it in America, so... but I was interested in how we think and how we were
manipulated to think, so I wanted to do an article on propaganda, but of course
that article never got approved either
-Big surprise -because I think the
people in charge there realized that a lot of the points that were going to be
brought out would highlight just how much the society actually uses
techniques of propaganda to further their cause. So it was a little bit too
close to home I think, and again recently I noticed we did have an article on
propaganda and it was kind of hypocritical and just really revealed
the Society's own way of doing things, but again they misquoted things in
that article or left important bits of the tools of propaganda out because I
think they could see that people might add up two and two together and see
that they were actually using those tools themselves. So this is what part of
what helped me wake up later was to just see how cleverly manipulative the
writing department is in misquoting, misrepresenting facts,
misrepresenting evidence and very carefully weaving a narrative that suits
their agenda, which is part of what propaganda and indoctrination is of
course all about. At the time, I couldn't see it, now it seems so obvious to
me. -but it sounds like, although you
weren't able to see it completely, it did plant some seeds; it sounds like
throughout your life you've had moments that would have caused you to
think twice, but it's interesting that being on the
writing team of the Australian branch is wwhat assisted you in ultimately
making your exit. Would it be possible for you to basically explain that
process how is it that you finally came to that to that conclusion that
this was not the truth
essentially? -Sure, okay, so this is quite
complicated. I wish there was kind of one thing I could point to and say, you know,
this is what really helped me wake up or this is the doubts that I had, but I
guess it was really a whole - it was a number of things that all coalesced
together to sort of make that push. So it's interesting, actually, just before
this happened, I even had a part on a convention about doubts. So my outline
discussed that even elders sometimes have doubts about
things, and I was instructed to even interview a couple of elders and
pioneers as to what doubts they might have had in the past and how they dealt
with those doubts. So even then - this is before I woke up - I was learning to
suppress my doubts. I even had a part on how to do
that at the assembly. So we're acknowledging that we
have doubts but we learn to suppress them and ignore them and just
shove them under the rug, as it were. So I guess what happened was, as I said there
was a number of things, so the whole
alternative Medicine thing was one thing. I'm a voracious reader and I started reading
some books on logical fallacies, critical thinking, again because I've always been
interested in that - been interested in how the brain works, how our thinking
processes work, and what I started to see was that when I learned about logical
fallacies like confirmation bias, selection bias,
ad hoc arguments, arguments from authority…I could see how they all
applied to alternative medicine. I could see why people were gullible in
accepting a lot of those things and all the logical fallacies involved in how
those things were sold and presented, and I started to see the connection
with what I believed as well, and I started to think back to what I did in
the writing Department and I could see that -
how much confirmation bias and special pleading and other problems were
very much a part of my work, and I guess the reason I was starting to think a bit
more deeply about it was at the same time I started to notice these really
strange dogmatic statements being made in the study articles without any
biblical support. So the brothers would say, you know, this is what this means and
there would just be no Scripture attached to that statement, and that sort of got
me thinking, why they they doing that? and then of course at that time we had the
the new generation understanding, the overlapping generations. So I think that
was a statement in that article that said something like: Jesus
evidently meant there were two groups of people and this is how they explained it,
and again there was no scriptural basis for that. In times past
I remember whenever they'd come out with a new light or a new point, they'd
spend the whole watchtower establishing and leading up to that point. So it'd be
proving with scriptural references and context and everything. They put a lot of
time into establishing this new idea. Some of these recent magazines,
they're just like: here's our new explanation and just.. like… well you've just
got to accept it. Just, evidently, that's what Jesus meant. There was no
need anymore to provide context or scriptural evidence for anything. So that
started to disturb me. Around the same time, we had that article on the types
and antitypes. I don't know if you remember that. - oh yes
Basically they said: well look brothers, we just went totally
overboard with this over the years. We're not going to say that anything's a type
an antitype anymore except when the Scriptures actually say it is. Now, in one
way, that was disturbing because as I mentioned, as a young person growing up,
that's how the truth had always fascinating me; all these intricate
connections, these types and antitypes from these prophecies were something
that I always was fascinated by, and that, to me, was like the deeper things of the
truth. That was what made our understanding of the Bible so
much deeper than Christendom's understanding, and now the brothers were
saying: well, we're just throwing all that out now, like everything that made
us unique and different, we're just throwing that on a scrap heap, and so
that's where I sort of thought well, I can't buy this idea anymore that this is sort
of some progressive new light all the time, and what particularly disturbed me
about it was they didn't expand on the implications of what that
would mean. So for instance, they gave a couple of
sort of minor examples, but then when you think about it, just about every doctrine
he had was based on a type-antitype, and one doctrine in particular is, of course,
the prophecy in Daniel about the Great Tree and Nebuchadnezzar's rulership,
and again, that was a type and antitype for God's kingdom and that's how we get
to the whole 1914 thing with the chronology and everything. So for me, I
sort of thought through the implications of getting rid of the types and antitypes.
So I thought, well, that means that we can't use that tree - Nebuchadnezzar's
tree - to prove the chronology that leads to 1914 anymore because that's a
type-antitype and the Bible doesn't say that we should view it in that way, but of
course, the brothers just avoided that subject entirely and didn't mention that,
even though they said that we're not going to rely on types and antitypes
anymore. So then I started thinking about - that got me thinking about the whole
1914, they would keep having to reinvent the explanation of what a generation
means and it occurred to me that we're just - we're just playing word games. We just
keep reinventing what Jesus meant when he said this when it should be
obvious what he meant. He is the greatest man who ever lived. He's
the greatest communicator. He's the great teacher. We had books called "the great
teacher", and yet, we couldn't just take him at face value. He couldn't
communicate, as a great teacher, what he actually meant we keep having to
reinvent it. So I guess that's where I first gave myself permission to think,
now I need to go back and look at everything I believe and really test it
properly. I really need to make sure that I'm not falling victim to some
fallacy, to some confirmation bias. I need to go back to square one and reprove to
myself
all these doctrines. -Were you still
working with the writing team at this
time? - no, no that stopped quite a… so that
stopped a number of years ago when I moved congregations. So we didn't really discuss that,
but after.. I think I lived in that Kingdom Hall flat for 14 years and, as I
said, it just ground me down. I was suffering emotionally, financially and in
many other ways. I just sort of had a nervous breakdown. So I moved to a new
hall, I resigned as a presiding overseer, I just went back to having sort of minimal
privileges that I could cope with, I still served as an elder, but I gave up
pioneering. I just sort of needed to lighten up all the things I
was working on. So around that time I'd also stopped working for
the writing team. I just couldn't cope with it anymore, I couldn't find the
motivation to do that work anymore,
so I'd given that up. - I see,
so at this time, although you weren't on the writing team, you were still serving
as an elder when you were making all of these discoveries.
Absolutely, so it was also around that time that the Australian Royal Commission
came out, that's why I said I can't pinpoint any one thing that woke me up
because it really was a whole range of things that all came together. So I
remember watching the testimony of Geoffrey Jackson
and I was just - I was just dumbfounded, you know? I was expecting to see
some amazing defense of the truth, and even when I was, as I said, I went
back to all the things I believed and I tried to reprove it to myself,
not in the sense of trying to prove it false, but in the sense of, "I
need to shore up my faith here, I need to reconvince myself of what I believe".
I went in wanting to prove that it was true and did my best to prove that it
was true, but having the critical thinking skills to be aware of if I was
just conning myself. So, the same thing when I approached the
Royal Commission, I was really expecting to see some evidence now that… because at
this time, this is the first time we'd seen the governing body
members. We never used to even know who they were and I used to be proud of that
fact, that we don't even know who these people are they don't… they're not the
limelight, and of course when they started JW broadcasting, they did come
out in the limelight, as it were, and we got to know them. Initially
that was good, they seemed like really nice and genuine and it was nice to see them
joke around and have fun and they seemed like really down-to-earth people, but the
more we started to see them, well the my that I'd start to see them, the more the reverse
started to happen. So with Geoffrey Jackson testimony, I was… I was… I was just
appalled at how he - the lack of defense for what he believed in came out
loud and clear and how he dodged and evaded all the questions, and I felt that
even in a couple of places he outright lied. I went to one of my colleagues,
one of my fellow elders and say, you know, what do you think? Do you think he lied
in those particular instances? and this elder said, no, I disagree he was
just being cagey because what he said might be a lie in this
country but it might be valid in another country, and the policies are different
around the world. So he was having to hedge what he said to make it sort of
internationally appropriate. This is the sort of mental gymnastics that some
elders were saying that, you know, he wasn't really lying he was just being
cautious. He was just withholding information, he was using
theocratic warfare, as it were, and they justified it to me by saying, well, you
know, apostates were feeding the Royal Commission all these things, they were
out to get us. So it was appropriate that he wasn't upfront and honest with the
Commission, and I was thinking, that's not right, you know? That
we're told to be obedient to the superior authorities. This was the
superior authorities holding us to account on something, and they had a
right to know this information. This wasn't like in Nazi Germany
where we could lie and withhold information about our brothers because
they didn't have a right to know. No, this was a Royal Commission. This was
a respectable and proper thing for the government to be doing and we should
have cooperated, and Geoffrey Jackson actually said, yes we want to cooperate,
but that's not what he did in his testimony. I couldn't believe how many
times he said "that's not my department,
I have no knowledge of that." -right - this is
a governing body member! Every bit of policy goes through him or one of the
governing body committees, there's nothing… everything that I wrote in the
writing department eventually went through his purview, he or one of the
other governing body members had to approve every word of what we
wrote before it got published. So I knew that, I knew that he would know every bit
of policy, and besides being a governing body member, he was also an
elder. So it wasn't good enough to say well, you know, I don't know how the
elders would handle this particular scenario because he was
an elder first before he was a governing body member. So he knows how elders do
things, what procedures to follow, and I just couldn't believe how much he
evaded the questions and just ran around in circles. So that was a real
disappointment to me, and then when I watched the testimony of other branch
committee members, I saw them also evade and lie and misrepresent certain things.
So that sort of all then tied in with the other issues I was thinking
about. So basically, what I did with all my doubts and the research
I was doing, I I did the right - well, I think I did the
right thing, again, I was still very loyal to the organization at this time. So no,
I hadn't read any apostate things, I had only - you know, when I looked up about - I
started doing some research on 1914 and 607 and I wanted to, as I said, go back to
the drawing board and look at the evidence for 607 and the archaeology.
Again, in a naive way, thinking well, maybe the whole generation thing is not
working out because we've got the starting date wrong. Maybe 1914 - there is
something wrong with that, and so I needed to just check the chronology and
I used worldly secular sources. I didn't look at apostate things, I just looked at
secular sources to try and work out what the evidence for all of that was, and of course you know
what I would have found out, that there was no evidence for anything,
it just really came crumbling down. So again I went to a fellow
elder whom I trusted and one who was quite academically inclined, a very intelligent
man, and I discussed some of these issues with him, and he was initially quite
helpful, but what disturbed me was I wrote - he doesn't know this but he
actually, I guess, pushed me further down the track of the questioning because I
wrote him a long email at one point and I outlined in this email
all the assumptions that we need to make to get to the chronology of 1914.
There's a number of steps that's involved obviously, it's very complicated and
most the brothers would find it very hard to explain it all, and going
back and looking at I realized that there were lots of leaks, lots of
assumptions we had to make along the way to get to that point, and so I outlined
all those to him I think there was seven or eight of them in the email, and I said to
him, brother, like… help me understand this. Are these just
assumptions or is this solid evidence? Are these just a bunch of non sequiturs
that don't follow or am I missing something? And so he wrote back and
I think two of the points - he referred me to a Watchtower article which I'd
already read and decided really didn't answer the question,
but what again shocked me was all the other points he just said, yes, they're
assumptions, but so what? That was his words, "so what?" So that just
really blew my mind, I thought, okay so here's a bunch of confirmation bias, a
bunch of assumption, there's no evidence for any of these steps, and here's this
intelligent elder saying, "well, so what? Who cares?" like - and that's really
then, I guess, what pushed me into researching things further. So what
happened after that was, as you can imagine, the more I'm learning, the more
disturbed on becoming, the more I'm really realizing that this is a house of
cards. It felt like I'd sort of pulled on this thread with the 1914 chronology, and
everything was just coming apart underneath me because it was all so tied
in and related. So basically I went to my fellow elders and I said, "brothers,"
again I was very upfront I was still at this time trying to save my
faith in a sense, and I said, "brothers, you know, look - I've got doubts about this,
this, this, this, this doesn't add up," I was saying to them. So another thing that
occurred to me at the same time to do with the child abuse issue was that I
sort of came to the conclusion that, you know,
where's God's Spirit in all of this? What I put two and two together with was that…
I think… so in Australia, what came out from our own statistics
in the Royal Commission that there were a thousand cases of child abuse or
allegations of child abuse, and I can't remember the exact breakdown, but I think
it was like somewhere between ten and twenty percent of those were appointed
men - ministerial servant or elders, and then I realized, again, this
sickness is not something that just - you don't get to 40 years old and
suddenly become a pedophile, like this is a sickness that starts very young. Again,
as an elder, I dealt with another case of abuse where it was like a
teenage boy abusing an even younger girl. So I knew that this sickness
happened from a very young age. So it occurred to me that there were a
number of elders in the organization that were appointed by Holy Spirit that
must have already been pedophiles at the
time they were appointed. -Good point
and that just like hit me like a bolt of lightning. I thought, well how could that
possibly happen? Because now, as elders, we go over the qualifications and we
pray to God to help us identify what we can't see. We can't read the heart of
this man. We don't know what's lurking in the background. All we can go on is what we
see by appearances' sake, and so the whole point of praying over the brother
and talking it over with the circuit overseer and sending the recommendations
to the society - the whole point of that whole procedure is supposedly to allow
the Holy Spirit to make that appointment. The Holy Spirit is supposed to - I don't
know - put something in the mind of some brother along the way to say, "hang on,
I've got a bad feeling about this. We need to look into this more."
There should be some warning. Something the holy spirit should have given us not to
appoint this brother, and that never happens. Dozens and dozens of
these men - abusers - got away with things because of their position as elders and
position of trust they were given, and it occurred to me - how could the Holy Spirit
allow that? How could Jehovah, whose power protects his sheep, allow predators to
get into positions of authority like that? So from that point on, I really
started doubting that there was any spirit involved,
and I started reassessing everything in my life, because again, over the years
I'd sort of seen Jehovah's hand in my life, as it were, but I realized that I
was just - it was another form of confirmation bias. I was interpreting
events in my life as if Jehovah had somehow done something for me, when in
the fact it was due to my own efforts. I realized when something good happens
it's because I worked towards it, or when something bad happens it was because of
failures on my part, but I'd interpreted certain events in my life as answers to
prayers or God doing something for me, and looking back now I could see again
it was just my interpretation, my biases coming into play. It wasn't reality.
So anyway, getting back to the point, I went to the body of elders and I said,
"brothers, I'm having problems with all these issues," and the
first meeting was really nice and, again, these are brothers - I have to say this
team of elders I worked with - they were good men and I still hold them in quite
high regard on the whole, but they were good, they were willing to
listen, they were patient, they were kind with me for that first meeting. They even
acknowledged that they too had some similar doubts, that they often
struggled with similar things, but the upshot of the meeting was, well, they
didn't have any answers to start with.
-Of course not -They couldn't defend the questions that I'd
raised. So because they didn't have any good answers, they just said, "look, just…" I
think the expression they used was "you've just got to park it. Park all this doubt." So,
in other words, "shove them under the rug, just kind of ignore them, suppress them,
and just keep doing what you're doing. Trust in Jehovah. Wait on Jehovah,"
and all these platitudes that we get, "and just kind of suppress all your
doubts," is what I was told, and looking back too, though,
they were even willing to, I guess, again, misrepresent or lie about things. I
remember one - I was talking to him about the whole new light thing and how that
didn't make sense, and how can we talk about old truth or new truth? or
whatever, and one of the brothers who, again, very old experienced brother who
served at Bethel, he said, "oh, we don't use those expressions. We don't
talk about new truth or old truths." and I started doubting myself, I thought, am I
going crazy? I'm sure we use those expressions, but again, I trusted this
brother. He was older and more experienced than me and the brother said, "oh, we don't
say that something is present truth. We talk about our current
understanding of things," and I thought, no, no, that's not how we talk, but he
but he flustered me, I thought I was going crazy, and then the very next
day, the broadcast came out and a sister was interviewed and she talked about
receiving present truth and how much he delights in presents truth, and I thought,
there you go! and this brother just totally denied that we use those
terms and think about things in that way. So anyway, I left that meeting and
continued with my doubts and research and then a couple of weeks later we had
the circuit overseers visit and I discussed a few things with him out
working with him in the territory and we had our elders and I said - at
the elder's meeting - "brothers, there's just one more thing I'd like to bring up if
you'll allow me," and the thing I brought up - while I was talking about it - one of
the elders was sort of Googling it on his iPad and he found commentary on
it on an apostate website, and so straightaway he sort of said, "well,
where did you get this from? Why are you asking about this? Did you get it
from an apostate website?" and at the time, I said to him - truthfully, because it was
the truth - that, no, this is just something that's come up in my research and
that make sense and something that I happened to know about, and - but from
that moment on, it was almost like I could physically see the shudders come down,
near like if there literal shudders in their brain and in their eyes. I could
virtually see that, and the whole mood and everything changed to - I was now no
longer a welcomed colleague. I was now almost like a dangerous enemy and
initially we discussed - I said to the brothers, "look, I can't in
good conscience teach some of these things and I disagree with them, and
initially they said, "well we just won't give you any talks on those subjects,"
but as the discussion progressed, we sort of came to an impasse
and we - I think, mutually realized that this wasn't going to work because
I wasn't a team player anymore, I wasn't a company man, if you like, any more.
I wasn't willing to just do what the society told me, to teach what
they told me to teach. So we mutually agreed that it would be best if I
resigned. So I resigned as an elder that night and I went to
the meetings for a few more weeks after that and then I just stopped going to
meetings. I couldn't stand sitting in anymore
and listening to all this nonsense I was hearing, all this
unfactual, incorrect information, this misleading information, I couldn't
stomach it anymore. So yes, I had to make that cut completely, you know,
cold turkey and just leave. -I see
There was also one other thing that happened in that meeting that really - I
guess - confirmed that my decision to leave was the right one and it kind of pushed me
over the edge, because even up to that last moment I was still
undecided as to whether I should resign or not, but what happened was we were
looking at a young man as a potential ministerial servant and the
way the process works in an elders' meeting is we go through all the
scriptural qualifications and we discuss the person and then we look at his
report card and discuss what he does in the congregation, how he meets up to the
standards we're expecting. So anyway, this brother was well-spoken of by all the
elders. We had already agreed that we all supported his appointment as a servant
but the circuit overseer was looking at his report card and he said, "brothers,
he's not getting enough hours. His average is quite low," and we tried to
give the circuit overseer the extenuating circumstances. We said, "look,
his wife is going through all this stuff, they're trying to have a child,
they're going through a lot of drama and emotional trauma with that. We
pointed out how much he does for the brothers in the congregation. If
someone needs moving, he's always the first to help someone move. He's doing
the accounts. He's doing the sound. He's so busy helping the brothers in the
congregation. We feel, regardless of his low hours, that he's a spiritual man.
His hearts in the right place. He's putting himself out to serve the
brothers like a young Timothy," and this is what shocked me:
the circuit overseer said, "well, what really counts is the hours. If he's doing
all these other things, then maybe you should get him, talk to him and get him
to do less of those things so he's got more time for the ministry."
I could not believe it. I could not believe we were judging a man based on
numbers on a card; a man who does practical things for
the brothers, you know? Helps the older sisters with their shopping, helps
brothers move, shows so much practical love in the congregation, and we were
telling him to stop doing all those practical loving things so
that he could get more numbers on his
report card. -Amazing -and that for me just
settled the whole thing. I thought, what - what am I doing here?
Why am i part of an organization that judges people, not on the good they do, but
on numbers on a card? and I thought this is wrong, and that just really cemented
my decision then, in that moment, to step down.
I see. So you said you continued going to the meetings for a couple of weeks and
at some point you stopped. Could you just explain what the process was once you
stopped going to the meetings? - Sure. So at
that point now, I decided - there was a scripture that I read in Proverbs which
says something along the lines of "he who's first to make their case seems
right but then you should cross examine that and hear the other side of the
story." So that's when I finally gave myself permission to actually read what
would be considered apostate material in a sense. So in the eighties when I was
a teenager, I'd vaguely heard about this member of the governing body,
brother Franz, that was disfellowshipped and it caused a bit of
drama at the time and I didn't know anything about it. So I looked up his
book, I found this book called "Crisis of Conscience", and I thought, well, I'm going
to apply proverbs here, there's nothing wrong with doing that. You know, God tells us to
question things, to test things, he had recorded in Proverbs that you should
cross examine the first person and I realized that all my life I'd
listened to one source of information, the Society was the first person to ever
teach me anything about everything. I thought, well, I need to hear the other
side of the story, I need to cross examine this story, and so reading "Crisis of
Conscience" was when - I guess is what brought it all together and the scales
just came off my eyes. That's the moment I awoke. I remember
closing the last page of that book and realizing that my whole life had just
changed in that moment, but that's when I literally lost
lost my hope, lost my faith, lost any sense of who I was, my identity - I just
realized it was all built on the fantasy, it was all built on a lie because he
confirmed everything that I was feeling that there was no Holy Spirit directing
this organization. He gave the proof and I didn't just accept it, Fifth.
I didn't just sort of suddenly go off and start believing apostate lies, as
the society likes to portray it as, as you know if you've read the book,
he has documented everything. There's photocopies of all the letters he's
referring to, the correspondence - everything is documented, but that wasn't
enough for me. In the book, he also mentioned other various people who were
caught up in that big sort of purge, if you like, at Bethel, and some of those
people are still alive. So I made the effort - again, this was my training as -
when I was working in the writing Department, you learn to check
sources, you go back to primary sources. So I did that.
I looked up these people. I Skyped with them on the other side of the world and
I interviewed them and I said, "Can you corroborate what I've read in this
book? You were there at the time. Let's hear your side of it", and I interviewed two or
three of these people and they all corroborated the story. So again, I went to
the source of people who were there and saw it with their own eyes, and that
was terribly devastating for me I have to say at the time. I've always
suffered from depression and anxiety disorders and I've sort of gone up and
down with that over the years, but that just hit me like a ton of bricks. I just
literally bawled for days, you can ask my wife. I was just an emotional wreck I had
a nervous break down, I'm pretty sure. My wife was so concerned she
made me make an appointment with a psychiatrist. I'd never been to
psychiatrist before. I went to a few counseling sessions and that helped me a little bit
but she wanted to make sure that whatever I was going through wasn't to do
with any mental illness and I was quite happy to agree with
her that could be a factor to what I was going through, and I wanted to
make sure that my change in belief wasn't because I was going crazy, because
you know that the society gaslights you in that sense, they do make you feel
like there's something wrong with you, you're the one going crazy if you don't
believe it anymore. So I went to a psychiatrist and he basically gave me a
clean bill of health. He said, "there's nothing wrong with you. You're just going
through a stage where your thinking process has changed and you need to
follow it, you need to continue that, but there's nothing wrong with the
way I was thinking. I wasn't being illogical,
I wasn't being emotional. It wasn't a symptom of mental illness. It was just me
actually just thinking for myself for the first time in my life, and sort of
deprogramming myself. So that was good to sort of just affirm as well for
my own sanity, but that was a very difficult time, and of course it creates
a lot of friction in a marriage, you know. My wife is the one thing I don't
regret about growing up in this organization. She's been my rock,
my support, and even though we disagree on many things now, she has stood by me
and defended me in all this, and I just can't thank her enough for her loyalty
towards me even though she's still very loyal to society as well, and it's been
very hard for her now to go to meetings on her own. She thought she'd married an
elder, she thought that her life was going to be a certain way,
and that pains me every day too, that I have to make her life difficult in
that sense, but I can't do anything else. I can't live a lie. I have to be true to
myself and who I am, and it's sad that it creates that conflict and division when
there's two opposing philosophies like that. With the depression - as I mentioned, I'd
always suffered from depression but this this was quite a bit more severe than
what I experienced in the past. In the past I'd never had any suicidal
thoughts or anything like that. It was just this sort of vague kind of depression
where you're just unmotivated and feeling miserable, but this really did hit me
hard in the sense I started having suicidal thoughts. I'd literally have
some days where I felt so bad I just - I just literally played out my mind a
scenario where I would drive my car into a tree or just do something insane
like that, and of course I didn't, I just wanted to mention that because you can
really plummet to some serious depths of despair when your whole
worldview is upended like that. When you have to face your mortality
for the first time and realize that you're not going to live forever, that
was just wishful thinking, and it changes your perspective on life, and the
depression got so bad, but luckily with the help of counseling and my wife
and other factors, I was able to get past that, which is good.
That's great to hear and I appreciate you mentioning that because
it's so common and we're starting to hear a lot of terrible
stories. So it's good that we're able to be open about that and
take steps to try to deal with it and just understand that many times that's a
part of finding out that everything you believed in and promoted your whole life is
not what it's what you believed it to be. So let me ask you about how
you're dealing with all of that now, I understand you had those thoughts and
feelings that you just mentioned previously. How are you able to deal with
it at this point? Sure, I think I've gotten past
the worst of things, I mean you have good days and bad days, but I think
generally I'm on the up-and-up now. I'm learning to cope with my mortality and
I've learned to appreciate life in a way that I never appreciated it before. I think
previously you're always thinking, well,
whatever is happening now in life doesn't matter because you're in like a
holding room, you know? You're waiting for the new system to come and
you're going to be able to enjoy lots of things there. So now I see life in a different
way. I see every moment as so much more precious than I ever did before because
this is the only life I've got in that sense and I have to make the most
of it. So now I'm just trying to change my thinking patterns and
trying to get out of that, sort of, depression that you initially go through
and focusing on the more positive things of life, and what I want to
achieve in this life, because I still am the same person, you know? As an elder - the
reason I was an elder is because I wanted to help people I wanted to make a
difference in people's lives and I still want to do that. I still want to make a
difference in this world and help people make the world a better place. I can't do
that anymore in a religious sense as an elder, so now I'm looking for ways in
which I can help the community and support my fellow man in more secular
ways -Right, and that's great. That's a very good
outlook to have, just try to find practical ways to help people which we
were somewhat discouraged from doing in the past. Ben, I really
appreciate you sharing all of that with me obviously you had so many years of
experience at high levels within the organization and I appreciate you
opening up and sharing that with all of us. I will ask you the same thing that I
ask all of my guests: for those who are looking at these types of videos, perhaps
for the first time or just starting to have doubts and have built up the
courage to watch videos of former Jehovah's Witnesses, what would you say
to those people who have not yet decided what they're going to do? Well I'd say
don't be afraid to explore the doubts that you have or the questions you have.
Whatever you do, don't suppress them. I think that's emotionally damaging. It's
not good. It's not a healthy thing for you to do. I think doubts are your
mind's way of saying, "there's something that doesn't add up here", and you should
listen to that, not just suppress it, but you should explore and address it and
come to some conclusion about it. So don't be afraid to look at both sides of
an issue. Don't be afraid, because the society likes to scare us into thinking that
outside information is somehow evil or satanic or whatever. I remember
my last elders meeting, I brought up something about just some kind of
secular fact I think I got it from Wikipedia, and the brother said, "well you
don't know who wrote that Wikipedia article. Maybe Satan influenced
them to write it," and so this is kind of demonization of any information that
doesn't come from the Society. So of course, that is ridiculous.
Information in itself is not good or evil, it's just information. It's what
what you with it. So I'd really encourage people to explore, question
everything, research everything thoroughly, research both sides of any
issue, and don't be afraid to come to your own conclusions. I would also really
encourage people to learn critical thinking skills because I can see that's
what kept me trapped in the organization for years because I didn't have the
skills to evaluate the information I was given. I was fed all this so-called
knowledge but I didn't have the necessary skills to be able to deal with
it properly and come to the right conclusion. So I really encourage people
to thoroughly research their questions and concerns and doubts and
don't be afraid of where that leads you
to. -That's great advice. I definitely
appreciate you sharing that point of view. So my next question has to do with
those who have come to that conclusion that this is not the truth, this is not
what they believed it to be at one point? and obviously we both know it could be a
very scary, very emotional time in our lives, you may even have some of those dark
thoughts, and I've had them as well. What would you
recommend or what would your advice be rather to individuals who find
themselves in that situation. - okay, you
need a support network. One of the good things about being a Jehovah's
Witness, even if what you believe might be wrong or the doctrines might be
wrong, you have a sense of community, a support network, and if you
leave, then all of the sudden you don't. You're on your own. It can a be very
lonely thing. It's hard to cope with on your own. One of the reasons I decided to
do this interview with you is because I wanted to add my story to many others
that are out there for people to realize that they're not alone, but I would
encourage people to find - well, to reach out to other people in the same
situation. It's good to read stuff on the internet, watch videos, but you still need
that one-on-one personal connection with people. So what I've done is I've reached
out to a number of people that have left and other ex elders who are in a
similar scenario to me and I've established some friendships with them.
I've established a new circle of friends and that has been so helpful to have
that support network. When I'm having a bad day, I can just ring them and vent,
and because we understand each other, we can really help each other out.
So I really encourage people to replace the support that they had with
a new one. You still need that human connection.
I'd encourage people to get counseling or psychological help if they
need to because changing your worldview brings up all kinds of emotions and
anxiety. So it's really good to be able to talk all those things through
with someone who's sort of independent and not critical of you
and just work through all those issues, and you can come out the other side as a
very healthy human being with a new way of looking at things. At the end of the
day, never stop questioning anything in life.
Just maintain your curiosity. The minute we stop questioning is the minute we
stop learning and growing as a person. So I just really want to encourage people
to keep learning, keep educating yourself, don't put questions aside, keep
gaining more knowledge and just open up a whole new universe of things that
you never experienced before when you're
under that indoctrination. -So with that
Ben, I would really like to thank you again for taking the time out, speaking
with us about your story. I know it's not an easy thing to do but it's very much
appreciated. So thank you very much. Thanks Fifth, it's been a real pleasure to
be with you and to get my story out there and I hope someone out
there - I hope it helps least one person to realize they're not alone and if I
could just mention, as I said, I think it's important to connect with people so
if anyone wants to reach out to me I'm happy to talk to them and help them. I'll
leave my contact details with you and I'd welcome anyone getting in touch
with me if they want to talk about more of the issues that we've discussed.
Sounds great. Thank you very much again. Thank you very much for having
me on
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