I once had a friend that was very precious to me, she became a JW. I was sick about it for months, literally ill! I couldn’t sleep. I wept, I vomited. I actually considered violence, fighting this can make you crazy. It burned me out.
I could follow the process of her conversion through our conversations, she was raised a Baptist and had a habit of saying stuff like “Thank You Jesus!, Thank You Lord!” when something surprisingly good would happen (like a bill got paid!).
When she stopped saying that I knew they had convinced her that Jesus was not God. Actually, according to the JW’s Jesus is an incarnation of Michael the Archangel, and therefore a creature. The Holy Spirit is an active force, or action of God, not a person of the Trinity.
The conversion process goes in stages, like an advancing disease, they do not normally tell the newbie everything up front, there are certain points in a persons’ progress wherein they become ready for something new. You can observe this very predictable pattern from the outside if the person is willing to converse with you. (This they will do if they love you and want to save you too! ) This reminds me of the Mystery Cults which would have the neophyte advance in stages of understanding, although it is not marked out with rankings (as far as I know).
(This contrasts with Catholicism which, as we know, is an open book. Everything our church teaches is available for scrutiny by anyone anywhere, Catholic Cathechisms of many varieties have been on sale in the open market for many, many years.)
Trying to reason with her was difficult because her eyes would glaze over and I could tell I wasn’t getting through.
Some doctrines seem to me what I call a gullibility test: as an example they profess that Christ was nailed to a single upright stake, not a cross. Once the new JW accepts this as true, they have passed an important point in their development and are ready for new information.
My girlfriend also would say stuff like “they told me you would say that” because the JW’s have this down to a science. They know all of our knee-jerk reactions, and all of our better arguments. Part of the many hours the neophyte devotes to the Kingdom Hall includes classes where they learn to refute our set-piece arguments. By convincing these people that the world is controlled by Satan and predicting our responses we actually validate the elders claims by giving these predictable responses!
My uncle is an elder in the JW’s, he is a great personality and very likeable but it tore his family apart, he hasn’t seen his daughter in years and his son only rarely. The children were raised JW’s and walked away from it, apparently the only conversations my cousins and uncle had for years were him trying to bring them back in.
This is a terrible scourge, my experiences with the JW’s have made me very reluctant to confront them again. It hurts too much.
My advice to anyone encountering this for the first time is read all you can on it. You will actually begin to predict what they will teach next and tell that person those doctrines ahead of time. They will be very surprised that you know so much when they go back to the elder and repeat what you said. (they
will do that for certain, because the elder will be coaching them in what to say to you!) It might keep the lights on, it worked for me.
