Expert: Andrew - 8/12/2011

Question
Why is it that you have to part from your family if you are a Jehovah witness and they aren't? i am also a Jehovah witness and what i learned is that we have to follow Jesus' example, which is to spread the God's word.. and if so, we must do it to our own family, even if they don't believe. Also, in the bible [John 4:9-27], Jesus treats the women with love. it was the era where women were treated bad. So why should we differ?

Answer
Dear Katherine,

There are no questions that start out with "you are wrong" as your subject line read. So it is not clear whether you are actually seeking an answer to your question, with a mind open enough to receive an answer; or whether you are simply confronting me out of a motivation to "protect" third parties from what you feel is my error. Let us assume for just a moment that your mind is open just a crack, enough that my answer might mean anything to you....

There are two main reasons you end up parting from your family (if you are a Witness and your family is not):

(1) The leadership of your organization, what you would call "the faithful and discreet slave" sends a steady stream of overt and covert messages that all Witnesses tune into by means of their weekly re-education. These messages repeatedly state and imply that associating with non-Witnesses damages your moral purity and threatens your future survival. Usually they involve scriptural "justification". However, to put any ideology (including an interpretation of scripture) ahead of family is a most reprehensible form of "doctrine over person", one of the most notable characteristics that define mind-control cults.

(2) The leadership of your organization has engineered your lifestyle in such a way that deterioration of family relationships inevitably happens. All the key traditions that normally reinforce family relationships have been undermined by the Witness leadership. Also your separatist lifestyle and mindset becomes so skewed from that of your non-Witness family that you find you no longer have anything in common, and drift apart because of having nothing in common anymore. Also you are conditioned to become extraordinarily judgmental. Sure, the overt message is that "only God should judge". But underneath that you are repeatedly conditioned to withhold your affections from the "goats", those who do not choose your ideology. This is by definition judgementalism. When you practice judgmentalism with your own flesh and blood (as you are conditioned to do toward all "goats" including family), it naturally repels them. They feel how cold your heart is, and they are repelled. Further, you are taught and you believe that you must preach to your non-Witness family members in order to win them over. And you probably even desperately want to win them over, believing that they will die at God's hand in Armageddon if you do not succeed, and--caring for them as you do--you do not want them to die, which motivates you all the more to try to win them over, even where aggressive or convoluted tactics are called for. However, preaching or aggressively attempting to grab hold of someone else's most personal inner thoughts also repels them in most cases. And convoluted behaviors confounds and repels a few more.

Of course all these behaviors are supposedly for "good reasons". The Witness leadership will repeatedly explain to you the "good reasons" for these behaviors which they require of you. (Repeated explanation is "conditioning".) And the reasons no doubt seem plausible; and they become true in your mind by means of neural reinforcement. (Learn how neural reinforcement can make something untrue appear true by virtue of frequent repeats.) But coincidentally, the end result of these behaviors and lifestyle (which may actually be arbitrary) is that you can no longer attend family functions on holidays (the only time most families get together), you no longer have anything in common with your non-Witness family members, and you repel them by means of your own judgementalism, aggressive preaching, and convoluted mental trickery.

Interestingly, all mind-control cults cut people off from their families; and the real underlying reason they do so is because people without the foundation of strong family relationships are emotionally less stable, and therefore easier to control.

What if the Witness leadership is right, however? What if they only want to control you in order to save you from dying at God's hand in Armageddon? This assumes they are right and infallible, that there is no other way to interpret their foundational evidence, and that you would not have made the right decision without their control. Does God want you to make free choices, or does he want your natural freedom to be suppressed in order for you to make a decision someone else decides is "right" for you? (How would you feel about letting them make decisions for you if you found out how often they have lied to you?)

Ultimately all power comes down to mind control. If someone can make you believe their leadership is right, then they have ultimate power over you, because you will follow without being forced, and this takes less resources than forcing you to comply. The Witness leadership is exercising classic power games via mental trickery; and this is why they need people to be emotionally less stable, and this is why they create circumstances which divide people from their families. Because strong family relationships make you strong, and they don't want strong members.

In fact, any Witness who shows signs of being strong is expelled, so that such strength does not inspire other Witnesses. This is ultimately what is behind all Witness expulsions, of which there are tens of thousands per year. (Sure, they appear to be about something truly grave, such as smoking cigarettes, but ultimately all expulsions are the result of the accused person failing to "repent" or refusing to capitulate to the absolute power of Witness elders, that is showing their God-given strength of character.)

> we have to follow Jesus' example, which is to spread the God's word.. and if so, we must do
> it to our own family, even if they don't believe.

So you're saying that, even if your family chooses not to believe in your interpretation of scripture, you still "must do it to your own family"? And yet you believe that God (the way you have defined him) is in favor of free will?

How is it that you have any authority to do that to them more than they have to do to you? From what source does that authority derive? The Witness leadership often implies slyly that they are somehow directly connected to God, and that their authority to dictate is legitimate by virtue of such connection (without providing any evidence of such a connection). How? They say that the Watchtower Society is "the visible part of God's heavenly organization". How? What is the connection? Without a clear connection, there is no special authority. You have imputed authority without establishing a connection, because they slyly stated and implied there is some special connection, and you came to believe it by means of conditioning or neural reinforcement (frequently repeating the same message).

I don't see how your comment about women has anything to do with the rest of your question, besides I am not interested in discussing your theology. As always, my comments are not about theology (the Nature or will of God). Rather my comments are about human behaviors, organizational policies, and sociological dynamics.

Please let me know if you have any further questions, or would like some support to begin reclaiming your own mind from this insidious conditioning you have undergone. Of course, this will only occur if you decide it should. If you decide otherwise, I will leave you in peace.

But for the sake of the readers of my column, I will not let your frivolous accusation stand. Some of us have to take a stand for the truth, the real Truth this time.

May you become free,
AndrewXJW