From JW to agnostic free-thinking gay

sent in by Jess

I left the Jehovah´s Witnesses at the age of 25 (It´s 2005 now so it´s approximately a year ago). For a long time I´d felt miserable attending the activities (meetings, fields service, public talks) of that religion. I´d lost my faith completely...I´d done some independent research (a very forbidden act among the JWs and other totalitarian religions!) in the fields of general science, evolutionary biology, origin of man, origin of diseases, so-called "full-filled" prophecies in the Bible etc...

My findings were very contradictionary to what I´d been taught from a fundamentalistic interpretation of the Bible and I couldn´t manage this Orwellian double-thinking anymore ´just´to keep my social network...Furthermore, I was very interested in the surrounding society and not just the world view presented in my religion...

As a 25-year old gay virgin who´d been battling with my sexuality and masturbation since the age of 13 (anti-wanking-log, daily Bible reading, SHORT visits to the bath room...do anyone of you recognise something LOL?) I also decided that I had to break out of the Christian belief set to do some experiments with my love life...I didn´t find it attractive to die as a Christian virgin martyr...I knew I probably was not able to live a perfectly happy heterosexual Christian family life...it would be unfair (very euphemistic!) to a woman just to marry her if I wasn´t able to love her in a sexual way, too.

So I just quit it all and turned off my phone the next 3-4 months to avoid the calls of ´caring´elders (A stupid way to react but I didn´t know what to do at all)...Lost a lot of real good friends (which has hurt a F*****G lot ;-((...and I have a very "stressed" relationship to my family who´s still active in the JWs...but luckily I´ve got some new "wordly" friends (I hate that word so much now)...and I am sure everything will work out fine when time passes by...

I still have bad times but I feel I am able to embrace life as it is...with all its goods/bads, its confusing complexities...
I take life as it comes and I am slowly accepting that I will not be able to find the "absolute truth" about life....I find it very joyful to soak up every information I can find in such diverse fields as science, politics, history, religious history etc.
Most of all I am glad that I am able to form my own beliefs and to form a social network that is independent of how well I believe in certain religious dogma and how well I follow a set of strict rules...but just to know that my friends love me because I am......me ;-)

Sex: Male
City: Cph
Country: Denmark
Became a Christian: Christian from childhood
Ceased being a Christian: 25
Labels before: Jehovah´s Witnesses
Labels now: agnostic free-thinking open-minded ex-JW gay
Why I joined: I was raised as a JW
Why I left: I deconverted because of my sexuality, the contradiction between modern science and the Bible, the errancies in the bible

Comments

Hi there Jess. I started a website for gay ex-JWs here: http://gayjw.blogspot.com

Check it out!

Mike
Seattle, WA

Recently popular posts:

Free at last...

I left god for good

This grieves me to no end to reveal these thoughts

If you logically look at Christianity, it just doesn’t add up

  Books purchased here help support ExChristian.Net!