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

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Comments

Site Administrator (Michael) said…
Hi there Jess. I started a website for gay ex-JWs here: http://gayjw.blogspot.com

Check it out!

Mike
Seattle, WA
April 06, 2006
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