VirusHead

I just stumbled upon this site while searching for some blinkies and saw this post. I was raised as a JW, however, a ‘judicial committe’ gave me the boot (along with my then bf) when I got pregnant outside of marriage for the second time. My soon-to-be-ex-husband (father of all three of my kids) was actually disfellowshipped the first time I got pregnant. Why wasn’t I df’d? Because I was ’sincerely repentant’. LOL!!! Yeah right!!!! Guided by the Holy Spirit…okay….and this spirit told you I was a good christian? lol If everything was guided by this holy spirit they speak of I would have been kicked out MANY YEARS before I was!

As far as associating with other members or family, everything the poster said is totally true. That’s how it’s ’supposed’ to be. My family and my ex-inlaws still talk to me on at least a daily basis. I go to my parents’ house all of the time and talk for hours with my ex-mother-in-law. I have many JW friends that I grew up with that I still associate with as well (all of them were DF’d at some point and then reinstated). They just don’t care, they love me and know that I’m not ‘evil’. Most members that my parents know and knew me before I was booted out still ask my parents about me and send gifts for my kids and myself. Although I’m very anti-religion, I must say that based on my experiance, JW’s really are wonderful, good-hearted people, for the most part. Yeah, they are pretty damn annoying, but I can deal with that lol. Of course, there are exceptions to every rule. There are those snooty, self-righteous jerks mixed in. Those people won’t even make eye-contact with me if they see me out in public somewhere. These are the people who would raise absolute hell if they knew other people associated with me. They’d turn their names over to the ‘Elders’ in a second.

Well, that’s about all I had to say on the matter. Yep, the post is absolutely true of the official ‘rules’ of associating with disfellowshipped people. However, I know that in my case those rules are rarely followed.

I am a former JW – and I concur that many of the JWs are decent folk. Unfortunately, your experience with the “rules” may be more of an exception than you think. I have quite a collection of narratives – not counting my own observations from when I was one – of fairly serious and tragic results of people following these rules of shunning. Most people who have not been involved don’t really understand the extent to which associating with “worldly” non-JWs is discouraged – so that when someone is disfellowshipped, they really can be stripped of all their friends and family. I think that it is wonderful that those who love you didn’t follow the rules. But… those are indeed the rules, and many others follow them carefully, even with regard to their own family members.