Confessions of a former theist: Part one
I can’t remember the exact date of my baptism, I know it was when I was about twelve or thirteen. I do however recall my sister who was eight years older than myself buying me a beautiful copy of ‘The Lord of The Rings.’ The irony of receiving a fantasy novel while I was living a fantasy is not lost on me.
As I sit here and reflect on this experience, I recall wearing a plaster on the big toe of my right foot, and this coming off in the deep waters of the baptism pool.
I was a Jehovah’s Witness. I’m not a member now and haven’t been for about nineteen years. Knowing the crucial advice to ‘write what you know’ I decided to create a behind the scenes look of what living as Witness entailed.
The baptism was a pivotal moment for me. It felt like validation; felt like belonging to something infinitely greater than myself. And with this validation came that same tribalism and sense of belonging which I would later recognise as an echo chamber.
My hair which alas has left me as has my faith in any higher power, was especially important on the date of my baptism and I recall being rather annoyed that it fell into disarray due to the water’s influence. Since my first crush was also present in the auditorium, I remember sweeping my hair back as soon as I had re-emerged from the warm pool.
My mother had been a Jehovah’s Witness since early childhood and had never left the organisation, and is still an active member. I left the organisation when I was about eighteen.
These memoirs are a record of what caused my dramatic paradigm shift.
My childhood was a good one, with a single mother who would do anything for her children. I never once felt deprived in the absence of a father, and most of my time was spent in contemplating the world. I was a quiet, introspective sort of child, though I did have occasional bouts of temper. These I now recognise as being the result of Asperger’s, the diagnosis of which I wouldn’t receive until I was in my twenties.
As a child of about five and six, I suffered from some horrendous episodes of eczema. I also had severe asthma. The eczema was so harsh that it led to me scratching a never sated itch. When I was perhaps two or three, it got so bad that the self-inflicted wounds upon my foot would cause my socks to stick to my feet and could only be removed once my mother had sat me in the bath. It’s incredibly difficult to convey what one has to do as a young child to escape the feeling of gently peeling away fibre by fibre, a sock from a bloody wound. Then there was the inability to hold a pencil due to the sides of my fingers being stuck together as I had rubbed so much of the upper layer of skin away by my constant scratching. Pain like this forces one to become insular and introspective in a peculiar fashion.
The eczema would eventually melt away and the previous dietary restrictions would be lifted. At the same time, or at least when I was a little older, I became the victim of severe asthma. It’s a scary time for a child when each breath is a battle. Each time I inhaled, it felt like I was waging a war against my pathetic lungs to grab more precious air. Thirty years later at thirty-five and I don’t really experience these symptoms any more and am immensely grateful for the incredible adaptability of the human body.
Every Tuesday for the Jehovah’s Witnesses was ‘group study’ night. These were held at the home of an ‘elder’ men who provided oversight for the congregation. However for some reason that I can’t really remember, the group study for one particular night was held at my mother’s home.
I was lying upstairs acclimatising myself to being bed bound due to a flare up of my asthma. I could hear from downstairs the elder ask questions dictated by one of the publications that was currently being studied. It might have been a text that took its inspiration from the book of Revelation, and thus my night was spent listening to eschatological predications. Generally the group studies consisted of a number of about ten to twenty people answering questions from the text itself or reading passages from the Bible.
Once the group study had ended, mum had arranged for the elder to come upstairs and pay me a visit to build my morale. Upon my bed was a small circuit board that I’m sure many will remember, where you could insert wires between springs and depending on the configuration you could build anything from a radio to a rudimentary burglar alarm. Well Adam the elder (all names have been changed) was a man who usually configured the sound systems for the large gatherings of Witnesses which are called ‘assemblies’. And so Adam was more than equipped with the knowledge of how to help me build the radio, and this even meant him going back to his car to fetch more supplies. I have been fairly lucky in my experience as a Witness to have had many mentors within the religion that helped ease the pain of not having a father around.
Experiences like these were the highs of belonging to the religion. But there was a darker side that only now, do I have the ability to recognise. The disruption of cognitive skills and the instillation of specific type of cognitive bias I can only really now observe from a position of distance.
One of the key elements of this profound subversion of mental life, is what I will call ‘humble arrogance.’ It’s a sort of claim to ultimate humility, whilst never allowing the thought of being wrong to enter one’s mind. More on this topic later.
For now that finishes the first part of Living as a theist.
Thanks for reading
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