My intention in developing this website is to create a place where people can share their experiences with cults and discuss what to do for loved ones who are involved in a cult. I also want to make this site informative so that people visiting it can think about what a cult is and why people get involved. However, most of all I want help with deciding what to do for a friend involved in a cult. I think there must be many more people out there in a similar position and we could all help each other.
I have a very close and wonderful friend who has lately become more and more involved with the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I did not know much about it except that they were a Christian sect and regarded as fairly extreme. At first I thought it was just another Christian group and did not worry about it or think about it that much. Even the fact he went to their meetings and bible study several times a week I accepted as just being very eager to be religious. However some things began to worry me such as when I began to realise Jehovah’s Witnesses were taught not to have friends outside the religion. Eventually he began to talk about how he could not really be close to me because I was not in his religion and he could not talk about Jehovah to me. This saddened me because we had been very close for a long time and we still shared everything with each other. Together with this he increasingly has an attitude that people outside his religion are all bad and he has a cynicism and contempt for just about anything that is not in complete harmony with his religion which means almost everything. This is not part of his personality at all, he is a naturally very open and generous person and his attitude was completely different a year ago. When I think about it there seems to have been a large shift in his thinking and for the worse. It seems to harden his mind against anything different and the religion seems to be very intolerant to everything outside.
The same could probably be said for lots of religions, and I felt I had no right to interfere. When I discussed this with friends they agreed that Jehovah’s Witnesses seemed to be very extreme and somewhat like a cult. Finally, I looked for information on the internet, and find many sites of former members who look back and feel they were brainwashed and that they have lost a lot through the organisation. I also find many sites about cults certainly classify them as a cult. When I learnt more about techniques the Jehovah’s Witnesses use I began to see how it was not really a choice for the people who entered it. I cannot really see how he will be happy in it. Even if the ability to think objectively is not important, he will spend his life feeling guilty about things everyone else thinks is normal, will be almost totally shut off from the world, and develop a bitter and twisted view of those outside the organisation, if he turns out like the average person in Jehovah’s Witnesses. I think it would be a tragedy for that to happen to him and a tragedy for the world to lose him to an organization that will not even appreciate him because they will see the worst in him and teach him to do the same.
I am sure that somewhere out there somebody knows the right words to say to him. Through this website I hope to figure out what is happenning and how to stop it.
This site is still in its embryonic stages, the links below work but will be improved over time.
