I was indoctrinated into the Jehovah's Witness version of the Bible from an early age. One can go to their official website for public information about their beliefs. It is a cult mentality. The hook is "you can live forever on Earth because God promised it." According to them, the Bible is the account of Jehovah's vindication of His Great Name which was besmirched by the lies of Satan and his demons. We are living in the time of the end since 1914 when Jesus Christ became enthroned in Heaven as king of God's Kingdom, and soon Jesus and his angels will act to destroy the wicked world of Satan by killing billions of wicked people. Perhaps tens of millions of the faithful will survive Armageddon and begin life in paradise during a restoration period lasting a thousand years. During this time, Earth will be restored to God's plan of perfection and the dead will be resurrected to live again on Earth with the exception of those who died in periods of Divine judgement, such as the flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, and Armageddon. After that time Satan and his demons will be let out of the Abyss to tempt perfected mankind one last time.
So, imagine coming from that sort of indoctrination with a compelling story line. Those who leave it are considered as good as dead. To break the indoctrination requires that one to destroy the story from a logical, rational perspective, because it is a story that pretends to be based on reason. The miracles of the Bible are gone, and God is far away in Heaven. Fortunately, there is no Hell because the Bible says in some scriptures that the dead are conscious of nothing at all. - Ecclesiastes 9
I reasoned that if the story itself was false, then I'd be dead and "unconscious" anyway. I was perhaps wasting my time in service to an American corporation pretending to be a religion. Perhaps it was just another elaborate lie. I became a cynical atheist. I saw all the logical flaws of the Bible, the compilation errors and outright manipulations in the OT were plain to see from a purely modern way of thinking. The letters of the NT didn't match well with the Gospel accounts either. The words attributed to Paul that "all scripture is inspired of God" seemed like an incredibly convenient way for mere men to assert a power over others that they did not deserve.
After writing all of that, I confess that I have attained a new-found respect for the Bible in recent years. The great irony is that my study of the occult and magic are the reason for this change of heart, because Jehovah's Witnesses believe that the occult is demonic and magic only comes from Satan. Once I abandoned the literalist, materialist way of thinking so common in modern Christianity, I began to appreciate the mystical message of the allegories found in the Bible. Reading works by William Blake, Neville Goddard, and others renewed my appreciation for so many stories that never made logical sense, but it turns out they weren't meant to be taken literally.
