Quitting Jehovah's Witnesses & Other Cults: how to do it & why you should by Stocking Angus

Author:Stocking, Angus [Stocking, Angus]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Boundary Line Books
Published: 2013-08-20T16:00:00+00:00

Blog Post II

This essay is definitely not for everyone. But I decided to publish it as is, with some disclaimers:

• I don’t think that playing with taboo is necessary to be a happy ex-JW, I just think it’s a powerful technique that you should know about.

• That said, I do think that you should somehow take advantage of your freedom when you quit the church—if you’re nominally out, but you still live within the Watchtower Society’s ridiculous moral strictures, you’re missing out on a lot of fun. And you’re not really free—it’s kind of the worst of both worlds.

• Like I say, this is a powerful technique. Proceed slowly, and evaluate the results of each experiment.

I’ve also added a coda at the end of the following essay. It offers a hierarchy of taboos that may be useful to you.

Exploring taboos as a means of personal growth.

Soon after leaving the fundamentalist cult that molded my thinking for 17 years, I drove to the nearest big city and bought myself a cigar, a tarot deck, and a Playboy magazine. I was holy in those days, but not in a good way, and I knew that the lingering effects of Christianity threatened to soil my thinking permanently. So to me it made sense to immerse myself in filth that was more enjoyable and more interesting, attempting to wash out one set of naughty thoughts with a set that was naughtier still. I wanted to roll in the mud of taboo, to be so stained with sin that the damned spots of faith and slave morality would be forever obscured, even to me.

It worked beautifully, I must say. Finding pleasure in forbidden things was good clean fun, and good for me too. Better living through deliberate sin. I still enjoy a cigar now and then, and divination and pornography are reliable standbys, but let’s face it—taboo is a receding frontier and would be explorers have to keep moving. Next for me was extramarital sex, which was awesome, and drugs were pretty cool too. Gambling, drunkenness, monosodium glutamate, heavy cream in my coffee, phone sex, all very nice, and recently I’ve been experimenting with a depravity that will surely shock even those closest to me—I don’t recycle! I just throw aluminum cans in the trash!

And here’s a curious thing about taboo: there are very few non-health-related taboos that are pan-cultural, and most of the practices that 21st century Americans consider repugnant have been accepted or even admirable in other times and places. Incest, for example, was the norm in dynastic Egypt and among Old Testament patriarchs. On the other hand, there appear to be no cultures without some taboos. Arguably—and to be arguable is enough for me—any particular taboo is largely arbitrary, but the idea of taboo is something of a cultural necessity. I suggest that a given culture is defined partially by lines drawn, by what is excluded from the set of safe, acceptable conduct as well as by what is included. So taboos are something like borders, and flouting taboo is something like travel.

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