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Suck the life out of you for sure. Took me a couple years to deprogram after I left home...with genuine help from former-JW's and random acts of kindness from total strangers.

This is just so awful, it's hysterical. "Jehovah loves you very much for obeying him"?! Not because god created love and so really knows how give unconditional love? Sounds like a common tyrannical dictator or ancient feudal lord to me, rather than a god with all the compassion and power in the universe.

A sickening, but true, example of the early isolation and brainwashing at the core of the faith. Like, is mom concerned he said "thank you" for his friend's generous gift? What about that child's feelings when he finds out his friend threw away his gift because mom said it's satanic??

For me it was the hypocrisies that got me to doubt the faith I'd been born into. In the end, love trumps all, and acts of simple human kindness will always win over the darkness of dogma, authoritarianism and manipulation.