My deconversion was very, very slow. I probably started to lose interest in religion in my late 20s, but simply chalked it up to a wavering of faith that needed to be overcome. I would say I was in my mid/late 30s when I simply stopped doing anything religious (attending worship, praying, reading and studying the Bible, etc). I was in my early 40s when I finally accepted that I was an atheist. The fact that the process was so long and drawn out made it a pretty easy one, in the sense that there wasn't some traumatic moment when I wrestled with giving up religious beliefs. By the time I realized that I was an atheist, any beliefs had long since bled away.
Growing up in an insular cult keeps you in a very controlled bubble, where your only information comes from the cult leadership. I didn't dare to entertain any non-JW information until after I'd decided that I was an atheist and therefore could not be a JW (hard to witness for someone who doesn't exist, after all). If I'd done so sooner the process would no doubt have completed much more quickly, but possibly with many more problems along the way. I have very few complaints about how my life has turned out, so that might be why I have so few recriminations. And I'm still young enough that "what might have been" can still be, so no reason to be bitter, either (or maybe just a little bitter).
Growing up in an insular cult keeps you in a very controlled bubble, where your only information comes from the cult leadership. I didn't dare to entertain any non-JW information until after I'd decided that I was an atheist and therefore could not be a JW (hard to witness for someone who doesn't exist, after all). If I'd done so sooner the process would no doubt have completed much more quickly, but possibly with many more problems along the way. I have very few complaints about how my life has turned out, so that might be why I have so few recriminations. And I'm still young enough that "what might have been" can still be, so no reason to be bitter, either (or maybe just a little bitter).
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
