Het begon allemaal heel onschuldig: gewoon een discussie, een oefening in het geloof. Jezelf moeilijke vragen stellen en kijken of je een antwoord kan bedenken. thelodger deed dat met zijn vrouw en een paar vrienden; één van die vrienden stuurde hem later een link naar Talkorigins.org toe:
Ook hier een indrukwekkende eerlijkheid tegenover zichzelf; helemaal als je de laatste (niet geciteerde) paragraaf leest waarin hij aangeeft dat hij doodsbang is voor 'hoe het nu verder moet'---al zijn familie en vrienden zijn immers JHG!thelodger schreef:... A few days later some friends came over and we all got to talking about the Ark and the Flood and pondering some of the same questions. Now, these friends are JW's and I have no reason to believe they have abandoned "The Truth" (as it's referred to in the organization) but one of them sent me a link to a document on TalkOrigins about the flood a few days later saying that he thought it was interesting. Interesting didn't even begin to describe it. I was blown away.
Now, I don't think I'm a stupid person. I am a 30-year-old professional software developer with a 142 IQ. I read a lot. I consider myself educated, open-minded and capable of recognizing fact versus fiction and yet there I found myself realizing for the very first time that I had been blindly accepting as a fact something that was completely impossible. Perhaps some sort of flood happened in pre-history, but a global flood, the Biblical flood of Noah as described by Jehovah's Witnesses, could not have happened the way they say. It was so obvious when all the issues were laid out in one document and yet I had never noticed it before. For once, I felt stupid. I felt like I had been believing in Santa Claus (JW's don't do the Christmas thing, BTW, so it's the closest I've ever come TO believing in Santa Claus). I could have left it at that, but I didn't. If the "logic" given to me to explain the flood was wrong, I had to know what else was wrong too. Oh boy.
[...]
Anyhow, after being basically crushed over the empty shell that is the Creation book I decided to take a serious look at evolution for the first time in my life outside of the writings of Jehovah's Witnesses. Oh. My. God. I never knew. I just never knew. I have spent the last week absorbing everything I can. I have downloaded the entire TalkOrigins.org website onto my laptop to read offline. I stayed up all night watching the Discovery Science channel the night before last because of a program on hominid evolution and I just kept watching every show afterwards. I bought The Blind Watchmaker and I'm almost done reading it. I have researched radioactive dating methods, transitional fossils, creationist arguments, abiogenesis theories and lots more and over and over and over again I have found a mountain of evidence, a mountain of evidence I had been informed didn't exist. I have found intelligent people who think for themselves, who (yes) argue and change positions and interpret things differently but who are firmly grounded in reality. The actual study of the actual world as it is, not the study of how a book says it should be and an obsession with trying to make the world appear to fit that model. ...
Maar thelodger ging verder. Hij won een tweede PotM Award door het schrijven van een simpel computerprogramma om uit te rekenen hoe snel de menselijke bevolking na de Zondvloed zou zijn gegroeid. En dan niet op basis van een model à la (1 + groei%)^n, nee, echte populatiematrixalgebra. (Leslie matrixen in het jargon.) Ironisch genoeg werd ook dit programma geschreven op aanraden van een ouderling binnen de JHG-organisatie: reken het uit en zie het zelf dat de Bijbel gelijk heeft! Ahem. Nee dus. De source zit erbij (in Java), dus wie wil mag het zelf proberen.
dergelijke sekten moesten "te vuur en te zwaard" worden bestreden 