transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] Hey, what's up, everyone? This is Jeremiah Roberts. We're on the coast here at Cultish.

Speaker 2:
[00:03] The Super Sleuth right here with him.

Speaker 1:
[00:06] Hey, so happy 2026, everybody. It is the new year. And just want to remind you, as we start the new podcast, that we are 100% crowdfunded. So if you want to partner with us, allow the gospel to get around the world and to allow more content like this to be here. You get on a regular basis. Go to the cultishshow.com. You can partner with us, become a one time giver or you want to do it monthly. You can do that too. And with all that being said, enjoy this latest podcast.

Speaker 3:
[00:35] My name is Eddie and I was in a call. Planet Earth about to be recycled. We've had as much of this world as you're gonna get. Let's just be done with it.

Speaker 4:
[01:08] Let's be done with the agony of it.

Speaker 3:
[01:10] This is a revolutionary suicide. This is not a self-destructive suicide.

Speaker 4:
[01:14] So they'll pay for this. They brought this upon us.

Speaker 2:
[01:34] Welcome back to Cultish, everybody, where we enter into the kingdom of the cults. I am your host today. It's me, the Super Sleuth. I'm flying solo, because Jerry is on some Jerry adventures, but he will be back soon, everybody. So I have a very special guest with us today, all right? This is a man that the Lord has taken from the cults and brought him into the truth. But what's really special about this as well is the fact that this man now is a pastor. He's a pastor of a church. And this is what the Lord does. He takes us from the domain of darkness and transfers us into the kingdom of his beloved son. That's Colossians chapter one. And this is a story of that. All right. This man, his name is Jason. And without further ado, I'm just going to have him introduce himself and tell, you'll be able to tell us where we can find some of his information where he's a pastor at and things of that nature. But we're going to get into his testimony. And then we're going to go into apologetics on the second episode. So Jason, take it away, man. Tell everyone about yourself.

Speaker 4:
[02:33] Hey, Andrew. So yeah, my name is Jason, last name Cantino. I am a pastor of a small, Baptistic Reformed Church in Port Jefferson on Long Island, New York. So that's midway out on the island, the North Shore. Actually, there's a ferry from our harbor here that goes across the Bridgeport, Connecticut. So I have been pastoring the church here. I've been the lead pastor for three years, just over three years. And I was here as an elder and associate pastor for a couple years before that. Prior to that, I had a 21-year career as a police officer. I was a New York City police officer and then became a Nassau County police officer. And so I had almost six years in the city, 15 out in Nassau County, which is the county that borders New York City, they pay us better and treat us better. And had had that career, I finished up in special victims as in child exploitation section. So I was a forensic interviewer. And during the course of my career is when I came to Christ. So so but but my story begins way back in the beginning, where I was raised in a in a home that became a Jehovah's Witness home.

Speaker 2:
[03:59] I cannot wait to ask you questions about being a Jehovah's Witness and a cop. That's so interesting. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Let's let's get into it, man. So so tell me you you're from New York and I'm assuming you were born there. Is that correct?

Speaker 4:
[04:15] Yes. I was born and raised on Long Island till the age of 10. And then at the age of 10 from the age of 10 till I was 20, I was in the Lake George area, which is upstate New York. You know, New York's a pretty diverse state. People think New York and they think New York City. Where I live right now, I'm about 55 miles east of the city. I'm in a suburb of the city. And where I lived in upstate for the formative years of my life from 10 to 20 was in the Adirondack Mountains.

Speaker 2:
[04:46] Oh, wow. I bet that was beautiful.

Speaker 4:
[04:47] Absolutely beautiful.

Speaker 2:
[04:48] Yeah. Take us back, man. Take us back to the household that you lived in from zero to 10, let's say. And what were your parents like and how were you being raised in terms of religion?

Speaker 4:
[05:00] OK. So my parents both came from Catholic households on Long Island. Mom is half Italian, half Scots-Irish, and dad was predominantly, I think, mostly Italian. So, loving household, dad was a New York state parole officer. So he supervised parolees. He was involved in absconder search and investigations, looking for people who had abscunded from parole. And in the household I grew up in, the first house I lived in was in Amityville, in Amityville, New York. Yeah, where the Amityville house is located.

Speaker 2:
[05:45] How close were you to that house? Did you ever go past it?

Speaker 4:
[05:48] Oh, sure. Yeah, yeah. Where I lived as a baby, I was only there for the first two years of my life. Where I lived as a baby was within a half mile of that house. But my grandparents owned an Italian restaurant, Amityville. Amados is the name. Anybody my age or older who's from Long Island might know of the name. It was a pretty well known Italian restaurant at the time. And so I lived there till I was two, born in Bayshore, Long Island, moved out to a town called Holbrook, out a little further out in Suffolk County, around the age of two and I lived there till I was 10. During those years, I was born in 1972. During those years, my parents who were raised in Catholic households were raised us just as nominal Catholics when we were little. So I was baptized, I think all three of us, myself, I was born in 72, my sister 75, my brother in 77. All three of us were baptized Catholic. But I didn't go through any of the sacraments after that, because mom's sister from the early 70s had become a Jehovah's Witness. And she was a charismatic type personality in that she was, if Aunt Joanne was into something, everybody around her would know about it. And she was very strong personality in my mother's realm. So dad was not practicing as Catholic, mom wasn't really practicing as a Catholic. And my aunt became a Jehovah's Witness and just started to drip away to share with my mother, showing her scripture and constantly tried to call her to respond to this Jehovah's Witness existence that she was involved in.

Speaker 2:
[07:47] Man, do you remember kind of what it was like in the Jehovah's Witness aura within New York? Because I mean, like, their headquarters for the Watchtower Tract Society and where they would have that meeting once a year they would take the sacrament is in New York City. So I mean, there's got to be quite a bit of Jehovah's Witnesses in New York in general, right?

Speaker 4:
[08:07] Yeah, their headquarters was for many years up until just recently in Brooklyn. So they were in Brooklyn, New York. They do offer the sacrament in every congregation throughout the world. But only, they believe that there will only be 144,000 that will be in heaven with Christ. And so where the leaders of the organization are all part of that 144,000, what they would call anointed, so they're definitely taking it back then in Brooklyn, now in upstate New York. They are offering that sacrament, and there would be people from time to time in different congregations who would take the sacrament. So it's not just limited to that place.

Speaker 2:
[08:58] Well, okay, yeah.

Speaker 4:
[09:00] But you don't realize at the time it is, because I had nothing to compare it to, it is a hotbed or it was a hotbed, but New York's a hotbed for so many things. It's not like it overwhelmed the culture, like you might experience Mormonism does in Utah. New York can handle having a lot of things coming from New York without it feeling, the UN is in New York, but a typical guy working in New York doesn't care about the UN, doesn't think about the UN. I remember as a city cop in the Academy being told, if you do stop somebody who's here and they're working for the United Nations, you just get a supervisor to the scene. So they're just giving you a heads up, but other than that, it doesn't really affect you. That's the size and the breadth and the depth of New York City. But anyhow, the 1970s was a hotbed of activity in that it was one of the times that I lived through, although I was a young child, that they had been pointing to and prophesying that the end likely would be coming around 1975. So they had done this in the late 1800s, they had done this in 1914, they had moved it to a later date in the 19-teens, and then 75 was another date, which could have been why my aunt got in when she did. But my mother coming to the religion was later in the 70s. I don't think she was baptized till around 1981. So it didn't affect her as much as some other people who I ended up interacting with later on in my life. But the interesting thing is my aunt, her husband never became a Jehovah's Witness, and my father never became a Jehovah's Witness. So both of them remained secular men. Both of them said to their wives, if you want to take the kids to the Kingdom Hall, that's fine, because they didn't have a strong biblical world view. I think for both of them, maybe it was just easier to not battle their wives on these things, and if their kids are learning things that they didn't deem dangerous, then they were okay with it.

Speaker 2:
[11:26] Wow. So what could you think drew your mother into the Jehovah's Witnesses? Do you think it was the fact that maybe that truth was lost and corrupted, and there was now an organization that had restored it? Was it maybe just clarifications on the person of Christ, or maybe just community in general? If you could speculate, what do you think it was?

Speaker 4:
[11:47] Yeah, to speculate. Mom's still, both my parents are still with us, although they years later went through a divorce. Dad's down in Florida, mom's not far from me on Long Island. I think what drew my mother is similar things that, why Charles Taze Rosal, his original theology was she couldn't, she didn't like or couldn't rationalize in her brain the eternality of hell and punishment of hellfire. So that's one of the things that Jehovah's Witnesses put front and center. They do a lot of reasoning through their scriptures, not so much accepting things because God says so of us. Sayeth the Lord, but there's a lot of just reasoning. What did God create people just to destroy them? Again, the other thing that they were offering a lot back then was that you could walk into life, you could live forever in paradise on earth. That's the title of one of their books that my mother studied. And so, there was this immanence of Christ's return, of Armageddon coming, of Satan being bound and put into the abyss. And so, the eschatology was very appealing to her. And so, the fact that she didn't want to see or hear or think about family being in hell, and the fact that her and her children could survive Armageddon, if you love your child, if you love your family, wouldn't you want to give them the truth, this being the truth?

Speaker 2:
[13:29] Yeah, that makes sense, because out here in Utah with all the LDS individuals, and even the recent debate that happened with James White and Jacob Hansen, you hear all the time from LDS individuals that what they love is the fact that it seems like God is ultimately loving, that there's some form of salvation that everybody gets. Not that you're with the Father for all eternity, right? But that you're on another plane, where even, let's say, Hitler goes to the lowest level of heaven. You know, it's like this weird form of universalism that appeals to people. So within the Jehovah's Witness theology, the justice of God is satisfied in the sole sleep of men, and not the eternal damnation of souls and God's wrath being placed on individuals for all eternity. So I think to like the carnal mind, that sounds appealing, you know what I mean?

Speaker 4:
[14:19] Of course, we can anthropomorphize God. We could take him, we could look at him, we could say, what would God be like if Jason was God, or Andrew was God? And then we now have morphed him into an idol that is Jason or Andrew's psyche. And this is what cult leaders do. This is how you could tell that something is manmade when it has this reasoning ability that comes from man, and not who God says he is. Take it or leave it. This is what God says. Let's say if the Lord, this is who he says he is, now you bend the knee to that, you submit yourself to that, you subject yourself to him, to his word, and like it or not, this is how it is. And you touched on something so profound, we'll get into this later. But I think that's, as a pastor, that's when I know someone's truly saved, when their goal isn't to be in paradise. It's not to be with family, it's not to be with friends. It's not to be a god of your own world or to live in a mansion on earth forever, but it's to be with your king. When you wanna be with your king, now you know that you're your king's child.

Speaker 2:
[15:29] Amen, brother, I love that. There's a sermon my buddy sent me, shout out to JT. It's called 10 Shekels into Shirt. I cannot remember for the life of me the name of the man who preached it, but he was preached sometime in the early 20th century. And he makes the exact same argument about how the modern philosophy of the world, let's say in America for specific influenced the modern church in such a way where people only believe in Jesus because they don't wanna go to hell.

Speaker 4:
[16:00] Yeah. Right?

Speaker 2:
[16:01] It's not because they love God and they wanna be with the Lord and they have this reunited relationship, but it's purely based out of their own personal motives and means. And it was a really profound sermon. I recommend anybody if you're listening right now later, just YouTube it or go to sermon audio or something and type in 10 shekels and a shirt. And it's pretty mind blowing. It's quite phenomenal. But like, let's go back into your story here. So what happened, right? So your mom becomes a Jehovah's Witness. What happened with you, right? What do they do with kids who come from Roman Catholicism into the Jehovah's Witness? I'm assuming that they only baptize people after a declaration of faith, right? Being a J-dub.

Speaker 4:
[16:47] Yes. So it's a very common thing. They proselytize. So they're used to new people coming in. Our people could learn a lot about welcoming new people into our churches because they're out there proselytizing. They rejoice when new people come in. They enjoy having visitors to the Kingdom Hall. And so that's one of my goals as a pastor is hospitality does not mean that you need to invite every person in the church over your house. You be hospitable when people walk in that door. You be hospitable when you see a new person in the pew. We have fellowship every week downstairs, bagels, coffee, lunch. That's hospitality. And our people love that. They see that. They feel that from the pastor, from the pastor's wife. And they naturally love that. And Jehovah's Witnesses, to their credit, are used to new people coming in. So they love bomb you. They know how to... It's a cult. They're not selling a true version of God. They're selling a lifestyle. And so they grab you and they invite you to things and they befriend you. And so there was no awkwardness that I remember as a kid coming in from this household because other households, other people in the Kingdom Hall came from similar households. There were a lot of women with unbelieving husbands, non-believing husbands. My aunt, I didn't mention this, but my aunt has four children. And so myself and my siblings are sandwiched right in there with them. So between the two families, there's seven of us, and we were extremely close. So it was an exciting thing to be going to worship with my cousins who were also, the two older boys were my best friends. And the sister was my sister's best friend, and the younger guy, my younger brother was looking out for. And so the culturally difficult thing was giving up, at the age of seven, giving up birthdays and Christmas. And I could see that that weighed on my father. You know, now you're, this culture, he was a cultural Catholic, this culture, he grew up in this, you know, both my parents were born in Brooklyn and lived out on Long Island and growing up. And so it was, this was part of the fiber of their upbringing, part of who they once identified as. And so the family is different. My, there was some positives to that, because I had the one parent in and the other parent who wasn't in, and so for me, what a typical Jehovah's Witness, if both parents were in or if even my mother was as strong in the religion as my aunt was, my cousins never, I don't think they ever played a game of organized sports. I don't think they were ever allowed to be involved in hanging out with worldly friends. But because my father had a stronger personality than my uncle and my mother had not as strong a personality as her sister, there was a difference in the family. I played sports until I was later in my teens and started to make decisions to go into the religion myself. I was on sports and then I even in high school returned to that. So I had this influence in the home that caused me to be torn in a lot of ways, but I think in some ways it was healthy in forming me to be a guy of both the Jehovah's Witness congregation and a little bit of a worldly upbringing that allowed me to be able to relate with people and to deal with things. Going through high school, junior high and high school as a Jehovah's Witness, I mean even in elementary school, you are different. You don't, I always hated the fact that we didn't stand for the national anthem. I loved my nation even as a Jehovah's Witness kid, but I was taught that this was worship. And so I would make it so if I went to a sporting event, I would make it so that you aren't expected to sit if you were standing. You just wouldn't rise for it. So I would say, you know what, this is a good time for me to be up and not in my seat. Or the Pledge of Allegiance in elementary school. You always felt different. You would, there were songs I wouldn't play in band or the Christmas parties or the birthday parties. I would excuse myself from. So that affected you. It affected you, but it also forged you a little bit. You told cults will constantly have their people, warn their people that their family isn't going to like what they're doing, that the world is not going to like what they're doing, that they have almost like a fetish with being persecuted, a persecution fetish. And so there's this sense of, yeah, well, I'm one of Jehovah's Witnesses. I should be different. The world should look at me and see me as different. And so there's this weight that you're carrying as a young child that, you know, well, often we wouldn't ask our kids to carry such a weight. Of course, as Christians, we want our kids to be different and we want our kids to be Christ-like. But man always adds more than just the simple gospel.

Speaker 2:
[22:36] Yeah, that's right, man. If you could remember, like, what were some of the first things they were teaching you at the Kingdom Hall when you were a kid? And how many days a week did you end up going?

Speaker 4:
[22:45] Yeah, so, we went three days a week, and it was two meetings on Sunday. So, it would be one right after the other. There would be a public talk, which would be the cult's version of a pastor's sermon. And that often... But that wouldn't be like a pastor putting together a message on his own. It would be something from the organization that he would maybe add some of his own illustrations. But they were staying in lockstep with the organization. And then there would be a study of that week's Watchtower article. So, there would be a question-and-answer study, and they would read through the article and then call on people and people would answer. So, that would be two meetings on Sunday. And then there would be a couple meetings during the week. For us, it would be a Tuesday-night book study, where we would be studying a book that would be more like a small group, or where it would be in someone's house and someone's home. And then on Thursday night, there would be another two meetings. I think they've cut back on some of these meetings, but back when I was going up until very recently, there's been a lot of changes recently, up until very recently, there were a total of five meetings a week. And we would go out in field service at least once a week.

Speaker 2:
[24:14] Wow, so you went out in field service with your mother?

Speaker 4:
[24:18] Yeah, I would go out with my mother, and then as you got older, one of your rites of passage would be to go out with another guy. Maybe a guy would disciple another guy by taking him along. A lady would do the same with a younger lady. As far as, I think your first part of your question was asking me what they were teaching.

Speaker 2:
[24:39] Yeah, I'm interested, yeah.

Speaker 4:
[24:42] Yeah, it would be church doctrine. You know, a lot of it was church doctrine. A lot of it is, you might read passages. It was eisegesis. It was never exegetically or exposited to you. It was a doctrinal thing with some verses taken and put here and there. I love RC. Sproul saying chapter and verse, you know. Whereas this would just be out of context. You could make the Bible say a lot of things. A cult can make the Bible say a lot of things. So, they might point to scripture. You know, they love the Book of James. They would point to the fact that faith without works is dead, and so it's work harder, work harder, work harder, not realizing that these works are the fruit of a life rooted in Christ. They put the works in the front end almost, almost ignoring all of Paul's writing on how we're redeemed and how we're saved and on faith alone. And then, but it would be a different study. You go through seasons of different study, but a lot of it would just be things explaining why they are different and what they see. There was always an emphasis on end times. Typical, Jehovah's Witness looks miserable and they're waiting for this system to end. I remember my father saying once in criticism of them, he says they look like a people waiting to die in order to live.

Speaker 2:
[26:16] Whoa.

Speaker 4:
[26:18] And what's the saddest part of that, well, my father didn't even realize when he said it, was they're waiting to die to go to hell. They're not waiting to die to live.

Speaker 2:
[26:28] Oh, man. Thinking about the way we do things at our church, we're kind of like family-integrated, meaning that... Yeah, good. So during the sermon, all of the kids are with us. So was it the same way at the Kingdom Hall? Were kids in their own classrooms ever, or were you always with your parents, even at these book studies and stuff like that?

Speaker 4:
[26:47] Yeah. So what I experienced, there was no kids' church. Everybody was with their parents. The other experience to that, there was a back room where there would be almost like glass, and there was a back room where if a kid was acting up, a parent might take the child back there. I think that's a great idea. But I remember back then, I don't know if it was just culturally, the time and the organization. But I remember a lot of kids getting smacked around in that back room for not sitting quietly, which is a lot. Two hours is a lot to ask a two or a three year old. I tell my people, I want to be integrated. We have a nursery for that exhausted mother who can't handle. She needs a break and she wants to hear God's word. But I want your children in the pews. I want to hear their cries. I want to expect our people to expect a two year old a six year old, a six year old, a 20 year old, like a 20 year old, and a 90 year old, like a 90 year old. Let's just expect this. And, you know, I actually was on a podcast, Chris Ornstein's Iron Sharpened Iron podcast on Friday. My biblical counseling professor from Forge Theological Seminary was on his podcast and I guest hosted with Chris. And we were talking about this gentleman, Russell Three had written a book called Ministry Across the Spectrum. And it talks about making your church available for people from all different backgrounds, people with autism, people, you know, somebody is is mentally slow. We want to have a we want to teach our people to be accepting of this. And I think to go back to what we originally talking about, I think that we our congregations are doing that with our children and doing that in a way that I think the Jehovah's Witnesses, I think that's good that the kids are with the parents, especially considering that this organization has come under an immense amount of fire for mishandling of sexual abuse within the organization. And I think that I could go into that. I think there's a lot of reasons for that.

Speaker 2:
[29:10] Yeah, I think that might be interesting to talk about real briefly. I think you're referring to how they have a specific doctrine. This might be a cool question for you, actually. Yeah. So biblically, in biblical principles, we would say there should be two to three independent lines of testimony and witness. And one person's case seems right, another comes and cross examines them. This is essentially due process in a nutshell, in the way it works in the United States of America, innocent until proven guilty and has to be established. This is a biblical process. But the Jehovah's Witnesses take those same verses, but they twist them in a different way. Are you able to explain kind of their two to three independent line of testimony doctrine that they have?

Speaker 4:
[29:46] Yeah, so we see it in the Old Testament, and it makes absolute sense. But what did we not have in the Old Testament? We didn't have ring cameras. We didn't have forensic science. We didn't have forensic interviewers. We didn't have, because now we're going into something that I actually studied and was my line of work as a special victim squad detective and who specialized in child exploitation section. If a child comes to you and they're able to describe your bedroom and your body and even things in that room, they're able to describe it. And they tell me as a forensic interviewer of that child, or they tell a social worker, or they tell a specially trained district attorney, what do we now have? We have two witnesses. We don't need to lay eyes on the evidence. If I take this piece of evidence to the lab and have this child or have their clothing examined and I have something that corroborates what this child is claiming, we have now developed more witnesses. So, they, they are not so much worried. I don't think, maybe some of them are, but I don't think they are so worried about holding to the Mosaic Covenant as they are worried about protecting their organization from lawsuit. And so, what man does is man loses sight of the victim and what's best for the victim and looks at the organization and now wants to protect the organization. And in protecting the organization, they've lost sight of protecting who Christ would have them protect, this child who has been violated, this crime that needs to face the full weight of the teeth of the law. And instead, they circle the wagons and they're not equipped, they're not educated. They're very, sadly, a very uneducated group of people because their very policies keep them getting secular and secondary education. And they turn around and they try to handle this in a way that re-victimizes the victim that doesn't bring the perpetrator to justice and allows the perpetrator to swim in the very waters in which they came from. So now you have this same person because there wasn't two or three witnesses who, unless you're part of some sort of strange cult, you're not going to do it in front of witnesses. And they turn around and they protect this person and they allow future victims to become victimized because of how they handle those things.

Speaker 2:
[32:37] My goodness. When you were working as a cop, essentially a forensic cop, did you ever come against cases within the Jehovah's Witnesses that you had to handle?

Speaker 4:
[32:47] There were a couple that we dealt with. There were all sorts of organizations, but predominantly, predominantly, and people out, I should say people out of all sorts of organizations. My partner and I, we handled one that was a priest, an Episcopal priest. We handled one that was a pretty well-known case here on Long Island. She was a child case manager, a child case, a female child case manager. I told people in our church, I said, this is somebody you would put in charge of children. Yet she was a predator, sexual predator, and that's a very rare thing for a female who happens to be a social worker, who happens to be working for children for the local county over here, and she's sharing images of infants. It's all sorts of organizations, and the Jehovah's Witnesses just happened to be one that really spawned in a more cult-like manner in that, again, what I started to say before, they discouraged their people from getting secular education, secondary education. So you have, and there's nothing, there's nothing, I think we should encourage people to get all sorts of education. There's nothing to say you need a specific college degree, but you might have a guy who's roofing all week or a plumber be the guy that's conducting this investigation in the organization. And he has had no experience in how to handle a witness, no experience in how to ask these questions, no experience in who should be called and how we should do these things. He has none of that, and yet these are the men that are making the decisions, and you have an organization that doesn't let people get educated at the secondary level. So if you look at the numbers, Jehovah's Witnesses are probably one of the least educated religious groups in the world, in the country.

Speaker 2:
[35:04] Wow, that's pretty surprising. I mean, like, if you're going to get into a street level conversation with the Jehovah's Witness and you're bringing up certain scriptures, they can pretty easily twist you into a doctrinal pretzel if you don't know your stuff. But what you're saying is really what's going on is they're learning specific things for specific reasons and they know how to answer specific questions. Let me know if I'm wrong or not, but those who are in charge of the local Kingdom Hall, the way it works, if there's some type of process that needs to happen or church discipline or anything like that, they have a handbook called Shepard the Flock of God, is that correct?

Speaker 4:
[35:40] Yes.

Speaker 2:
[35:41] And so I'm assuming that this handbook, if there is any allegations of abuse or whatever, this handbook has to have some type of guidelines. But what that is only really doing is reinforcing their bad interpretations of biblical texts. And that's about all they know because they're not encouraged to think about, well, what does two or three independent lines of testimony mean apart from the Watchtower Tract Society? Because they have the infallible interpretation of the scriptures. Everyone else would ultimately be wrong if it says anything different. Is that correct?

Speaker 4:
[36:14] That's right. And they're not going to trust anyone who is not a Jehovah's Witness. They are programmed. The language that they would use, they would just say, oh, that's a worldly person. And when you say that's a worldly person, or worse yet, if you were to say that's an apostate, so you have the worldly people, such as yourself, and then you would have an apostate, someone who has actually been baptized and then chose to walk away. I am, in their eyes, I would be demonic. So that's an apostate. That's a worldly person. The loaded language is there to cause the ATM door to shut. It like just shuts, and that is, there is, your card is gone. You're done, and you're not withdrawing any money. So there's a, their minds are set up with this language. They are in the truth. You are worldly. I am an apostate. It just, they're set up to not be able to really process things beyond how they're told with this loaded language.

Speaker 2:
[37:22] Yeah, so pretty much anything that disagrees with what they're taught automatically reinforces in their brain why they're true.

Speaker 4:
[37:30] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[37:31] In a weird way.

Speaker 4:
[37:32] Yeah, and, you know, Stephen Hassan has a book, Combating Cult Mind Control, and he talks about the bite model, the B-I-T-E. In a cult, you'll find these four things, that your behavior, your information, your thought, and your emotions are controlled by the organization. And so these people are, they're controlled. So when they seem to, on the street, have a vast amount of knowledge, they know about 6% to 7% of scripture is where they swim, and they know that scripture really well. Because that 6% to 7% of scripture is going to point out the eschatology that they believe. It's going to point out the humanity of Christ over and above the deity of Christ. It's going to point to these certain things. And so if you're not equipped to go into that, you could be twisted around in that 6%. But if you could pull them into the 93% of scripture, that falls together and does not contradict itself, and shows you the true Christ, then you have a chance.

Speaker 2:
[38:45] Praise God, yeah, we'll get into more of that in the second episode that we're recording with you. Praise God, I love that we gave just like a little teaser there. Let's get back into your life, Jason. So you were baptized at what age as a Jehovah's Witness?

Speaker 4:
[38:59] So at the age of 15.

Speaker 2:
[39:01] And then, so what, yeah, go into that. Why did you get baptized? What made you believe that the Watchtower Tract Society was the infallible organization?

Speaker 4:
[39:10] Yeah, you know, I think if you did take a young person and you just teach them one thing, there's a very good chance that that they're going to believe that thing that you've taught them. That's all that I knew. It was all that I was shown. It was, the world around me was an indoctrination camp, five hours of meetings a week, going out in field service at least one day a week. So, I was being, withdrawing from worldly association, hanging out with friends. I was starting to lose my friends who were not Jehovah's Witnesses, and they were being replaced by my cousins and friends in the Kingdom Hall, who were. And they were great guys. They were fun guys. We played sports together. We played basketball together. We played football together. We got together. And that's who I was with. So now, as a young man who was a few years older than me, started studying with me, discipling me. I'm studying the books that were given to me, and it's the arguments, the conversations, the study, is an indoctrination plan showing me God's Word and how it's supporting these things. And you're in a cult is a culture, it's your culture, it's who you're around. The pats on the back are from people who want to encourage you in the direction that you're going in. So as I hit my early teens, these were the people that I was with. And from my father's perspective, this guy who was going into work and dealing with criminals, his family is clean, his kids aren't drinking, they're not doing drugs, they're not around these worldly influences that any father would worry about. At the same time that all of this was going on, mom herself was an RN and was working part time. So I had two educated parents. I had two people that were articulate and could explain things. And so by the age of 15, which is like that, it was almost like a rite of passage. My cousin, Billy and myself at the same time chose to get baptized.

Speaker 2:
[41:36] Okay. Okay. So it's like everything was just perfectly falling in line in the sense that your world existed around this culture. And this is just something that essentially happens if you're raised in one point of view for so long, you're heavily indoctrinated. It rightly follows that you would end up getting baptized. It just makes sense. That makes sense to me. And what was the baptism like?

Speaker 4:
[42:00] So the baptism is a believer's baptism. So it's all people either from, you know, there are some younger people, maybe around 10, 11 years of age, through converts who are older people. And it's not done in a church. Like I had a baptism in my church yesterday, and we have a baptismal behind the pulpit, so I just moved the pulpit out of the way. The baptism is done at a convention, at an assembly or a convention. So I was living in upstate New York, and I was actually baptized where the US men's hockey team won the 1980 Olympics in that arena. We were at Lake Placid, so we were at Lake Placid. But before you get to the baptism, it's not like there's, this is who Christ is. Do you believe in him? Do you intend to follow him forever? It is, they sit down with you. You sit down with your elders, and they give you a series of questions. There's 70 questions that you answer. And it's all doctrinal, church doctrine type questions, very simple questions, but there's a lot of them. And it's almost like they're looking to make it so you will know before you become a Jehovah's Witness that if you choose to not be a Jehovah's Witness that you will be cast out. And so you leave knowing that, oh, well, I was warned about this.

Speaker 2:
[43:34] Whoa, okay, okay. So this has me thinking. So you're getting to the point of essentially your baptismal interview, and the questions they lay out, 70 questions, who knows what it is nowadays. But if you were to disagree from that point on, you would essentially be disfellowshipped, no longer welcome at the Kingdom Hall.

Speaker 4:
[43:54] They can't disfellowship you until they baptize you. So you're going through this process, and you're sort of at being asked questions. You realize you're now identifying with Jehovah and with his organization. As a matter of fact, you're baptized, not in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. You're baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and Jehovah's Spirit-directed organization. And so you're being baptized into an organization, into a publishing company, a cult.

Speaker 2:
[44:26] Okay. So help me understand this. World Mission Society Church of God, you get baptized in the name of An Song Hong. Okay. You're saying within the Jehovah's Witnesses, they say, we baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son, and then they'll say, and also in the name of the Watchtower Tract Society?

Speaker 4:
[44:43] Jehovah's Spirit-Directed Organization.

Speaker 2:
[44:46] Oh, so that's literally what they say, is Jehovah's Spirit-Directed Organization.

Speaker 4:
[44:49] They bring the spirit in, but the spirit is actually Jehovah's Directed Organization. Wow.

Speaker 2:
[44:56] Okay. So part of their belief, essentially then, Jehovah's Spirit-Directed Organization, since the spirit, which we'll get more into in the second episode, isn't a person, the force of truth is Jehovah's Spirit-Directed Organization, which is the Watchtower Tract Society.

Speaker 4:
[45:11] So, and I'm only realizing this now as we're walking through this. It's amazing. Every time I talk about my upbringing, I realize new things. But they refer to themselves as the truth, which is a very powerful thing in me leaving. They refer to themselves as the truth. And then they refer to themselves as the organization, as Jehovah's Spirit-Leader Organization. You see, they're almost two parts of the Godhead they've absorbed into themselves. They're the way, the truth and the life. They're the Spirit-Leader Organization. So, they're two-thirds of the Godhead.

Speaker 2:
[45:46] They are, aren't they? Oh my goodness, man. Okay. And so, yeah, it even has me thinking, like, in this point, like, what would happen to somebody? Did you know anybody where they get to that point and they're like, actually, well, I kind of disagree. Say you're not baptized yet, you can't be disfellowshipped. Would they just be like, okay, go sit back in the pew with your mom and your dad until you believe?

Speaker 4:
[46:07] Yeah, yeah, they would turn around and say, okay, let us know when you agree or we'll keep working with you. We'll keep working on you.

Speaker 2:
[46:14] Gotcha. So in terms of convention, can you flesh that out for me? Like, how many, is there one convention a year? Is there one convention a month? What even occurs at these conventions?

Speaker 4:
[46:23] Yeah, so there's three a year where they used to be. I left in the early 1990s, so some of my numbers are gonna be off because this is a manmade religion, but right now, it is rapidly changing. There have been big changes in their blood doctrine. There have been big changes all within the last weeks. I can't keep up with what's going on with them. But back then, there would be two or three conventions a year. They were broken up into, the congregations were broken up into, I'm trying to think, circuits. Then a bigger group would be a district. There'll be two circuit assemblies, and then one big district assembly every summer. The circuit assemblies might be like Saturday and Sunday, and then the district assembly might be like a four or a five-day program. The circuit assemblies might be in like a civic center in an area or an arena. The district convention when I lived on Long Island was in Yankee Stadium, or when I lived in upstate New York, we would go to where the Montreal Expos used to play, so the Olympic Stadium in Montreal. That's a big, and so you might get a couple thousand days also or older numbers. I think this organization, if it's not losing more people than it's gaining, it's losing more people than it's gaining in the first world, and it's gaining more people in the third world. So when we see like American Gospel, and we see the distorted Gospel growing, even above and beyond the health, wealth, and prosperity Gospel, you also have growth of the cults. The Mormons and the Jehovah's Witnesses take advantage of these people, not having the accessibility we have to God's Word, to the Internet, to some of those other things.

Speaker 2:
[48:26] Yeah. So what happened at these assemblies and then the larger ones? Like when I think about Utah, there's general conference twice a year. They gather to listen to the words of the apostles and the president of their church, the prophet, and they're getting not necessarily new teaching or anything like that right now. It seems to me, as a Christian looking on the outside, it's just like Mormon life coaching. But what happens at the Jehovah's Witnesses conventions?

Speaker 4:
[48:51] Yeah, I mean, of course, it has to be life coaching, right? It's a works based organization, just like LDS. So you have to teach people how to live. You have to teach people how to white knuckle it through society, how to white knuckle it, try their hardest, bite their lip, keep putting their best foot forward, keep smiling instead of looking as miserable as you are, because you don't have the true gospel. You have no relationship with Jesus Christ. And so a lot of their theology is, look at how many of us there are. How could we be wrong? Look at how we're reaching the nations and other people aren't. So it's a life coaching. It's a broadcasting of what we're doing. Look at the proof that we're the one true religion. We're going to people's doors. They're not coming to us. It's a, and there is doctrinal change. They will unveil something at the Big District Convention. And you might get one of the governing body members come and speak to you and give you some sort of a doctrinal change or something new that might be going on. And they tend to seem to get excited about that. You know, it's to sign for them that we're in the end times, that the end is coming.

Speaker 2:
[50:05] That makes sense. Okay. So now you're baptized, you're 15 years old. What happens next in your life after that? Are you like, now I'm going to take my Jehovah's Witness identity more serious? Did you start doing more field service and things like that?

Speaker 4:
[50:20] For a time I did, leading up to my baptism and after my baptism I did. And then I, around my senior year of high school, I started to see, it started with football. I said, I'm never going to get to play football organized again if I don't do it now. And I just said, I'm going to try out. I walked on, I walked on my high school football team and made it as a senior. When I was in the starting rotation of split ends, bringing the plays in. And that, I think that was like, oh wow, what's going on? That's not what Jehovah's Witnesses do. And then I went to college and that's not what Jehovah's Witnesses do. And then, so those few years started to come a little rocky. I was definitely living a double life. I was definitely looking one way to people. I would try to get to the Kingdom Hall, but living another way. And college was a great experience for me in that it opened my eyes to the fact that people could have different thoughts. And I don't need to demonize them. They could see things different than me. And they could be, you know, back then, they could live a morally decent life, despite the fact that they weren't raised the same way as me. And so that was something that gave me a little bit of a thought process, a little bit of men. It was just a little different than I had, than I'm being told in the Kingdom Hall.

Speaker 2:
[51:59] Yeah, let's flesh that out just a little bit. I think it might be helpful for the listener. In terms of thinking about the world, how do we as Christians in the right way, Pastor Jason, if you put your pastor hat on, how can we distinguish ourselves from the secular but still have a loving respect for those who aren't Christian? Right? Because if we're going to be honest with ourselves, I would go, they don't know Jesus, they don't know the truth. Not everything they teach is good in a college, especially now they're getting indoctrinated, all kinds of stuff. But, in a sense, there's still this aspect of having a common grace that God gives all of men that just because they believe something different, they're made in the image of God and they're still worthy of life and respect, in a way. Is that kind of like what you're explaining?

Speaker 4:
[52:43] Yeah. So, they don't know Jesus, but they ought to know Jesus. They need to know Jesus. I heard recently, and I've quoted it quite a few times for my congregation, but I don't want anyone that I know to be in hell and wonder why didn't Jason tell me about this. I can't control whether you accept Christ or not, but I can control what I share with you. And so, if that is what we see, if that's what we are aware of, that these people need to have a relationship with Christ, then we ought to be in the world. We ought to be, sorry about that, we ought to be sharing with them. We ought to be living amongst them. We ought to be salt and light in the world. Jesus never called for a monastic life. He called for you to go out into the world and to change the world and to be a preservative in the world. So the school that you go to, you're going to find people who have a similar, maybe political view as you. Now tell them why this view makes sense. This view makes sense because Christ is king. And so I think we could, we could, you know, we could definitely, we ought to protect our children. And if teaching them at home is a way of protecting them and giving them our world view is a way of protecting them, that's great. But at some point, we're not all going to be working from home. At some point, you need to release that spring, and you need to allow people to go out into the culture. And so we want to educate our young people to go out there and to know what they believe, know why they believe it, and share that with people. And so that's something that I think could inspire our people to just, you know, have that on the front of your mind. People need to learn about your Christ, about your King.

Speaker 2:
[54:41] Yeah, I think that's wise in the sense where when we go out into the world to do evangelism, to live life as Christians, people who belong to Jesus, our goal is to not demonize everybody, right? That's what the cult does. It's to demonize the other person if they give you any type of information that contradicts with what you really truly believe from the cult. Then it just victimizes you, which makes them look bad, more demonized, and you more indoctrinated in the truth. What we ought to do as Christians is have the same heart that Christ had, right? Like the Pharisees. Why are you sitting with the sinners and the tax collectors? Well, Jesus was about his father's business. He's going to talk to his sheep wherever they are. And people are made in the image of God, so they deserve love and respect and value unless they've demonstrated otherwise, right? So the Christian ought to operate in such a way to where we can be actively involved in the world and with people who differ from us without demonizing them. Instead actually loving them, like you said, to be able to accurately articulate the truth in the form of the gospel to them. And God's going to do what he's going to do with them. They're either going to not like you or they'll just continue to be your friend and you can talk with them and have that type of relationship just with another human being. They don't have to be demonized. And I think that's what you're articulating. And I think that's a wise position to hold because I find as the world gets more polarized, it's going to be harder to have that type of wisdom with the interactions that we have. You know, it's pretty wild. I heard this one comedian once. What did he say? He was like, I'm happy for all the people who dye their hair because I know exactly who not to talk to at the airport. You know what I mean?

Speaker 4:
[56:27] Yeah, yep, yep.

Speaker 2:
[56:28] But it's almost like we need to break through some of that a little bit and get out of our comfort zone and do a little field service of ourselves. And what I mean by that is actually engaging with people that we don't agree with in order to give the gospel. You know?

Speaker 4:
[56:46] 100 percent. And, you know, who is it? Greg Huckel, he says, just leave a stone in their shoe. Have a conversation with them and leave them with something and let them know that they encountered a thoughtful Christian, a Christian who thinks through his worldview and understands what he or she believes. You're called to broadcast spread, not to stay around and reap what you sow all the time. You have no idea the effects that this is going to have. But you and that's I think this is how we went down this rabbit trail is I was in school and I was interacting with other people who their worldview I could see it and say, well, I can't demonize them anymore. And so when we so that works both ways for us. We want to interact with other people and not just paint them with a broad brush, but also we could be the ones that are leaving the stone in their shoe. We ought to be the ones that are broadcast spreading and leaving the stone in their shoe and letting them know. I interacted with someone who loved Jesus, who was thoughtful, who was caring, who listened when I spoke, and I'm not afraid of what they believe because they didn't present it in a way that was scary. They presented it in a way that looks like he loves his king, he loves his God.

Speaker 2:
[58:19] Amen, dude.

Speaker 4:
[58:20] Amen.

Speaker 2:
[58:20] I love that. So you go to college, what were you going for specifically?

Speaker 4:
[58:25] Specifically, I got my LPN in high school. So I went to college looking to get my RN. So I was taking my first couple of years of school was mostly electives. I went for two years. And around that time is when all heck broke loose in my theological world. And I ended up dropping out after a second year of college only to pick up years later as an adult. So I ended up finishing up in community and human services and getting my, you know, then going into seminary. I went through Forge Theological Seminary years later. But at the time I was going for health sciences. And yeah, so that's what I was going for. And right around the age of 20 is when the veil was pulled back, the curtain was open. And I saw into the inner workings of the organization. We could go into that when you're...

Speaker 2:
[59:27] I'm ready to go into it right now. I want to hear about the theological disaster essentially that happened. Let's get into it, brother.

Speaker 4:
[59:35] So what happens is I was living upstate with my parents and my grandfather got sick. Like I said, I was a nurse. So grandfather got sick. My mom's dad cared for him a great deal. And I moved down to Long Island and I was living with my grandparents. And that's a big deal when you move away from your location. When you're in a cult, when a cult member moves away, a lot of things can happen there because it's the cult. Christianity is based on being changed here in your heart. I could be in prison the rest of my life and I'm not going to become unsaved. But a cult, there's no change that happens in the heart. The heart of stone wasn't removed in the heart of flesh given. So what happened is I'm now away from my congregation. I'm away from the people who share the same worldview with me, and my grandparents were not believers. So I'm living with them and I started to ease up on attending meetings. I stopped going to meetings. Shortly after moving down, my aunt who was still in upstate New York, she came out and said that for many years my uncle who was a gentleman, this guy was a hard working guy, this guy had been a steam fitter, a union steam fitter in New York City. He opened a heat and boiler business in upstate New York, and he had hired a lot of Jehovah's Witnesses. He was just a regular guy, hard working guy. She came out, she separated from him, and she said that for the last decade or so, he had been secretly operating a satanic cult. And he had been, yeah, you aren't ready for that. No. So he had been worshipping satan, abusing the children to very, very strange level of abuse, to the point where she was saying that there was human sacrifices and girls had been made to have babies, and the babies would be aborted and sacrificed and stuff like that. And I told you what my parents did for a living, because I want you to realize I had educated parents. I said, my mother's sister, mom's an RN, dad was an investigator with New York State Parole, and she comes out with this. And as my parents are like, okay, who have you called? Who have you made an investigation with? Who have you contacted? Do we need a, do we call the state police? Do we call the county police? Do we need a special district attorney on this case? Nothing was ever done from a secular standpoint. Now, I had been sat down with our kids when they broke the news to us because I had been in and out of the house, and they were trying to say that we were victims in this. And so the Jehovah's Witness elders sat us down to say this, in fact, happened. It was presented as fact. These are the facts of what had happened. And you don't remember because you must have been giving medication or the effects were so horrendous that you have forgotten it or whatever. Well, I was a 20-year-old guy. I knew that I had never seen anything weird with my uncle. I knew that my uncle, it was so out of the clear blue. But it was scary as all heck. And so, you know, somebody tells you something crazy, it's still scary. It's like, what is going on? My world was shaken, my world was rattled. But out of the seven of us, nobody could remember one night of taking a strange walk in the woods with my uncle, let alone anything, anything. And so, over the course of about a year, initially it was like, oh, we're not going to call the police because the ice is too thick and there's too much snow on the ground. But it just, nothing came about. It became very obvious that my poor aunt had had some sort of a nervous breakdown. She was looking to divorce my uncle. She was looking for scriptural ability to divorce him. And she went to a very, very high level. And I think the poor woman needed to be institutionalized. But what I witnessed was that the people who claimed to be the truth were willing to lie to support one of their own and demonize a worldly person. Wow.

Speaker 2:
[64:29] Okay. So, this kind of makes sense a little bit, too, because even during this era, the satanic panic is going on.

Speaker 4:
[64:37] A hundred percent. So, this was 1992, 1993. It was right on the heels of satanic panic. It was all had just been happening. And it was the people arrested in... And listen, I went into this line of work. I know kids get abuse. But this is why there was so much was learned from satanic panic. People learned how to conduct proper interviews. They learned how not to lead a child witness. They learned how to sit with them for hours, many, many visits, and not even bring up what happened and wait for that child. And when the child says, well, what did you do today? And the child finally talks about what you want to talk about, all that the interviewer says is, tell me more about that. Tell me more about that. Tell me more about that. And that child might never reveal, they might never disclose what happened. You never go there because you're not going to instill the thought into the child. You're waiting for the child or the witness to come out with it. That's what a forensic interviewer does. And so, but at the time, everything was mishandled. And it was all of these memories were infused into these young people. And despite their efforts to destroy this case that didn't exist, nothing. There was nothing. There was no memory. There was nothing that happened. But it was all based on, like you said, satanic panic. I use that term all the time.

Speaker 2:
[66:06] Yeah, I guess that's what it sounds like. It's not to really say these things don't happen. Like you said, obviously, they probably do. It's just in the case of your uncle and your aunt, there was no evidence. And it's quite ironic that an organization that protects its people so much with a two to three independent lines of testimony doctrine that they have would not use the same standard with the man who was worldly.

Speaker 4:
[66:34] That's 100% so true. It's so succinct. You succinctly wrapped up everything I was feeling. You want to hold people to the standards of the mosaic law when someone is accusing one of your own, and you circle the way against them, and you protect them. But when somebody else comes out and says, I think that this could have happened because I have a weird feeling about this, you then go and just paint everything with that brush and say, this in fact happened. This is what happened. And when it comes around and it's like, I guess it didn't happen. It was none of, let's gather all the same people that we gave nightmares to. Let's gather all those same young people and say to them, listen, we were wrong. We made a mistake. There's a lot we could learn from this. Instead, it's just radio silence. It's never brought up again. How dare you even bring that up? It's almost like your mind is doubly blown. You have the cognitive dissonance when they tell you these things happen, and then it's like, well, didn't you tell me these things happen? You're acting like you never told me these things happened. And so it's a double whammy. But what I saw was this entire castle, this whole house of cards that had been built on the premise that you claim to be the truth, a card was pulled out from the bottom and the whole thing crumbled in front of my eyes. And if you're not the truth, then what are you? And why am I following you? And why am I living my life the way you're telling me to live my life? Why, you know, like you were surprised that I was a cop as a Jehovah's Witness. I wasn't a cop as a Jehovah's Witness. I had, once I left, I'm like, I don't really love nursing. I want to be a cop. So I became a cop. But I had to leave first. Because starting in the early 1980s, and this will be a little interesting sidebar for you, because I knew the family that was affected by this. In that congregation that my aunt was in, in upstate New York, there was an elder who was a, elder is like one of the leaders of the church, who was a New York state trooper. And his daughter was sexually abused by one of the other elders. And he didn't play by their rules. He went and had the guy arrested. And he had the guy persecuted. And prosecuted, not persecuted, prosecuted. And he, the organization, this was the early 80s, turned around and came out with a rule that you can't carry a gun and be a Jehovah's Witness.

Speaker 2:
[69:26] That makes sense.

Speaker 4:
[69:27] They were looking to stick it to this man who I knew who was protecting his daughter, because he took things. So they really didn't want to say, we don't want cops. But how do we say we don't want cops? What they're saying is we don't want, we could say, you could become blood guilty by carrying a gun. So we don't want you to be in a job where you have to carry a gun. But again, now we're, now we're making our people more like sheeple. We're making our people less able to have these jobs and have these positions where they could stand up to us. And that young lady, she ended up in a multi-million dollar lawsuit because the guy who had abused her had abused before and he abused after as a leader in the church, in many different congregations. So yeah, so that's the little side, little sidebar.

Speaker 2:
[70:21] Yeah, that's interesting. It makes perfect sense. It makes perfect sense. So tell me then, so you, how did you leave the Jehovah's Witnesses? Was it just as simple as you had a meeting with them and you were out or did it take like a few months? They tried to do like councils and stuff like that. Like what was it like?

Speaker 4:
[70:38] I was very fortunate. I had moved. And so I was a little bit under the radar. There's almost a gentleman's agreement that if you don't embarrass us, we're not going to look to embarrass you. I stayed under the radar. I was living on Long Island. I just never reconnected with the congregation on Long Island. I never did anything that made it seem like I was a apostate. Until years later, 20 years later, I came to Christ. Wow. Then, then people stopped talking to me. Really?

Speaker 2:
[71:10] Okay, so tell me, how did you come to Christ?

Speaker 4:
[71:13] So now I'm only, I left the organization at the age of 20. I started living just a moderately normal life. I didn't become a total banana. I wasn't like one of these springs that just was released. I met my wife, who was a young Catholic woman who was a practicing Catholic. Her theology, I'll tell you, it's so interesting. Strict Catholic family, father had actually gone to a seminary prep high school. So father was going to become a priest, but his mother got sick and he came home from the seminary prep, like around 12th grade. So they were 11th grade. He didn't graduate through that program. But they were a Catholic family like I had never met. They went to church. If they were on vacation, they would go to church. They would, if you asked my wife if this is the body and the blood of Christ, she said, of course not. That's done in remembrance. That's a representation. So her Catholic theology wasn't fully developed. She almost had a Christian theology. But I met her. We courted and we got married. We bought our house. And this is the mid 90s. Had two sons. So I and I had she would go to the Catholic Church. I said, you know, you could bring them through the sacraments. They got baptized, did their first communion, even did their confirmation. But the one thing about coming out of a cult, you'll see this a lot with with Jehovah's Witnesses. I don't know if Mormons, you see this as much, but it's scary to go into a church. You're taught that Christendom is false religion. And so that's a scary thing. And so I would go for Christmas or Easter, but I just felt like in the Catholic Church, the statues kept me a little discouraged. The homily was not deep enough for me. I felt like I'm not getting enough of God's word. I couldn't take communion because I had never taken First Holy Communion. So I just felt like an outsider looking in. I had gotten involved in, very involved in martial arts. I was studying jujitsu. And so I got intrigued by Eastern thought, meditation, stuff like that, just at a shallow level. And then, this is covering decades. I had become a New York City police officer and then a Nassau County police officer. And so I'm just living my life. You know, by the world standard, I had it all. I had the house I wanted, the cars I wanted. I was doing well. My wife and I were both professionals. Had these two beautiful sons. You know, that was really our world view was raising our boys. Older guy ended up playing college soccer at Elon University Division 1 program. Younger guy ended up playing college lacrosse at Manhattan College Division 1 lacrosse program. Just that was what our family was focused on. And so I tell people all the time, I get how it becomes an idol. Sports can become an idol. The weekend, the living for these things becomes an idol. In a strange way, there were blessings there because we were spending time with our kids. We were involved with other families that focused on the family, on the kids. And so I was lost now for two decades. Unsure first, agnostic first, not caring. Then interested in different philosophies like Buddhism for its, I could understand the appeal because it's just a psychological system of relaxing and you're good enough just as you are. And then I had a guy move next door to me. His name is Eric, who is, we have cousins in common. So he's on one side of the family, I'm on the other side of the family. Our families knew each other, we played together as kids. He moves next door to me and six months later I realize that he is my cousin, Gary's cousin. So we become very close, we become very friendly. And in the course of time, Eric becomes a Christian. Praise God. Yeah, so he becomes a Christian. He starts out at a charismatic church, maybe Assemblies of God. And now, well, not now, now he comes to my church. But then he moves to Hope Reform Baptist Church, which Pastor James White is very close with Pastor Rich Jensen and these brothers over at Hope in Quorum, which is close to me. So he becomes a Christian and his theology starts to develop very quickly. And but we're friendly and I had seen him, I had seen him come to Christ and I saw him go from being like this uber conservative type guy stressed out about the world to seeing things through more of a Christian worldview. And his politics didn't change, but he relaxed in them. And I took note of that. And he asked me a very important question. He asked me, and this is a great question, this works a little bit better with Jehovah's Witnesses than with LDS. But he asked me if I believe the Bible was God's inspired word. And a Jehovah's Witness has a distorted Bible. They have, they have this thing. But this is the most recent copy of the New World Translation. But they believe it's God's word. They just don't know that they only know. They're only, their studies are only dealing with about 6% of it. They believe all scripture is inspired. And so where, when you ask an LDS person that, they're going to say, as long as it's translated correctly, Jehovah's Witness will say yes, and then not realize they have a mistranslation. So it's interesting. But, but I answered yes. I said, yeah, I believe it's God's inspired word. And as I answered yes, it was as I was punched in the gut. And my follow up question to myself was, then why aren't you reading me? Wow. I went in the house that night. We were smoking cigars and drinking bourbon. I went in the house that night and opened up a old daily devotional that my wife had. And I just opened up to that date and started reading it that night. And within six months or four months, I had read the entire Bible. But I want to remind our listeners, though, if the person answers no, I don't believe it's God's word. Or I don't know. Or yes, nothing changes. Yeah, so whether somebody says yes, no, or I don't know, there's only three answers. Yes, I think it's God's inspired word. No, it isn't. Or I don't know. The follow-up question is, what kind of an investigation have you conducted? If I ask you, you know, tell me about that car. Do you want to buy this car? I mean, you might want to test drive it. You might want to look under the hood. You might want to even ask a buddy about it. You might want to do some sort of an investigation. Is this not at least worth the value of a car that we would investigate? I mean, that's some claim. Is it God's inspired word? If it's God's inspired word, then it deserves to be honored as such. But to just say, I don't know, and you could say to somebody, you seem like a thinking person, you seem like somebody who would walk through these things carefully and challenge them to that, and see if you can't get that wheel spinning a little bit. I said yes, but I think in the past, I've had people answer in different ways, and if they say yes, then have you read it? Have you looked at it? But no where I don't know. Have you looked at it? Have you examined it? Would you like to look at it? You know, and sometimes people, they just never had the God's word presented to them like that, you know?

Speaker 2:
[80:14] Yeah, absolutely. I think it's a wise thing. Like if I'm doing evangelism and I speak with somebody, and let's say like they're an atheist, I think one of the questions I like to ask them just to kind of get their gear spinning is like, well, why do you think we die? Why do we die? You know, because their worldview operates in such a way where they can't really make sense of death. Because an evolutionary model or a worldview that supports the increasing ness of the progress of man can't account for life coming from non-life and then that life decaying. It doesn't make sense. Why would life come from non-life just to die? And so in their worldview, I think people operate in such a way where they're trying to avoid thinking about the inevitable mortality, especially for the person who's goes when talking about God's inspired word saying mainly from that agnostic atheistic point of view. No, I've never I've never read it or considered it. I think they're constantly trying to do things to avoid thinking about their own mortality. And I think what's beautiful about the Bible and God's word is it confronts you with mortality within the first three chapters. Yeah, you know what I mean? It tells you, well, this is why you die. And then extrapolates further, well, because the wages of sin is death, right? Since you're all sinners, we are all sinners, we all die. But the beautiful thing is the gospel, you know, so that's wonderful. I love that. So you just all of a sudden, you just destroyed the Bible like you ingested it. And the Lord saved your soul.

Speaker 4:
[81:51] Yeah, so I couldn't get enough of it, but it took another Christian who his son played soccer with my son. It was the end of their senior year. So these boys are about to go off to college. And we're at the last barbecue. It was like a going away party for these guys. And this man was an elder in his church. And he just turned to me, and I knew he was different. I knew he was a sweetheart. I knew he was he wasn't like the rest of us. Your nutty parents. He would stand off to the side and he could just enjoy the game. And he just said to me, he said, when you die, where are you going and why? And just just Ray Comfort. And I had been reading the Bible for a few months. And I started to say, well, I think I've been and I just said, wait a minute. God's word says I'm going to heaven because I believe in Jesus. And it was in that moment I realized that I was that I was saved. And then he recommended a church to me. So the cousin who had moved next door to me, when I said I believe the Bible is God's inspired word, almost like Jesus, he just said to me, you're not far from the Kingdom of God. And then this guy says to me, he says, you know, he says, there's a solid Bible believing church in your town, in Port Jeff, and he recommended to me this church that I'm sitting in the office of right now. And so I come to this church, my wife says, I've always wanted for you to worship with me. She says, let's, we made the agreement, we would go to this Baptistic non-denominational church one Sunday, and then I'll go with her to the Catholic Church, because now I'm hungry. And so we made this agreement, and we come here in week one, and I see a couple things. I see a man standing in a pulpit holding just a Bible, not a magazine, not a book, just a Bible, and just saying what it says, and explaining what it says. And it was the bomb my soul needed. Then things get even more amazing. I find out in Fellowship that the pastor's dad, he grew up in upstate New York with a Presbyterian mom and a Jehovah's Witness dad. Whoa. And so he was Christian his whole life. He had the choice to go to both, and he preferred the Christian church. And at the end of dad's life, he actually got converted and became a Christian. But I knew, I felt, I have someone who understands a little bit of where I'm coming from, and that's just God's providence. Yeah. Because I could have gone to dozens of other churches. I had other Christians speaking into my life at this point, and I was pointed here. And I said to my wife after week one, I said Catholic Church next week, and she goes, no, she goes, I'm good going here again. And that was it. That was it. We started coming. I'll go back a little bit 20 years prior, when I walked away, I found out that my mother also walked away at the same exact time.

Speaker 2:
[85:10] Whoa.

Speaker 4:
[85:11] So despite the fact that I had lost my faith in the organization and thought that I was going to be shunned by my own family, my mom was out of it too.

Speaker 2:
[85:21] I was just wondering in my head, I was like, I wonder what his mom's doing now.

Speaker 4:
[85:26] My siblings never really belonged other than just culturally. They never got baptized like I did. Dad never got baptized. Mom now comes to my church. So that gentleman who asked me where I'm going when I die, he started a discipleship program with me. He started to just come over the house after work. He was an attorney. He came over the house. He studied with me. My next door neighbor joined him. My wife would serve us and then she would sit down. My son would come home from college. He would sit down. My other boy would come home from La Crosse practice. He'd sit down. Mom would sit down. Before we knew it, the whole family got saved. My older boy is now a pastor of a church in the mountains of North Carolina. So my son Jimmy, he ended up going to Elon University. He gets saved in the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. He goes to Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary and became a pastor himself. First, he was part of a church plant to Halifax, Nova Scotia, Port City Church up there. Now he's part of Gateway Church in Waynesville, not part of the big Gateway Church, but Gateway Church of Waynesville, North Carolina, and he's the associate pastor there. And my younger guy is in the Coast Guard, and he's in Clearwater, flying on helicopters, and he's an evangelist in the Coast Guard. He goes to a church, I'll think of the name of it in a minute, in Clearwater, and my older guy met his wife in college, and she's a Christian girl from Tennessee, and my younger guy ends up marrying her younger sister. Whoa. Yeah. So the two brothers are married to the two sisters.

Speaker 2:
[87:21] Wow.

Speaker 4:
[87:22] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[87:23] Man, what a story of God's grace. That is amazing, man. Give me the goose bumps just talking about it, how the Lord works. I mean, he had everything lined up for you perfectly for a reason and for a purpose. There was nothing meaningless in your life. You know what I mean?

Speaker 4:
[87:41] The brother who came to my house, this guy, Gene, who was the attorney who shared with me, he says, I had the most profound dream before I came to your house for the first time. He says, I was walking up to this dark home. He says, and as I stepped in, a light went on and I walked into another room and a light went on. I go into another room and a light went on. He says, I've realized with about three or four years later, when about six or seven of your family members had been baptized, was your family coming to Christ from darkness to light.

Speaker 2:
[88:12] That is amazing. I love that so much. That is so cool. Praise God. I can just say, all I can say is praise God. The way the Lord works is phenomenal. There's people, the power of the gospel. You and your household, brother, you and your household, and we would both say that doesn't mean babies, but that's just a little jab there for any of us. We still love you. But oh my goodness. This is great. This is a wonderful place to end this episode. I can't wait for the next one that we're going to get into going over some apologetics. But again, real quickly, tell everyone where they can find your church, if they want to look up any more information, where they can find you. Say they're in New York and they're a Jehovah's Witness right now, and they're by you. How can they get connected with you?

Speaker 4:
[88:58] Yeah, so I do have a ministry to Jehovah's Witnesses. And so I have now, this church has become like a cult whispering church. We have now, like I said, former Mormons, former Hebrew Israelite and former Jehovah's Witnesses. And so please reach out to me. Anything you sent to me would be held confidential. I understand the risks of losing your family and losing your friends. And being ostracized by your culture. I am just here for you to answer questions, to guide you, to lovingly show you God's Word. And so my email is pastorjasonathvc.church. pastorjasonathvc.church. The church's website is www.harborviewchristian.church. www.harborviewchristian.church. And we are a non-denominational, reformed Christian church, right in the heart of Port Jefferson Village, 315 East Main Street. We're in a building that was built in 1855. And we just preach God's Word every week from the pulpit, like has been done here for 171 years. So we're just not going to let that legacy end with us.

Speaker 2:
[90:21] Praise God. Thank you so much for your testimony today. Jason, also guys, if you feel so led to partner with us, you can always go to the cultishshow.com. You can partner with us to donate one time or monthly. Without your support, we wouldn't be able to do this, right? So thank you for helping us expose the key of the cult with the power of the gospel. If you want to wear merch as well, you can go to shopcultish.com. There's a couple of new designs that we've got thrown up there as of late, which I have some more coming that I am working on. But guys, until next time, this next episode, we're going to deal with apologetics. How to speak to your Jehovah's Witness neighbors and how to have a reasonable defense for the hope that is within you. So please don't miss the next episode as well. We'll catch you next time as we enter into the Kingdom of the Cults. Talk to you soon.