I'm Hemmant Mehta and I'm Jessica Blumpty and you're listening to the podcast for

friendly atheist.com. You can now listen to all of our episodes and see show notes at friendly atheist podcast.com.

Lloyd Evans is the founder of J.W. survey.org, a website that focuses on the problems with Jehovah's Witnesses.

For most of his life, Lloyd was a witness, but that changed not too long ago.

Now he's trying to help others leave the faith.

I've learned so much about the seedy underbelly of the religion by reading his work.

He's in Croatia right now and he woke up early for this, so thank you Lloyd.

My pleasure, thanks for having me on. for this

so thank you Lloyd.

My pleasure, thanks for having me on.

Absolutely.

So give us a little background about you.

Tell us about your childhood, growing up in the Jovas Witness Church,

how devout were you?

Oh, I was extremely devout. I believed every single word of it.

I was raised in the UK in Northern England not far from Manchester and both of my

well my father had been raised a witness from childhood. My mother had been kind of brought

into the organization through a series of tragedies really her previous

husband had died tragically in a fire and after when she became a widow she was basically loved bombed by her

Jehovah's Witness friends and this led to her becoming a witness herself despite some negative experiences in the past with the

witnesses. And so both of my parents took the religion very seriously. They raised me to as well. I can remember various. and very

serious, they raised me to as well. I can remember various

...