Okay, 3, 2, 1. Hi, this is William Ramsey. Welcome to William Ramsey Investigates on tonight's show. I have a very special guest. I'm really delighted that he agreed to tell his story. His name is Michael Shemwell, and he operates the shunned podcast, and also the website, ThisJWLife.com. And he is a former member of the jehovah's witnesses and he is

kindly agreed to kind of tell his story and his experiences he no longer is a member but to tell

how he kind of passed through this organization with a lot of interesting doctrines so michael are are you there? Yes, sure am. Glad to be here. Thank you. Awesome. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for being here. So maybe what we can do to just get started is talk a little bit about your background and your experiences in Jehovah's Witnesses. We might abbreviate that to J.W., J. Dub, but Jehovah's Witnesses.

So if you could just tell a little bit about yourself, that would be great.

All right, so let's see. Well, I guess it all started.

I'm going to take you way back when I was born.

You know, I was born into what I guess everyone would just consider a normal family.

I mean, you know, we celebrated holidays, normal Christian family anyway.

We celebrated holidays.

Weren't particularly religious, but just had a normal family life.

I went to school.

I played with my friends.

I had some aunts and uncles around and some cousins, and we played with them. It's just, you know, the typical childhood.

But when I was about eight or nine, my parents had, my dad, I think he lost his job. And so they had a little bit of a

financial setback. So they had to move and they moved to a different area of town. Well, they just

happened to move next to Jehovah's Witnesses. So we literally through a chance real estate happening,

ended up right next door to a family of witnesses.

And my mom and the woman next door really hit it off.

And so my mom started studying with the lady next door.

So witnesses have their own publications.

My mom had a lot of questions about the Bible.

And Jehovah's witnesses have an answer for just about anything.

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