When I was only a few weeks in the cult, we had a sermon about the lost day.
The sermon spoke about the time God backed up time to give Hezekiah a sign and made the sun stand still for Joshua.
The sermon then cited some “evidence” of NASA scientists finding a lost day in history to “prove” that these stories were true.
It seemed fishy to me so I looked up the “evidence” after service and discovered that the story was false.
I brought it up to my team leader, who then reported it to the missionary overseeing the church.
He sat me down and gave me a long lecture about faith. The bottom line was, “If God says it’s true then it’s true.” I was to believe that the fact checkers online were wrong because God said the story was legit.
The answer bothered me but I didn’t want to doubt, so I swallowed it.
From then on, I suspended my critical thinking and disbelief and accepted whatever the church told me.
The reason this bothered me so much initially is that if the church were using one falsehood as “evidence,” who was to say that they weren’t using even more falsehood? All the evidence they were showing me could potentially be false, created or twisted by Christians to prove Christian narratives even if it wasn’t coming directly from the WMSCOG.
The answer had scary implications: If I were supposed to disregard fact-checking, I’d essentially have to discard all facts and evidence in favor of blindly accepting whatever the church told me. And this is something that the church did teach directly later on. Non-church books and evidence were under the control of Satan and not to be trusted. Other sources of evidence were only to be believed after passing through the filter of the church.