Amber Scorah: Leaving the Jehovah's Witnesses

thank you Ambrose Cora is the author of the moving memoir leaving the witness which details her experience growing up as jehovah's witness moving to China to become a missionary coming and coming to question the beliefs that she had been taught and eventually leaving that religion after suffering the tragic loss of her three-month-old son amber became a parental leave advocate bringing this issue to the forefront of the 2016 presidential campaign she also penned an op-ed in the New York Times entitled surviving the death of my son after the death of my faith you may have heard her on NPR's fresh air with Terry Gross or on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah or even on FFRF radio show and podcast Oprah Magazine said that leaving the witness is one of the best books of summer and the New York Times called it one of 12 new books to watch amber is a Canadian writer living in Brooklyn New York she's been published in The New York Times USA Today Gotham Escom The Globe and Mail and believer magazine she's also recently delivered a TED talk we invited amber here to speak today because we were blown away by her memoir the poignancy of her writing and her intellectual integrity of course we have copies of her books for sale at the front tables if there are any left and amber will be signing them and in the ballroom at 5:00 p.m. after representative Mark Polk hands talk please join me in welcoming amber score [Applause] first of all I have to say it is amazing to be here because I was raised to Jehovah's Witness and women were never allowed to give talks so first time so it's my guess that probably everyone in this room has either known intro vows witness or been preached to by one I've heard enough to raise hands but so many people I've noticed don't they feel like they don't really understand what Jehovah's Witnesses are about why there isn't more information from ex members out there so I thought I'd share a little bit about that first so Jehovah's Witnesses fly under the greater cultural radar and a large part because of the way that their own culture is set up as the Jehovah's Witness you're raised or if you convert later in life which is rare but happens taught to believe that you have to keep separate from the world so this is why Jehovah's Witnesses don't vote they don't get involved in charity work they don't get too close to people who are what they consider worldly or non Jehovah's Witnesses anyone who's worldly is considered part of Satan's world and therefore bad association growing up as a Jehovah's Witness from a very young age this meant that I was just taught that I was different and this was reinforced by many of the arbitrary thing was that Jehovah's Witnesses pull out of the Bible and pronounce is necessary for salvation you may have heard that they don't allow people to take blood transfusions so that would mean that if you ever were in a medical emergency you would have to accept death over this life-saving medical treatment but it also meant for a kid growing up that on hot dog day because some hot dogs at least back in the 80s when I was growing up had blood in them and so we'd have to have special we were the special hot dog eaters our moms would cook our hotdogs separately from the other kids in the school and there were other things that made us feel really different we didn't celebrate Christmas or any other holidays and we would have to sit outside the gym if there was Carol singing if someone had a birthday in our classroom then we wouldn't be able to have the cake it was all in all quite a boring childhood we couldn't date or marry anyone that was not a Jehovah's Witness and we were strongly advised not to go to college or establish any kind of career and the reason for this was is because Jehovah's Witnesses believe that the world is about to end any day and so we have to save as many people as we can before Armageddon so you don't see many books by people like me who leave the religion first of all because none of us realize that we can actually write because we're always taught not to do anything except preach but also because the leaders strongly forbid anyone from airing the dirty laundry of the organization so this will apply to very minor issues for example if say you were in a congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses and someone cheated you out of some money in a business deal you were discouraged from taking them to court and it extended to also very serious issues such as child sexual abuse in the congregation's if a child if there was an accusation that a child was molested they parents would be discouraged from going to the police and they would be told that it would be better to handle this matter internally in the corrugations and often it wasn't the idea behind this was that the most important thing was that God's chosen people be protected they didn't want God to look bad essentially of course you might think when a person leaves a religion like me well then you're no longer bound by this rule to not speak about the religion or criticize it in any way right but what happens when you leave the Jehovah's Witnesses is that you are swiftly shunned and that is quite a severe punishment for people who as I mentioned are taught to build their life around this organization all of your friends and usually all of your family are witnesses as well and therefore as a result you have very few ties in the real world now this shunning is bad enough but if a person takes it one step further and speaks out about the organization say in a book or in any other public way whether be to someone on the inside or outside that person is labeled an apostate now of course we know this is a very loaded word and it means different things to different people but as the jehovah's witness the term apostate is a very scary brand to receive apostasy in our congregations in our literature according to our leaders was the one sin that God would never forget forgive it was worse on the scale of sin than being a murderer or a child abuser because it was the one thing that God would not forgive every week at our meetings that I intended my whole life and in our literature apostates like me now would be described in very terrifying terms these are people who were mentally diseased criminals dogs that had returned to their own vomit lower than a snake with characteristics like the devil apostates were said to be like gangrene that needed to be swiftly amputated identity is a weird thing even myself when I wrote my book I had already been out of the religion around that time around eight years and I didn't believe in it anymore but the power of a community last longer sometimes than even a belief and even after you've left a community the way that your old community even if they don't speak to you anymore looks at you it has a big effect on you the last thing that I wanted to be was this horrible apostate character that I had been warned about I didn't want to be seen that way by people I had loved but yet obviously I got over it Here I am out in satan's worlds I don't think I'm mentally diseased but you be the judge so how did I get here well the path to finding my freedom was a weird one it was I was in one of the most restricted restrictive countries in the world China when I was in my 20s after spending years knocking on doors in my home city event for Canada - not much results you all know what you do when a Jehovah's Witness calls so I blame all of you but I decided I was gonna get out of there I was gonna learn Mandarin Chinese and travel to China to preach China was the one place or one of the places that had not yet received a witness because religion for the large part as we know is illegal there so Jehovah's Witnesses hadn't really preached there either I wanted to give these people who had never had a chance to convert before a chance to survive Armageddon and I'm being killed for being non-believers now ironically it was in China that for the first time in my life I had a little bit of freedom which I realized should have probably been the first sign that something was wrong because most people do not go to China and feel more free but it was different for me because at home my life revolves were my religion like week in week out we had study and meetings and all of my friends were witnesses and we were so busy we didn't even really have time to think in China because the work was done underground being illegal the structure was not there there wasn't so many meetings and to preach there wasn't other brothers and sisters that I would go out with as I did at home we were given instructions when we arrived in China of how to do our work and then basically left on our own to be Jehovah's Witnesses there now you have to understand that though I had a bit of freedom I mean it was it did feel exciting but obviously there was something latent to me that there was some you know attending to gravitating to this kind of freedom but my aim at first was to preach I was a true believer I took the mission seriously but that too looked different because back at home as I said witnesses didn't really make friends with people on the outside but in China that was how we did our work we would first make friends with people and sometimes for a long time get to know them on a sort of casual basis but what we were really doing was vetting them to see if they were members of the Communist Party or if they were safe enough to reveal our real reason for wanting to be their friends often that vetting process took a long time because you were trying to act natural and you know bringing in the Bible you know just dropping the Bible in conversation at the best of times it's not really like a normal thing to do but in China it's super weird but the byproduct of this was that for the first time my life I had started to make some worldly friends for the first time and get to know people who weren't Jo's Witnesses on a pretty intimate level preaching to in a language like Mandarin was different but after a few years when I really knew enough Chinese to carry on conversations and conduct these Bible studies that we would do in Mandarin you know I would sit across from these Chinese students that I had teaching them this truth that I had held as my firm faith for my whole life and it was almost as if for the first time using this new language that almost required you to excavate your mind in order to speak I could hear what I was saying I was sitting across from these people with thousands of years of cultural history and wisdom and telling them to trade it in for my 100 or so year old new American religion and it started to feel a little crazy eventually the mild disorientation of being in this new culture and speaking this language so different than my own opened up cracks in my faith and the physical distance from my community gave me a mental break from the constant meetings and indoctrination slowly a worldly friendship I had begun to engage in with a client at my workplace ended up with me questioning everything that I had been raised with and eventually leaving the religion there are a lot of juicy details to that story but I that's better for a book than a talk now a lot of people who have never been religious wonder why anyone any reasonably intelligent person would stay in a group like this that is so obviously to people on the outside wrong or culty even so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna give you the inside scoop on cults so here's the thing no one who is in occults ever thinks they're in a cult you think you're living your best life and I have to say that in some ways it is a great life I mean you having the answers to all of life's disturbing questions is really relaxing you have no angst you don't worry about climate change you don't have to have a retirement fund the world is ending Armageddon God is gonna solve all of those problems plus you have many wonderful friends and your family in it with you and you have this really warm community and that's something that is hard to imagine stepping outside of for most of us to you're constantly told how awful people's lives are on the outside and because you're only allowed to be close with people on the inside you have no way of verifying otherwise and of course the world can be quite a scary place like especially right now so it's an easy message to sell of course you meet nice people at work and on the street and such but you know that they are going to die it over again in so how great can that be yeah it isn't until you start to try to leave a cult that you realize you might be in a cult when the people in your organization and family members immediately shun you for questioning even one of the teachings from the leaders which teachings themselves have changed over the years you know that you might be in some sort of cult later after I left the religion I found stronger proof that something was off the first boyfriend I had when I left China and moved to New York he had a loft in Brooklyn and one winter we just watched every documentary on YouTube about cults and cult members who had laughs I don't know why he did that I think back now I think maybe I was a little bit weird and he was it was a message he was trying to help me normal lives but I was surprised as I watched because every cult every cult member that was interviewed after the disintegration of their belief system from the most extreme Jonestown people dying Jim Jones to the less extreme where they didn't mandate death well these people's story was exactly my story entirely in different belief systems but the same systems in place to keep people in my lines of reasoning my thought patterns my thought blocking the us versus them black versus white thinking all the things that we have been trained to do to stay in the religion to save our lives were the same things that people in these cults have been trained to do and while the witnesses are not as Extreme as some groups they do mandate that people die rather than take life-saving blood transfusions so while they're not drinking kool-aid they are mandating death for no reason which to me is not that different there was more I could go on but I won't but the point being it takes a lot of deprogramming to realize that the religion you were raised with as truth is simply a mythology something passed down in my case from generation to generation something that started with somewhat good intentions perhaps but morphed to enable the survival and the expansion of the group to consolidate the power of the organization to the point that everything else was second place and while many of the individuals in my old organization were loving humane wonderful people it's like the organization itself becomes a machine with traits that are cold and inhumane and just wrong at times and then this rubs off on to the people this seems to be a pattern and I have noticed in many just institutions no is there some cautionary tale and my story something I've learned having been on both sides of the fence here being very religious and now being not religious well I could say a few things even given all that I have lost which is family friends my purpose in life you know a lot of time that I could have used to do other things or pursue other things I've never once regretted waking up and leaving mmm and I've never heard any other ex-jehovah's witness or other really ex religious person who's been in a group like this saying anything different I know people who have lost their own grown children to the religion they taught them this religion the kids grew up that parents realized oh this is not the truth they left and now their own children won't speak to them because they think of them as an apostate I know people have lost their livelihood everything and yet they're still so grateful to be out I think that's really to me speaks to the value of having freedom of having the mental freedom to be who one is I think it in my own life I can see that this is just such a human need and a human right really now that said on the other side now that I shed one a very controlling belief system it's a lot easier for me to see cult enos everywhere I look I can't even take a yoga class without being like are you the leader and I'm the follower but the fact is we are all of us subject to indoctrination of some form whether we realize it or not and obviously some belief systems are more extreme than others but we all have blind spots we're born into a family and a culture that teaches us certain values and ideals right from birth and all of us have embedded ideas about the way that life should look or how the world should be it could be anything from what's normal that we you know get go to college get married have children live in a house or that we elect a president that looks a certain way aka a white man we're part of communities we're part of political parties we're human beings so we're tribal by nature and while groups we need them we need communities we also have to be aware of our tendency towards siloed thinking we have a tendency to align with our group we'd like to be around people who think the way we think we other people who are different we cancel people whose opinions we don't like it's happening more and more this is most obvious in the religious realm but it's also the case in the political realm and social circles on the Internet in scientific communities and any other realm where people identify with a way of thinking this is why cults exist there just to me a manifestation of the extreme end of something that is in us all it's a continuum and I say all this to say that I've learned that I have to check my own thinking to ensure that I'm not succumbing to my own cult-like tendencies that are part of me as a human being and how do we do this I have no idea but I do have some ideas just from my own experience I think it's important to make friends with people who don't think like us and that may sound trite but in my story if you remember or I gave you a few details but what made it possible for me to leave was that I did open myself up to a close relationship with someone that was the other I didn't believe everything that he told me he believed and I still don't but the differences between us were what made it possible for me to see that not everything I had been taught to believe by my culture was absolute truth even if it had seemed to add up allowing myself to get close to someone so different than me was what me see that and it wasn't always pleasant to see those things but I'm really grateful that I didn't back away or dismiss him also I think there's another thing to think about is that I find for myself it's really easy for me to get into Twitter arguments with people on the other side but I think it's much easier to argue and be polarized on Twitter but if you have a relationship with someone you're much more inclined to challenge each other in meaningful ways it goes both ways so I think ultimately we need each other we're social creatures but we need our differences too I've also learned this that when we feel we're really sure that we're right that's always a sign that to me that I need to look deeper and question my strongest assumptions to not be dogmatic about anything it doesn't mean that we're not right but we have to be open to the possibility that what we hold dear is not 100 percent true or right all of the time life is complicated and finally never let your identity to be identity be too hijacked by a group or a belief I think it's really important to step outside our comfort zone and put ourselves in positions that make us feel off kilter because that's when we get opened up and that's when we learn new things I say to this day that if I had not gone to China I would most definitely still be a Jehovah's Witness but that's probably the only person who's ever said that in the history of man okay so there's one PostScript to my story which was mentioned in the introduction and this is not really exactly about religion but it is kind of about my story of religion and that is that seven years after I left my religion I experienced a great tragedy my child who was almost four months old Carl died on his first day in child care now I raise this because many people who know my religious background have asked me whether this kind of terrible like unbearable loss made me want to go back to religion and I think it's an interesting question so just to set the framework for where I was when I gave birth to my son I had already after seven years overcome a lot of obstacles by the time he came along it hadn't been easy to start a new life outside my religion but the one thing that I had not prepared myself for post religion was a tragedy like this I hadn't thought about what it would be like to experience loss without faith I don't think anyone can really be prepared for the loss of a child but it blindsided me I think that I thought on some level that there was like some quota of difficulties that you would go through in your life and that after so much loss already that I had experienced and so much pain that now everything somehow the universe would stretch out before me and be good and kind and just and nothing bad would happen but of course it's not that orderly when my son died I was faced with an entirely foreign landscape death without hope of an afterlife grief without the comfort of religion I say this because I knew grief with religion my father had died when I was 18 when I was at your home as witness and I was sad but I wasn't that sad because I was certain that one day I would see him again in paradise religion was born for things like this for death for tragedy it's the ultimate escape from it my faith I realized now looking back had acted as a buffer to many of these very difficult things of being human the more devastating emotions of what we had to experience in life and now when I lost my son without that faith I just experienced his death as nothingness a child so full of promise health and energy and the future just vanished it was a bomb beyond my ability to understand or to accept and it was the ultimate test for someone who had once had belief so when people asked if I was tempted to go back to my religion I could honestly say that if belief were a choice there are definitely times where I would have chosen it because as I said it was comforting to just turn off the emotions I didn't want to feel to just believe that there was something else that would resolve them for me but the truth was is that there was now no believing what I now knew to be a myth at best a lie at worst and trying to believe something that you know to be false is not comforting but let me tell you what I discovered about grief without religion it has some surprising byproducts I now had no choice but to live with the reality of loss to deal with what was in front of me at first what was in front of me was just utter darkness on every level but once you have been that close to death especially that kind of death the death of a child something else happens when you can't escape it by thinking about paradise or heaven or somewhere else and that is that you become deeply attuned and deeply grateful to life in the midst of this kind of grief so it's so all-encompassing where you have no escape you're forced to experience an even deeper pain but you also become more clear eyed about life and I found that I started to see like to my utter surprise that there were glimpses of beautiful things in this suffering some of those things were the memories I had of my son which you know when you look after a newborn baby for almost four months you as a mother I spent every minute with him and they the memories became just seared in mind and they were so meaningful and so beautiful and the other thing that I encountered and focus on and notice was the depth of care and compassion and empathy that came from the fellow human beings around me people that were friends and people that I didn't know alike you don't see this every day your crowd I'm from New York so like you know I use the analogy of your crowded in a subway and everyone's a jerk you get cut off by annoying drivers where you drive cars it's easy to forget that we all as human beings possess this deep humanity but when I was in such great great pain so many people both strangers and friends alike got me through by showing me love in many ways and it was the strangest thing to experience such an awful thing and yet be touched by beauty and love now time has gone by and without the escape of belief I've learned more I've learned how to live with everyone's worst nightmare and I'm still alive which sometimes feels like a feat and I've learned how patience and endurance and how to tolerate devastating feelings because that's what living without your child requires someone once told me that great grief is like a character test and it does feel like that it takes all my energy not to devolve into anger and jealousy and feelings of why me but since I do not believe that my son is out there somewhere or will come back to me it's meant that I've kept him alive in ways in the here and now and one way I did that was becoming an activist for paid parental leave and through this work I found that death without hope didn't have to be death without faith and how so it's because activism can be an act of faith a faith that when there are problems that we as human beings can find ways to solve them and a faith that others would join me in a fight for what was right and they did in my own religion old religion we were taught not to put our faith in man but if humankind is all we have or at least all that's available to us at this time perhaps this faith that we can change the world is not misplaced that's what I've learned and I'm not willing to give up hope yet I think many of us have all suffered law all of us have suffered loss and we can relate to this I don't have all the answers now but I can say that I appreciate the deep mystery of it all and I feel the magic of life all around me and this power of our shared humanity and I feel deep gratitude and it's been very lovely to be here with all of you today thank you [Applause]

Channel: FFRF

Views: 36,919

Keywords: Amber Scorah, Amber Scorah leaving the witness, Jehovah's Witnesses, Leaving the Witness, jehovah's witnesses cult, the jehovah's witnesses, Freedom From Religion Foundation, FFRF, Atheist, Atheism, missionary in china, FFRF Convention

Id: HqisFY3qJR0

Length: 30min 35sec (1835 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 22 2019