Why jehovahs witnesses are right

One of the sad things about our email conversation is that my Jehovah's Witness friend rarely asked me a follow-up question. He would ask me a question and I would answer. Without responding to what I wrote either to ask for clarification or rebut what I wrote, he would then ask a question on a different topic.

Thus, we had very few real "conversations" in which we discussed anything in-depth. But they do not vote in elections , serve in the military or salute the flag. Such acts, they believe, compromise their primary loyalty to God. However, they make an easy target for governments looking for internal enemies, as they refuse to bow down to government symbols.

Through subsequent legal battles in the s and s, Jehovah Witnesses helped expand safeguards for religious liberty and freedom of conscience both in the United States and Europe. Many Witnesses fled to neighboring Mozambique, where they were held in internment camps. The Russian Supreme Court maintains that the country needs to be protected from disloyal religious fanatics.

So after that had happened - I was so naive, I didn't even really know what had happened. But he was a bit older and more experienced.

And he knew that that would cross the line. A lot of people say, why would you confess? You could've just not told anyone. But we were so - we had been taught, for our whole lives, that God could see everything we did and that if we crossed a line into immorality and we hid it, it was much worse than even the immorality itself and that, when Armageddon came, we'd be killed for that, for hiding those acts that we had done - performed and made ourselves unclean.

So the way to overcome this sin you had committed was to tell the elders in the congregation. The elders were older men who were appointed to basically shepherd the flock.

So they looked after giving talks and sort of, like, administrative matters in the congregation. But also, one of their main roles was to basically form a committee anytime any sin was committed, hear what the sinner had done and then decide - basically, judge the sinner - as to whether they were - they could stay in the congregation or whether the sin was severe enough or the person unrepentant enough that they had to be kicked out or disfellowshipped from the congregation.

But the second time, after you had actually had sex with your boyfriend, you were apparently not repentant enough and you were disfellowshipped. You're around 18 years old at the time. What did it mean to be disfellowshipped? And what happens, effectively, is that, when the elders determined that you were not repentant enough - this type of thing - they would make an announcement at the congregation meeting.

They would go to the platform, stand at the podium and just say, Amber Scorah has been disfellowshipped. They wouldn't say why. But it was an announcement to let everyone know that they had to stop associating with you, even saying a greeting to you. So what that effectively meant was that you lost your contact with your entire community - including your own family. They had to also abide by the disfellowshipping. And the way to get back - of course, if you wanted to get back, they left the door open.

But the means of doing that was that, while you were disfellowshipped, you had to show your repentance by attending all the meetings, being very regular in showing up at the kingdom hall. However, no one was allowed to talk to you. And you sat in the back row while the meeting was on and left right - as soon as it was over so that no one would have to talk to you. You went to the funeral, but you had to sit in the back row.

Now, your father had strayed himself. He had become an alcoholic, which I'm sure is not smiled on by Jehovah's Witnesses. So considering that he had strayed himself and that you were sitting in the back row, because you weren't allowed to be an active participant in the funeral or in the mourning process, what was it like for you to be shunned like that at your own father's funeral?

But one thing you have to understand is that when you are a true believer in a organization in a highly controlled environment like this, everything that happens to you you agree with. You think that it's deserved. So when I sat there in the back row, I knew that I - it was of my own doing. I was the one that had put myself into this position because I had been immoral. It was strange, though. My dad's best friend gave the prayer.

And after that day, after the funeral when my father died, it just gave me more impetus to want to go back to the faith because I knew that the only way I would see him again was if I were a Jehovah's Witness who survived Armageddon because after Armageddon, the faithful would be resurrected to Earth, in our beliefs. If you're just joining us, my guest is Amber Scorah. So after having a boyfriend and having sex with him, you ended up being shunned by your religion. You got back into the faith.

And then you got married to somebody who you did not feel passionate about, but you married. And within the faith, the man has a kind of higher position in the marriage than the woman does. So what powers are given to a man in the marriage that the woman does not have? So there's sort of a hierarchy that the Jehovah's Witnesses draw from the Bible, where God is in first place. Jesus is in second place. The husband is in third place.

And then the wife comes last. So what that meant in my own marriage was not that much. It was - my husband was kind of a passive guy. He wasn't someone who wielded his authority in a harsh way. But what it meant was that in the congregation, he was the one that sort of had privileges.

All the men were the ones who did the teaching. They were sort of - the men were the ones who - they called it, like, the captain of the ship of the family. So if a man decided that, you know, you were going to do something, the family was going to do something. The woman - it wasn't her place to argue with it.

It was her place to support him. I think, by nature, I have kind of a strong personality. So I come from a line of women with strong personalities. And in fact, my grandmother was the one who became the first Jehovah's Witness in our family.

And the only reason she converted was because her husband wanted to. And she agreed to the - study with the Witnesses on the condition that she was only doing it to prove them wrong. Of course, they ended up being the one to convince her.

But yeah. I was definitely not the most submissive of Jehovah's Witness women. GROSS: You wanted to, like, travel and live in other places because you're not allowed to divorce if you're a Witness. And the marriage wasn't going well. But you figured, at least if you'd, like, change scenes and go to a different place, your life would be more interesting. So you lived in Taiwan for a while, then moved to China - did missionary work there.

And you write about how you felt more freedom in China - even though China was a repressive society, you felt more freedom there than you did in Canada. And that was, in part, because the religion was banned, and therefore, you had to operate underground. So how did being a missionary for a banned religion in China and having to work underground make you feel more free? We studied our Bibles all the time.

We went to preaching multiple times a week. And all of our free time - if we did have some, you know, association with anyone - it would be with others Jehovah's Witnesses for congregational activities. Moving to China, to my surprise - I knew things would be different there because our religion was illegal, therefore done underground. But in China - when I got there, it was kind of amazing to discover that there was only one meeting a week, held in a secret location.

And other than that, you were kind of on your own. You were left to your own devices to arrange how you were going to do your preaching work. You didn't really see other Jehovah's Witnesses that much because the city was huge and there were very few Jehovah's Witnesses there.

So effectively, what that meant for our preaching was that - whereas in Canada, we would go to a preaching group, and a brother would assign us who we were working with. And he'd give us a territory map, and we'd go and knock on the doors.

Well, in China, you just woke up in the morning and had to figure out how you were going to find people to talk to. Now, given that you're in a country where your activities were illegal, it didn't mean that you could just go out and start preaching to people. You had to first make friends with people and get to know them before you ever brought up your purpose in talking to them. So what that would entail is, like, multiple meetings with people - maybe over the course of a couple months - getting to know them in order to know whether they were safe.

And by safe, I mean they didn't have any affiliation with the Chinese Communist Party. Or they didn't have family members who worked for the government. Or if they didn't seem like people who were kind of going to be anti-religion or sort of wonder what you were doing there. And why that felt very free for me was that, for the first time in my life, I didn't have a really structured schedule.

And I had the freedom to develop relationships with people outside the parameters I was used to. GROSS: So when you did bring up, like, your faith with somebody you'd befriended in China and you started talking to them about it, what did they find most unusual, most baffling about what you were telling them?

It was all, for the most part, quite new to them. So this Jehovah's Witness doctrine that I was teaching them was, basically, their first introduction. And for a while, it was great because to have this kind of, like - as a Jehovah's Witness, to have this kind of fresh blood, where nobody had any prejudice against anything that I was saying, was really encouraging and satisfying.

But what had started to happen the longer I was there, you know, I was studying with them in their language. It wasn't the language of my own and, you know, how I had learned, how I had been indoctrinated.

It wasn't my own language. I was sort of hearing what I was teaching, almost for the first time, through their ears. And while Chinese people on the whole are so hospitable and respectful - especially to a teacher because, culturally, you know, a student does not question a teacher. So while they were really, like, great students - they would answer the questions, they would look up the Scriptures - over time, I did start to notice that - just, like, a shift in their expression would tell me that some of the things I was saying sounded kind of crazy to them.

And then over time even longer, that feeling that I got from experiencing their experience of my religion started to morph for me, too, to a point where I started to almost feel embarrassed as I sat across from them because the more I got to know and learn about Chinese culture from them and from the other friends that I met in China, the more I realized, like, their culture had thousands of years of rich wisdom and cultural tradition and history.

And here I was across the table, coming here, this person from the West, telling them to, you know, throw all that away in favor of this, you know, hundred-or-so-year-old, new American religion.

And it started to put - sort of skew my perspective. And it was one of the factors that initially started to, I think, create fertile ground for me to start to question what I had been taught myself in the first place.

Her new memoir is called "Leaving The Witness. Let's get back to my interview with Amber Scorah, author of the new memoir "Leaving The Witness," about her life as a third-generation Jehovah's Witness. In her hometown, Vancouver, Canada, she knocked on doors trying to convert people, warning them that Armageddon was imminent.

Then she became a missionary in China, where the religion is outlawed. There she began to question her faith. She's since left the Witnesses and started a new life in New York.

When you're raised in a really, highly controlled group like this, a fundamentalist group, it takes a lot to unravel and unpick all of the beliefs and - because so much of your identity is wrapped up in it.

A lot of people think it's just like, one day you wake up, and you're like, oh, my goodness, I had this epiphany. It's not the truth. But there were things along the way that started to, like, bother me and that started to feel wrong - things that I hadn't seen before. Now, leaving your husband basically meant that you were leaving the faith because you're not allowed to divorce. So was leaving your husband a way of leaving the faith without officially saying, I'm leaving the faith? It's very tightknit.

And I was also in quite a prominent position. Not that I had a position that was, like, high up in the church, but when - not everyone goes to China to be a missionary and, you know, is married to an elder. Also, I realized a lot more after leaving that there were things in this group that were cult-like. But at the time, I wasn't ready to admit that. But I knew that it was wrong, and I knew I had to get out of it.

It's hard to explain how much of a hold the beliefs have on you because even if I had a couple of doubts, I still believed the rest of it. So it was almost like - I think I felt propelled towards creating some kind of ending. And when you're in a group that the ultimate ending is apocalypse, Armageddon, I think in some ways that's the only kind of ending you know, that you have to just blow everything up in order to start over again.

And it worked. But I wouldn't have been ultimately shunned from the faith just for ending my marriage; I probably would have gotten disfellowshipped, but I could have clawed my way back in as I had before. But what ultimately led to the complete ostracization was the fact that people became aware that I was having doubts about the faith. And what that is considered as in Jehovah's Witnesses is apostasy, which is essentially believing and then not believing and is the actual worst sin a person can commit.

It's worse than being a murderer or a child abuser because that's the one sin that God will not forgive. GROSS: So when your religion told you this is the end, and everybody who was your family and friends within the religion knew that they could no longer communicate with you, what were you left with?

You were now a single woman living in an authoritarian country, China. You were there to preach your faith you were no longer a part of. So you basically lost everything.