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    Leaving the Witness: Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life
    Unavailable
    Leaving the Witness: Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life
    Unavailable
    Leaving the Witness: Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life
    Audiobook6 hours

    Leaving the Witness: Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life

    Written by Amber Scorah

    Narrated by Amber Scorah

    4.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    A riveting memoir of losing faith and finding freedom while a covert missionary in one of the world's most restrictive countries.

    A third-generation Jehovah's Witness, Amber Scorah had devoted her life to sounding God's warning of impending Armageddon. She volunteered to take the message to China, where the preaching she did was illegal and could result in her expulsion or worse. Here, she had some distance from her community for the first time. Immersion in a foreign language and culture — and a whole new way of thinking — turned her world upside down and eventually led her to lose all that she had been sure was true.

    As a proselytizer in Shanghai, using fake names and secret codes to evade the authorities' notice, Scorah discreetly looked for targets in public parks and stores. To support herself, she found work at a Chinese language learning podcast, hiding her real purpose from her coworkers. Now with a creative outlet, getting to know worldly people for the first time, she began to understand that there were other ways of seeing the world and living a fulfilling life. When one of these relationships became an "escape hatch", Scorah's loss of faith culminated in her own personal apocalypse, the only kind of ending possible for a Jehovah's Witness.

    Shunned by family and friends as an apostate, Scorah was alone in Shanghai and thrown into a world she had known only from the periphery — with no education or support system. A coming-of-age story of a woman already in her 30s, this unforgettable memoir examines what it's like to start one's life over again with an entirely new identity. It follows Scorah to New York City, where a personal tragedy forces her to look for new ways to find meaning in the absence of religion. With compelling, spare prose, Leaving the Witness traces the bittersweet process of starting over when everything one's life was built around is gone.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateJun 4, 2019
    ISBN9781984889447
    Unavailable
    Leaving the Witness: Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life

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    Reviews for Leaving the Witness

    4.5/5

    47 ratings10 reviews

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    • 2/5
      This is a very boring book. Perhaps because it is a story of a bored woman who cheats on her husband because she was so bored. Yes, JW is a cult, founded by an occultist , they are not even real Christians. However, the author doesn't understand this. It seems she entered the cult because it was convenient and left it because she was bored. Not a decision made with sound research and questioning, and now to justify her bad choices she writes a book. Her theology and her arguments against religion in general are very weak. Skip this one!
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed the way this book was written and narrated, however it left me feeling hopeless. Why do the ex-witnesses become secular.
      Why do they denounce God?
    • 5/5
      I really appreciate your honesty and courage ❤️ Bravo !

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      I liked that I could listen to the author, herself, reading her book! I think it would have been quite the slug to have to read through. As is often the case, when Bible-based cult members WAKE UP, Amber ditched God's worth and God. JW's use only 6% of the Bible. I hope you read God's word. Hundreds of OT prophesies were revealed hundreds of years later in our Messiah, Jesus. His burial cloths were authenticated to the world in 2013, though mainstream media refused to publicize this TRUTH FOUND IN NO OTHER!
    • 4/5
      I loved hearing about Amber's time in China and the hoops she had to jump through to preach to people there. She answered a lot of questions about China for me! I also enjoyed hearing what it was like firsthand to leave a cult like the JWs. I could have done with a little less of the back and forth with Jonathan, but overall, I enjoyed the book and the audio reading was very well done.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      As with many listeners, I to was raised in a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses. So this book is deeply personal. One of the reasons that I love this book, and have listened to parts of it over and over, is that it has reaffirmed that everything that I went through with my parents and the destruction of our family unit at the hands of the Jehovah’s Witness organization, really did happen. So in many ways, this book is a book of healing for me, especially the last chapter which I have listened over and over again. What Amber so beautifully describes is the feelings of loneliness and a sense of emergence into a word in which a person exiting the Jehovah’s Witness feels very much alone. It’s a beautiful account that has left me feeling not so alone anymore and has given me a path forward to creating my own tribe, one to which I know that I truly belong.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 5/5
      I truly Loved this book. Answered many of my questions regarding religion!

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Heartbreaking and touching the way Amber tell us the story of her life through religion. I recommend it.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Vulnerable and beautiful.
      Very very real. I rarely tear up from reading or listening to a book, but this is true art and truest truth in print. Simply a great book if you ask me. It feels like it only gets better with every page actually. It is truly a privilege to be so fully invited into someones inner world in the way I felt in this book.

      There is also something to say for the author reading the book herself . (And also the Simply fantastic quality of the sound) Her narration is done with a voice that overflows of poetic intelligence and sensibility. All in all perhaps the best audiobook narration I have ever listened to. It was not ego or financial gain that spoiled it like it is when some authors “do it themselves” but should have known better.

      I don’t feel like brining up any peeves just for the sake of it. No point.

      I just hope to read more books from her in the future.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 5/5
      This book is absolutely excellent and a must listen. Having been a former witness who was able to wake up to the cult's untruths and manipulation, I was able to totally relate to all of her feelings and questions. The narration was outstanding. Amazing book!!

      1 person found this helpful