![leaving the witness leaving the witness](https://images.complex.com/complex/image/upload/t_featured_image/wwhxws36mkdiugojf8rp.jpg)
But among her initial tasks was to moderate the site's active online forum, where she started corresponding with someone with the username Taipan - real name Jonathan. (She is fluent in Mandarin.) There, she eventually developed and hosted the podcast Dear Amber: The Insider's Guide to Everything China. While in Shanghai, Scorah began working at a startup called ChinesePod, which offers an online Mandarin language course. Having started over, she has written about it in a new memoir called Leaving the Witness: Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life. They led to her loss of faith and her own personal apocalypse.
#LEAVING THE WITNESS SERIES#
'I definitely have the truth.'"īut then a series of events left Amber Scorah less sure of the truth. "There's nothing like taking someone, especially someone that has a totally different frame of reference, totally different belief system, and seeing them change their mind. "It's almost like you've won an existential argument," she says.
![leaving the witness leaving the witness](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/UhgulIPYbok/maxresdefault.jpg)
And for most of her time in Shanghai, the work to save souls was exhilarating. Everything had to be secret - such preaching was illegal in China. Scorah was married at age 22, and she and her husband moved to China to work as missionaries. Instead, like every other member of the church, she dedicated her life to spreading the word. "If the world is ending, why would you go to college?" Scorah says in an interview. The answer was Armageddon, and it predetermined everything. As a third-generation Jehovah's Witness, Amber Scorah believed she had the answer to life's biggest questions.