Leaving the Witness Quotes

“Absurdity becomes truth when enough people agree to it, and to not do so then becomes what is irrational.”
― Amber Scorah, Leaving the Witness: Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life

“So long as the burden of proof remains with the critic, a cult can never lose.”
― Amber Scorah, Leaving the Witness: Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life

“There is no human so bold as the preacher. Or so blind. For they do all of the talking, and none of the asking.”
― Amber Scorah, Leaving the Witness: Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life

“And then there was me, sitting across from them, with my fake name and life built inside my organization. I was an uneducated preacher posing as an English teacher, my presence here not what I claimed it was. I was out to change the course of other people’s lives, and their children’s lives, and their children’s children’s lives. I somehow had the effrontery to try to alter the course of their history, to urge these people to make over their lives into the shape of mine, when I had never even considered how my own life had come to look as it did.”
― Amber Scorah, Leaving the Witness: Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life

“Having lost all expectations as to what should happen, or how people must be, every tiny experience or thing or person was beautiful for what it was.”
― Amber Scorah, Leaving the Witness: Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life

“Was I a good person? The righteous war of black versus white, right or wrong, good against bad, had given meaning to my life. It was comfortable to know that everyone was wrong and you were right. I had known who I was by which side I was on, but there are not only two sides there are thousands of dimensions to things. Living in uncertainty is humbling and terrifying. Uncertainty is pain.”
― Amber Scorah, Leaving the Witness: Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life

“People sometimes wake up one day and realize that the life they live or the belief system they carry around doesn't work anymore, for a variety of reasons. But many of us don't because our culture (or to say it in another way, cult) too fully consumes our life and extends across our world, our peer group, our country, our political affiliation, and all of our experience. We don't even apprehend this, because we are never far enough outside of it to understand what is happening.”
― Amber Scorah, Leaving the Witness: Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life

“Even those with no religion -- we were all hiding, indoctrinated, embedded with ideas about how we must be and must live so as to impose order on the disorder.”
― Amber Scorah, Leaving the Witness: Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life

“Certainty delineates things. The people of the world, the people who were bad, wicked, ungodly, Satanic, told me who I wasn't, and that, by default, had defined for me what I was - - the opposite. The good.

And now that I was one of the world, I had no idea who I was.”
― Amber Scorah, Leaving the Witness: Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life

“It can't be the true religion. If it were it would be able to be open to constant inquiry, honest assessment, logical and intuition.”
― Amber Scorah, Leaving the Witness: Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life

“So much of who we are is what we have been taught by our culture or even our family.”
― Amber Scorah, Leaving the Witness: Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life

“I was starting to understand that truth was ambiguous, and subjective.”
― Amber Scorah, Leaving the Witness: Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life

“I have called a truce with the unknown, and I am learning to live with the disquiet. I do not attempt to pray to a god who will not answer.”
― Amber Scorah, Leaving the Witness: Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life

“I had performed mental contortionism to reconcile the irreconcilable, so that I could feel comfortable. I had been "in the truth" because I was afraid of the truth.”
― Amber Scorah, Leaving the Witness: Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life

“My continued presence each day indicated to e that I was more than this belief, but to the people I loved who were in this organization, I was only the belief, or the lack of it.”
― Amber Scorah, Leaving the Witness: Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life

“Both they and I had these lives that were created out of circumstance, accidents of birth, and we went along in them, carried along by the decisions made for us long before we were alive, our participation in the whole scheme making us feel ownership -- that indeed this was our life, our possession our creation. But what things lay dormant? Lodged in our gray matter were there other parts of ourselves -- lives we did not have the opportunity to carry out or the circumstances required to invent or the courage to do something about? What other life were we capable of?”
― Amber Scorah, Leaving the Witness: Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life

“Regularity is what breeds conformance, satisfaction, allegiance. And though rigorous, the constraints of this sort of life go largely unnoticed, mainly because humans are highly trainable creatures, and most of us have been doing this since we were children. It's the most natural life to someone who has been taught that this is the only way to live, and we are told that it is the best way of life. and we believe it.”
― Amber Scorah, Leaving the Witness: Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life

“. . . but this simmering unrequited tension it was in the bones of the place.”
― Amber Scorah, Leaving the Witness: Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life

“The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived, and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. . . . We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.”
― Amber Scorah, Leaving the Witness: Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life

“The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived, and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. . . . We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought. —JOHN F. KENNEDY, Commencement Address at Yale University, delivered June 11, 1962”
― Amber Scorah, Leaving the Witness: Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life