CHAPTER TWO

 AS JEHOVAH IS MY WITNESS

People migrate in search of a better life. Our life had been pretty good in Malaysia. However, a decade after the New Economic Policy was introduced in the wake of the May 1969 riots, with special privileges for the Malays constitutionally entrenched, it was clear that, as English-educated non-Malays, my family had effectively become second-class citizens. Malaysia had ceased being a British colony in 1957. Yet there were many - like myself - who felt a rose-tinted nostalgia for the days when we were part of the mighty British Empire, where the sun never used to set. And so in 1981 we migrated to Australia, from one former British colony to another.

Migrants are the most dynamic people in any community. It takes stupendous effort to uproot oneself from an established environment and relocate to a new country and culture. Everything is new. The people, the flora and fauna, even the air smells different. My wife still insists, for instance, that pork bought from a Caucasian butcher smells and tastes different from pork sold by the Chinese butchers back in Malaysia. I couldn’t tell the difference. To me food is food, but it’s a very important ingredient in our lives. Most of us spend up to thirty percent of our lives buying, preparing, and consuming the food we need for our nourishment. Having access to familiar food goes a long way towards making a migrant feel at home in a new location. Migrants bring culinary and cultural diversity to their host country. Without us, the food Down Under would be deathly dull.

A few months after we settled into our new home in Melbourne, we had a couple of unexpected visitors. They were Jehovah’s Witnesses. I showed them a bit of Malaysian hospitality by offering them tea and - over the next five years – they returned every Wednesday to discuss the scriptures with me. These weekly Bible study sessions would last on the average an hour and a half. We had ample time to explore the finer points of our doctrinal differences. I discovered that my Jehovah’s Witness friends had an entirely different take on the Gospels. Christians regard Jesus Christ as their personal savior and God. The traditional Christian Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is a doctrine they accept without question. I was stunned to discover that Jehovah’s Witnesses have no use for the Trinity. They regard Jehovah (known as Yahweh to the Jews) as the Heavenly Father, the only God we should worship. Jesus is the Son of God – the Logos (or Word) made flesh - and the Universe was created through him, but he isn’t one and the same as God.

My Jehovah’s Witness friends were patient and persevering with me. They plied me with supplementary reading material explaining their specific version of Christianity, and our weekly discussions stimulated my desire to learn as much as I possibly could about the origins of my own faith. Mainstream Christians view Jehovah’s Witnesses as a dangerous cult. Various well-meaning friends had warned me that Jehovah’s Witnesses brainwash their members, so they turn into mindless zombies serving their organization’s goals and purposes. Jehovah’s Witnesses constitute only a tiny fraction of the world’s total Christian population. From my personal contact with them, despite their rigid dogmatism, I found the Jehovah’s Witnesses pretty harmless. Perhaps my logical accountant’s brain grounded me in common sense and reason, and kept me from getting overly swayed by their indoctrination; or maybe it was my increasingly eclectic approach to truth.

I proceeded to investigate the Baha'i faith, the Church of Christ, Christian Science, the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints, even the Church of Scientology – indeed, almost every permutation of Judeo-Christianity I could find. My intellectual curiosity prompted me to look into Islam in an attempt to understand the basis of the centuries-old conflict between the Christian and Muslim worlds. Since Christianity and Islam both have ideological roots in Judaism and all three scriptures have a common origin in the Middle East, I was convinced that some crucial key could be found that would reconcile and harmonize these Abrahamic belief systems. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are linked by a pronounced patriarchal bias that perceives the Supreme Being as a MALE authority figure. All three are essentially Book Religions in that they are founded on laws purportedly promulgated by God through the written word - Torah and Talmud, Old and New Testaments, Quran and Hadith.

Nevertheless, throughout that period, I continued to cling stoically to a Christian fundamentalist mindset. In December 1983, on a group tour with a number of Australians to communist China, we were taken to an excavation site just outside Peking (now Beijing). The tour guide told us the original inhabitants lived in a walled city and they buried their dead in shallow graves. She mentioned that the skeletal remains, which had Asian features, were at least 5,000 years old. I had serious problems with that. Since the biblical first couple, Adam and Eve, were created only about 6,000 years ago (according to the fundamentalist interpretation of Genesis), the dating of the Chinese excavation site was obviously incorrect. Beijing is more than 8,000 kilometers (5,000 miles) from the Middle East where Adam and Eve lived. It would have been difficult, if not impossible, for early humans to migrate that far in a mere thousand years, even if they had somehow managed to travel in a straight line. Besides, I reasoned, it would have taken considerable time for a Semitic tribe to mutate into Asiatics in a mere millennium. I concluded that the excavation site was most likely no more than two or three thousand years old.

In September 1986, I relocated to Sydney with my wife and our two children, and was put in touch with a local chapter of Jehovah’s Witnesses whose members continued my slow and steady induction into their sect. By then I had begun reading in earnest, beyond the confines of religion, any book that might clue me in on the mysteries of existence. I delved into physics, cosmology, astronomy, biology, archeology, paleontology; boned up on evolution and genetics. The possibility that humanoid races may have existed on this planet a great deal longer than six thousand years began to force its way into my consideration. I devoured Stephen Hawking, Paul Davies, Fritjof Capra, Richard Dawkins, Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace, Kahlil Gibran. I dug into the early history of the Church and discovered more than a few ill-concealed skeletons in its closet.

The spectrum of possible perspectives was absolutely fascinating to me. I appreciated the empirical approach of scientific enquiry, and at the same time was greatly intrigued and excited by accounts of the mystical. It’s a wonder I was able to maintain some sort of balance between open-minded curiosity and my deeply embedded faith in Christianity and the Bible. All this while my study sessions continued with the Jehovah’s Witnesses. In fact, all in all my contact with them lasted ten years - until 1991 – when they decided I was ready to be baptized as a bona fide Jehovah’s Witness. I told them I had already been baptized in Malaysia at the age of fifteen. They said I must accept a new baptism into their faith. First I had to agree to certain obligations and answer a few questions:

“Do you accept Jesus Christ as your personal Savior?” they asked.

“Yes,” I replied.

“Do you believe that the Bible is the Word of God?”

“Yes.”

“Do you believe that the Bible is true literally for all eternity?”

“No,” I replied emphatically.

“What do you mean – no?” one of them asked.

“The Christian Bible may be the Word of God but it was formalized more than 1,600 years ago. It can’t be relevant to modern life in all aspects. Science has progressed and we can’t expect human knowledge to stand still,” I explained in a reasonable tone of voice.

“Give us an example of what you mean,” said a very concerned looking Jehovah’s Witness.

“Well, take for example the creation story in the Book of Genesis. It was just symbolic. It was based on the knowledge of the day when the Book of Genesis was first compiled over 2,500 years ago. It’s pretty impressive as a metaphor: the sequence of creation events recorded in the Bible comes remarkably close to recent scientific findings and doesn’t really contradict evolutionary theory. Modern science places the formation of our solar system at just over 4,500 million years ago. Life apparently started about 3,700 million years ago and gradually evolved into the amazing varieties of lifeforms we see today. 

Geneticists have proved that all life on Earth is related through our DNA and our genes. But we still don’t know exactly how life came about yet. Life evolved over time, it took millions and millions of years.” I replied, feeling like a latter-day Giordano Bruno before the Inquisition.

The Jehovah’s Witnesses were shocked to hear such heresy from my lips. They must have been wondering how I had managed to conceal my blasphemous thoughts from them for so many years. Finally, after an uncomfortable silence, one of the Witnesses declared: “Since you do not accept the literal creation sequence in the Bible, we cannot accept you as a member of our organization. If you happen to change your mind in the future, let us know.” He uttered a sharp “goodbye” and they all walked briskly out of the house.

It was a sad moment for me to see them go. After all, the Jehovah’s Witnesses had been among the first friends I had made in the new country, and they had shown exemplary patience and kindness with me. Without their encouragement and moral support – for which I shall always be grateful - I would not have embarked so enthusiastically on a deep scrutiny of the Bible and, subsequently, more secular and speculative works. As it so happened, I had arrived at my own unexpected conclusions, based on startling revelations gleaned from new data.