Archives for January 2017

I am the product of an inter-racial marriage. My father is a Malay with a Muslim family. My mother is a Chinese with a Christian family. Both are non-religious unlike the rest of their families. I guess you could say I was born into atheism.

My parents came to the conclusion that the only way not to cause disharmony between both their families was if I was raised in a secular environment and left to discover religion by myself. I won’t deny that there were tensions in the family and some relationships were strained. But I guess that’s the cost that has to be borne. I find that without a religious upbringing, there really wasn’t any big desire to discover God. When I was younger, I simply couldn’t be bothered with that. I had been to church before but it just seemed weird what the people there were doing. Maybe they needed better evangelism techniques.

I spent my time when I was younger watching several atheist YouTubers debunking religious apologist arguments as I found them highly entertaining. I used to be rather militant of an atheist. One of those really nasty guys that would argue with people about how they were wrong, how they believed in a lie, how the science backs me up. In retrospect, I don’t think any of that did much good. In fact, it burned bridges. Recently I’ve been focusing on finding and understanding the role that religion plays in people’s lives and how it influences the choices they make. It’s not a matter of discovering God. I am firm about my atheism. It is about familiarizing myself with religious perspectives and grasping the impact it has. Hopefully this allows me to better work with religious communities to achieve common goals in the future.

Armond Bushfield

My road to atheism was a short but simple one. I was raised in a traditional Chinese Family, full of Buddhist rites, Taoist rituals and worship of ancient Chinese pantheons.

My journey to atheism was triggered, unfortunately, by peer pressure in an opposite direction. In school, I used to be an introverted and closed up student, who was wary of the world around. I was coaxed out of my shell thanks to the help of a friend. However, my other schoolmates had the impression that I was being extremely nice to this person even though I felt like I was treating everyone equally. It began to devolve into rumors saying that I was a closeted homosexual.

All the comments about homosexuality were disgusting and hurtful. This was during a time where sexual education was sparse and gender stereotypes were expected to be conformed with. This was further propped up by the indiscriminate and unreasonable teachings, which contributed to a climate of fear and hate.

At the time, I was uneducated about language and labels used when referring to sexuality. However, I could feel that the negative connotations associated with homosexuality were impossible to repudiate without offending some religious groups. Even though I was not gay, I began to internalized [sic] the damage and hate that was targeted at homosexuals. And as reason and rationality could not convince my friends, I was expelled -forcibly- out of their circle.

Many years have passed. Looking back at my formative years, I now realize that this episode has been especially painful and it took me 8-9 years to recover from it. Until now, none of those ‘friends’ have recognized the damage they have inflicted back then. On the contrary, they have become more homophobic throughout these years. But I have walked out of it stronger and realized that to combat such irrational hate, I needed to combat the superstitions that give rise to it.

Kenny