Eventually I realised I was being stubborn and stupid in equal measure. I saw my religion as a rotten tooth. Just cos it’s not killing me or giving me cancer doesn’t mean it’s good. It may have chewed some good food for me in the past, but that’s irrelevant now; it’s rotten and I should remove it.

So I did! And I got a shiny replacement implant which is much better. And it fulfills all the good functions of the old tooth, while losing the baggage of the rotten decay.

Actually, it was indescribably liberating to leave my religion. I felt a sense of freedom and exhilaration that has not left me since. My mother was extremely disappointed in me and we have had many fights, but overall our relationship is going strong. Which shows the power of love is universal and requires no silly stories of burning bushes or flying horses; just human acceptance and understanding.

I have replaced religion with the values of humanism, reason, human rights, democracy, secularism and pluralism. These values are really important to me and always have been. And when I see how religion threatens all these things, I feel a great and urgent responsibility to make the case for secularism and do my part in strengthening the opposition to theocracy and enforced ignorance.

Bryan Gan

As with any religion, it came with an arbitrary moral code that made little to no sense. Why must one accept suffering as moral? Why is it improper and evil to eat meat? I could not answer these questions, and since I lacked proper answers, I was not able to muster the courage to call myself an atheist. Surely an act of denying the presence of the supernatural for the sake of denying it was just as arbitrary as their doctrines. I could not stoop to their level. I thus came to accept their claims that pride was evil; that humilty was a virtue, or to count on your own ability; since your fate was already predetermined.

It was philosophy that saved me, that imbued me with rationality and let me understand the virtue of thinking. It was knowledge that gave me courage: to refute the irrational, to condemn the mindless and most of all, to understand the fundamental nature and absolute importance of morality. Indeed, the notion of the supernatural is absurd – absurd because it offers no help for a person in his life. Be it mindless stoicism, or mindless acceptance, mysticism only allows for mindlessness, the anti-thesis of life.

Davin Chee

But I was less satisfied with my own answer. I felt like I was grasping for straws, trying to reconcile religion with my education. From that moment on, my belief in God began to crumble. I had a dogged phase in which I was desperate to find Quranic verses that contained scientific facts that were impossible to know at the time they were written. I even went as far as asking for help from a friend who had became an Imam, requesting any and every verse that could have aided me in my quest. But despite my efforts, I wasn’t able find any verse that withstood the tiniest amount of scrutiny or didn’t require an incredibly charitable stretch.

Eventually, no matter how much I tried to prove the veracity of my beliefs, I had to realize that reality simply wasn’t on my side. This is how I gave up religion and became an atheist.

Ufuk Borucu

Then my grandfather passed away, and my father got a monk and his followers to conduct the funeral ceremony. That seemed to awaken his latent interest in Buddhism and he insisted on sending my brother and I to Buddhist Sunday School. I was there for four years and although I passed all the exams with flying colours and participated in all the chanting services, I could not bring myself to take the religion seriously.

Once I went to the temple with a Bible in my pocket. There was the usual passing around of flowers ritual, and when it came to my turn, I dropped the whole vase of flowers on the floor. It was an accident but when my father discovered later about the Bible in my pocket, he insisted that that must have something to do with it. It was around that time too that I told my father I didn’t believe in Buddhism, but he insisted that I continue with Sunday School.

The turning point came when during my early teens, I accidentally discovered a book — The Humanist Revolution by Hector Hawton. It’s long out of print, but the book was a revelation because it echoed all the views that had been swirling around in my head for months, maybe even years. After reading the book, I considered myself a humanist there and then.

A few years later, there was Betrand Russell’s Why I Am Not A Christian. I read the book multiple times and even wrote a chapter by chapter summary of it. My path to atheism was more or less set.

I was busy with life in my twenties, and there was no space for religion at all — I had long given up on Christianity as well as Buddhism. I enrolled as a student at NUS in my thirties and encountered the Free Inquiry magazine at the library. I also spent many hours having online arguments with mostly Christians at the varsity’s internal forum — this was in the 80’s, before the advent of the Internet. I also majored in Philosophy and of course, that made me more skeptical of religion than ever. More than an atheist, I also became a determinist, and my views have not changed much since then….

Yeo Khirn Hup

When I was 30, my mother told me that my father (whom I greatly admired) had spent the bulk of their marriage being unfaithful. When this truth came out, I was less devastated by the fact he was an adulterer, than because I saw him as a God-fearing, churchgoing man who was always saying his Rosary prayers in the car. The revelation obliterated the foundation of my fragile Catholic faith. My mother made me promise to never confront my father, so when he died of cancer 9 years later, he died believing he had my full respect.

I began reading and researching – Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, deGrasse Tyson, Krishnamurti; the business of religion etc. I began questioning. I began pissing off many people, including family. Ultimately, I studied myself; on understanding my conscience and the role it plays in interacting with the world around me.

That episode with my father and my thirst for new knowledge flipped the “pure logic” switch in me. I now scrutinize people more carefully, especially people guided by religious faith. I’ve discovered that most can’t “walk the talk” and are seeing with blinkers, like third-rate race horses, powered by prayer, stumbling over one another towards a promised paradise.

Allen A-luhn