In multi-religious, multiracial Singapore, many Singaporeans will not hesitate to stand up on behalf of countrymen at the receiving end of racist jokes, insults and discrimination. From young, Singaporeans have been taught the importance of respecting different religions and cultural practices. Where public education is insufficient, the government has an array of legal tools to tackle instigators of religious and racial conflict. [Read more…]
The Humanist Society (Singapore) is a non-profit NGO. All NGOs are rooted in causes, often gaps in governance.
Gaps in governance occur because no policy is perfect. Trade-offs happen. In a democracy, there is always a pressure on governments to serve the majority.
Sometimes the private sector can step in to fill voids in public service, but sometimes the void is due to existing regulations and societal norms.
No amount of money, for example, can easily change how Singaporeans view atheists and apostates.
Nonetheless, any successful cause has to be rooted in tangibles. The tangibles that attract the most concern are always about your physical safety, your livelihood, your loved ones and your identity.
The Humanist Society, even as a non-profit society, must link its efforts to the tangibles enjoyed by the non-religious demographic.
The Society must explain why the losing the rights to be non-religious, results in physical harm, loss of livelihood, separation from your loved ones and loss of your identity.
Examples abound in neighbouring countries where atheism have been declared illegal or unconstitutional.
The Society must be understood as a safeguard for the non-religious to lead the lives true to themselves.
Example:
An esoteric cause: A cause to promote humanism as a philosophy and clarify misunderstandings about it.
A tangible cause: To protect your freedom to work openly as an atheist, to walk around as an atheist without getting killed, to be safely accepted by religious loved ones as atheists.
According to our experience, two powerful forces pull people to Humanist events. The first is a powerful cause. The second is star personalities.
Based on existing evidence, good speakers draw the most attendants at Humanist events. The top 5 events above 100 participants all involve good speakers.
Singapore is a small and young country, we do not have many famous Humanist thinkers and celebrities.
However, Singapore is a very connected global city. The Singapore government and universities pay huge sums to fly famous humanists into the country.
By collaborating with them to host these famous humanists, our local programme will be enriched tremendously. Examples include visits by A.C Grayling and Jerry Coyne.
What you can do
There is no such thing as too much money. There is also no such thing as too many people an event.
An over-attended event may suffer, but an under-attended event is worse.
The no.1 rule of organising any Humanist event is getting a critical mass of attendants. Never take pride in an event so esoteric that nobody comes.
A critical mass of event attendants leads to:
Poorly-attended events lead to:
As a general rule of thumb, Humanist events should strive for at least 30-5o per gathering.
The critical mass rule can be broken if the meeting is aimed at decision-making, or sealing a deal. Too many cooks spoil the broth, so keep the decision-making team lean. (<10, <5).
If you don’t believe in having proper events and wish to form small cliques just for self-expression, the Humanist Society is not for you.
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
Unfortunately, the more I found out about Christianity, the more I realized that it simply didn’t make any sense. There were numerous conflicts with various scientific disciplines such as archaeology, biology, astrophysics and geology. There was no way I could become a Christian in spite of its lure because it was important to me for a belief system to be congruent with reality.
Regardless, I couldn’t believe that so many people could be so wrong about something so important; hence, I remained agnostic. However, as I learned about cognitive biases and heuristics, and other limitations of the human brain, as well as how vulnerable we are to social conditioning and indoctrination, I gradually accepted the reality that a vast majority of my fellow human beings were deluded by the fables of our ancestors. That’s how I became an atheist.
Chan Yue Kong
When I was in secondary school, I didn’t make too many friends, as I was busy proselytizing, and telling all the Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims and queer individuals in the immediate vicinity that they were doomed to hell for their belief in the wrong God. This being a Christian mission school, I never got in trouble with the administration.
The irony of the whole situation was that I was also starting to discover my own sexuality, and that I was attracted to individuals of both genders. I would be damning people to hell, and then rushing to meet boys after.
A close friend of mine who was both gay, and an atheist, began to prod me to examine my beliefs, as he would say, “since you pride yourself on being a logical person”. I began to read the bible thoroughly, cover to cover, and the conclusions I reached were inescapable.
What finally led me to renounce belief in immortality was my fully coming to terms with my sexuality. When I accepted that I was bisexual, I realized that I couldn’t in good conscience, continue to believe in an all-loving God who would send me to hell for sleeping with people of both genders.
From that point, I accepted fully that I had become an anti-theist, and have been proceeding along that route ever since.
Clara
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
When I briefly explored Greek mythology in my later years, the image of gods and deities as more representative of humans writ large got stronger, so even with overtures from peers, classmates and relatives to join their churches doesn’t sound very persuasive to me.
What compounded this lack of belief was also the behavior of those who professed to be strong in their faith. For most of my current life, I had never met a more judgmental and hypocritical group of people than those in monotheistic faiths. No doubt the bad experiences are about the same as the good. But it just goes to show that these faiths are no more than elaborate storytelling devices to direct and lead people.
As a storyteller myself, I am all too familiar with the concept of taking oneself too seriously. When a fantasy component in a tale is taken to its extreme is when I see people do some really strange or questionable things, the events in the current world are frequent enough examples.
So like any addiction which leads the addict into deviant behavior, I have come to consider that faith, when used by certain individuals, do more harm than good.
I still have faith, to me its [sic] a quality of trust and optimism, but I would never ever ascribe a name or religion to it, because it’s just a man-made institution to me.
Nick Lai Weixuan
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
