I was first exposed to Christianity as a child just below ten. My eldest brother was attending the neighborhood Sunday School and he would preach the gospel to my brother and myself every night before we went to bed. One day, I decided to tag along to Sunday School with him, but I never felt at home there because I still couldn’t see what the fuss was all about. The only memorable thing I remembered was that they gave out presents at Christmas time, and even if you were absent that week (as I often was), they kept the present aside for you. I gave up going after a few months though I continued to read the Bible on my own.

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

My journey away from religion into atheism was a very gradual one. From the time I was a teenager, it was obvious that what science had discovered about the big bang and evolution were not compatible with the Bible. But my parish priest, explained to me that the stories of the Bible, like that of Adam and Eve, were allegories meant to convey allegories, like Aesop fables. They convey moral, not scientific, truths. That reply, together with the fact that I could not see how morality could exist without God or religion, kept me “within the fold”.

Paul Tobin

I was raised a Catholic, in a Eurasian family that didn’t read the Bible, but went to church faithfully. We didn’t question, we just followed and listened to whatever the priests preached at Sunday Masses. I guess the seeds of doubt were planted during those moments, often during sermons, when every priest would chide us for being sinful people and rationalise our “worldly” problems with Biblical doctrine. I could never relate.

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

It seems that there was a sign on the wall when I was born that I would be a lifelong Atheist. It started when my father went to the local administration to register me as the next offspring of the fast growing Veltman family, now increased by one. He arrived at the office, joined the queue and was called forward. There he gave up all the necessary information until they reached the then still relevant question of religion. The friendly civil servant asked what the religion of the newborn was and my father answered in all honesty “None yet”. The man responded a bit shocked and said: “But the baby needs to have a religion, what is your religion?”. My father smiled and replied that that was not relevant because he himself was not the baby and he allowed his son to decide for himself what kind of religion, if any, he would choose in later life. The civil servant quickly explained that because he was Catholic, all his children also were Catholic, he probably concluded that my father did not understand how life worked. So he asked again for my father’s religion. My father replied that he would not decide for the baby and that was it. So my religion on my birth certificate stated “Religion: None Yet” as written down by a then very frustrated civil servant. And it has stayed that way ever since, because my parents saved money over the years to buy me an encyclopedias, not bibles. They did actually not protest when I bought several bibles when I was about ten years old to see what the fuss was all about. Over the years we discussed the many possibilities that life could have, but it turned out that religion was not our thing.

I forever stayed a “none yet”… It made my life so much easier, and I am very happy with my life. I am grateful to have a father who loved his son so much that he allowed him to make his own choices in life over enforcing his own ideas.

Thanks dad.

Mike Veltman

I was never particularly religious, growing up in a family of Buddhists. Sure, I followed my family to the temples whenever they went when I was a child, but was never really indoctrinated in the same way I could have been if I were from a Christian or Muslim household.

My concept of the world was a mish-mash of the views of the different religions in Singapore. I wouldn’t really use the word “believe”, but I accepted the notions of gods, a heaven and a hell. I even accompanied a Christian friend to church a few times, but I remember one instance where I questioned the implication of Earth being only a few thousand years old. Having access to television and a bit of internet back then, I already knew about dinosaurs. How can Earth only be a few thousand years old when dinosaurs roamed the earth hundreds of millions of years ago? He rebutted me by asking me if I know how they died, and of course he claimed that they died in the great biblical flood. That raised more flags for me as I knew some dinosaurs, or at least, creatures that existed within the same period were aquatic.

In another scenario, I had a little argument with the same Christian friend of mine, and I said that liars would go to hell. He objected and said it were non-Christians who would go to hell, and that Christians would go to heaven. Iy [sic] upset me that that would be the qualifier to determine who would go to heaven, instead of what I had believed, which was being a good person.

Eventually, I was tired of the way he and other Christian friends expressed their religious views, and searched for anti-Christian arguments online. I found a site called Godless Bastard, and spent quite some time there. Eventually, I learned of the term “atheist”, and slowly, all the even slightly religiously influenced beliefs I had had started to fade away. I became more passionate about science, as I felt the need for gods and other supernatural explanations disappear.

Darsh Daimontal

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