Important for belief system to be congruent with reality

I was never really religious but as a teenager I had been to quite a few cell group meetings and bible study sessions. I went to these sessions because it seemed to me that my Christian friends were so serene and unruffled by the amount of suffering and injustice in the world. I thought they knew something which I didn’t.

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