A Message to the Society - Speak out against Evil

Every person became who they are today because of the environment they grew up and lived in till this moment. They are products of circumstances they didn't get to choose. Nobody does bad things for no reason. This understanding inspires empathy and kindness towards people. It also shows us that we have a great need to get rid of the ideas that reduce the peace, happiness and freedom in this world. "Bad people" are actually people who do bad things due to our collective failure to oppose bad ideas that are part and parcel of our society. 
This is not to say people shouldn't be punished for anything. Deterrent and corrective punishments should be there depending on the actions. However, the bulk of our effort should go to transforming ideas and environment instead of being angry at people. Our fear and silence towards social norms and dogma will not help. This is why I encourage everyone to think independently and challenge every single of the negative ideas in our social system. If one person speaks out, nothing much will happen. It should be a collective effort. Speak out and help transform the world, and very importantly inspire others to do the same. This helps to produce the chain reaction that brings out a significant and permanent change in the world for the good.

My Journey to Atheism

Like the vast majority of people, I was brought up with the idea that God exists and can answer prayers. From my earliest days of childhood that I can remember, it was mere common sense that God exists. It was just another truth like day and night that had no reason to be doubted. A child's mind believes what he or she is taught as the truth. When you've been taught this way repeatedly before your intellects are even developed, you simply accept it as a part of everyday normality. Coming into teenage, I carried this belief with me. Around 13 years of age, I began to consider this idea that God may not be true at all. But it was just an idea which I myself kept rejecting as unlikely. This surety in God started developing some cracks as a result of independent, objective thinking. By 15-16 years of age, I became more open to the idea that God might not exist. However, the powerful concept of God is not something that leaves you so easily after it got hold of your brain.

The next phase was disassociating the concept of religion from God. I was not raised in a strongly religious manner. Despite this I never felt a need to separate this idea of religion from God. For me God was still someone who likes being worshiped in temples. Slowly I began to transform my concept of God. As years passed by, I got comfortable with this idea that God has nothing to do with religion. This was an important transformation in my life which came about as a result of questioning things that we generally accept unquestioned. Coming out of the dogma of religion is an important step one has to make to think objectively about God. Religion is someone else's idea about God and clinging on to it makes objective thinking difficult. By 21-22 years of age, I completely disassociated myself from belief in Hinduism - a transformation that started after the end of my high school and was complete towards my final days of engineering. My religious concept of a God who answered prayers in temples changed to a concept of God who created universe and has some sort of power over everything. From believing around 75% in God's existence at the end of high school, my belief shrunk to 50-50. The final year of my engineering (21 to 22 years of age) also helped transformed this from an actual belief to some sort of a "delusional" belief. Delusional belief means belief in something despite contradictory evidence - I knew at this point that there was pretty much no evidence to suggest that there is God - while still thinking there is a 50-50 chance for God being true.

Our minds have been systematically trained since childhood to think that the burden of proof is on the atheist to disprove God - and not on the theist to prove God. Just think about it - we don't apply this kind of logic on almost anything other than God. By this logic, we can't prove that ghosts don't exist. We can't prove that fairies don't exist. If we fully appreciate the fact that we are being biased towards the God concept, we will begin to think differently. The burden is on the believers to prove God's existence. This complete realization has taken me to where I am today. After my engineering, I spent a lot of time with philosophy, seeking truth and goodness. Today at 23 years of age, I believe that there is around 5% chance that God exists - and I pay this small favour to God mainly because I don't believe in being too sure of something so complicated. In that sense, I'm an agnostic and not a perfect atheist. Despite my 95% disbelief in God, I'm sure he is perfectly fine with me being honest about it.