Freedom of choice

Today's Straits Times has an interview with a scientific Professor on the Main section page A19 and one particular question caught my attention and his response echoes my thoughts as well.

You have such a moral stance and yet don't believe in God. Why is that?

My father was an Anglican priest and I was brought up to believe in the Christian God. But as a teenager, I began to think for myself. I questioned absolutely everything. By the time I was 18, I realised that there were many different religions. So I started saying, including to my father, that these can't be all right. In the end, it seems pretty reasonable not to believe in any of them because why choose one over the other?

The paralysis of having the freedom of choice in choosing what religion we want to believe in, and then devoting the next half of our lives defending our choice(because of the reduction in satisfaction from the plethora of choices available causing us to consciously think of the what-if-I-had-decided-on-believing-in-another-faith scenario) and making sure it is the best choice amongst the thousands of other religions that is supposedly good as well.

The above said is based on the assumption of one having questioned what exactly one has chosen to believe in and not blindly following something.

Here are his takes on religion:

Being an atheist: "To believe in God answers nothing because who made God? Where did God come from?"

The absence of God in his children's lives: "My wife and I had friends who had not had a religious upbringing and they hadn't turned out to be murderous or anything like that."

I'm a testament to that because I'm quite the mildest person you'd ever find around and quite the most conflict-avoiding person aside from my occasional insensitive and forthright remarks that will cause some tension because people take it personally as an insult. I have never believed in criticising a person, only the person's ideas, but sometimes the more emotional people see it otherwise. And I have never been brought up to believe in a single God, only the morals that Chinese culture expects of children.

I don't know the number of people who have been convinced that religion has caused more conflicts that it ever aimed to resolved, but I'm definitely one of them.

Not to be critical of the way believers try to convert the non-believers, but every morning as I go pass a church, it has a banner that makes no sense to me at all

"Are you pursuing something important but not significant?"

Seriously? I can totally imagine Miss Nansi's incredulous look as she goes on in her dramatic fashion of how our expression in essays are so convoluted it makes no sense.