thoughts…
The Tolerance Paradox
Tolerance is tricky when it comes to applying it to our daily living. As a humanist, I find myself struggling to keep my compass oriented toward goodness while trying to differentiate between ‘wanting’ good and ‘imposing’ it. There is also this incentive to check my moral outrage from aligning with bigots who can use my…
Coming Out As a Non-Believer
Coming out to our loved ones – and this is imperative – only whose feelings matter to us and who love us truly – is a difficult thing for most nonbelievers. For the rest of the world, our disbelief shouldn’t really generate much angst. But with loved ones, the act requires you to have clarity…
Oblivion
We humans are wired to be lazy. Evolutionarily, we conserve energy. Calories were expensive. Our nervous systems evolved to reward efficiency. We prefer shortcuts. We automate habits. We stick to routines. We resist change. We jump to conclusions. We use tools. We assume patterns. We adopt group opinions. We follow fashion. We avoid difficult conversations.…
The Singaporean Experiment
Singapore is by most measures a very successful country. It is an economic powerhouse ranking as one of the most open and globally competitive countries with strong financial and manufacturing sectors. It boasts one of the world’s highest GDPs per capita and strong economic stability across all social strata. It is a major player in…
No Harm, No Foul?
I’ve come to a place where I don’t feel the need to fight every belief anymore. As long as a belief isn’t harming someone, physically, psychologically, or financially, I’m okay letting it be. And that’s a big shift for me, because I used to think that bad ideas had to be confronted everywhere, all the…
Beyond Science?
Humanity’s singular gift to itself, Science, the systematic pursuit of knowledge through cumulative faculties of observation and experiment, is not an institution but a method – a disciplined way of knowing that transcends cultures and epochs. At its core, science is a neutral compass: observe, hypothesize, test, falsify, refine. It does not care for values,…
Dissonance-led Deconversion
Some beliefs hold on to us, even after we have dropped them, simply because we grew up with them. Also because the people closest to us hold on to them. These are organised in cohorts of functional heuristics that are deeply entrenched into our psyches. Fear-based admonishment is one such embedded belief- retention premise. Deliberately…
Bulla Ki Jaana Main Kaun
(Bulla, Who Knows Who I Am?) Came upon Rabbi Shergill’s rendition of Bulleh Shan’s powerful poem and was caught off-guard by it’s timelessness. Syed Abdullah Shah Qadri, known by his followers as Bulleh Shah, was a Sufi poet, philosopher mystic who lived beyond the conventions of his time in the early 18th century in Punjab,…
Veganuary
Not really one for making new year resolutions but my daughters took it upon themselves to stop eating any animal product for January. Veganuary is a UK based non-profit that encourages people worldwide to try a vegan diet for January as a compassionate response to the cruelty of animal farms and a responsible action against…
The Past Tense
Be wary of insecure people who look backwards into foggy memories of their past and claim those were the good times. These are incomplete musings of the fortunate who form the majority of our society’s demographic. Heavily dosed with innumerable biases, such memories are selective and most times don’t feature the unpleasant, or as a…
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