Good day everyone. This is my first post on BioLogos (though I have been lurking for several months now), and I thought my personal journey to where I currently am might be of interest to some of you. I apologise if this is a long read.
I am a 17-year-old from Singapore. I note that the regulars here are typically British or American and at least thrice my age. This does not deter me.
At the time of my birth, my parents were atheists, and I was named after a prominent atheist. As a child I was made to read Stephen Hawking and watch Carl Sagan. My parents even bought me a diorama containing models of the different human species, from homo habilis to homo sapiens .
At the age of 12, I was introduced to Christianity by a friend’s mother. She was a young-earth creationist who tried to convince me that Darwinism was “just a theory”. Ironically, she also recommended me Francis Collins’ The Language of God , an eye-opening book that got me thinking for years to come. It was in this book that I first encountered the concepts of evolutionary creation and BioLogos, but I did not come to this forum until years later.
Soon after that, I enrolled in a Christian (Methodist) secondary school (because it was the best school within a half-hour bus ride of my house). Christianity and its practices soon became normalised to me. I also discovered, to my dismay, that a lot of people there were YECs, including multiple science teachers (Singaporean secondary school teachers are required to have at least an undergraduate degree in their field. Evidently education does not eradicate irrationality). Throw in a hefty dose of homophobia for good measure – the authentic Christian experience. That being said, I made great friends and connections and had experiences in that school I would not trade for the world.
In my early teenage years I started to realise my father was a conspiracy theorist. The man who had raised me to trust science was the same man who vehemently refused to grant permission for me to receive nationally mandated vaccinations at the age of 11. How could this be? I’ll never know, but I still have not got the shots. You can guess what happened when COVID arrived, but I’ll get to that soon.
My father was not just an antivaxxer. He was a Holocaust denier, an enthusiastic Trump supporter, a moon landing skeptic. He would lecture me about chemtrails and how Bush did 9/11 and how 5G would kill us all. He once showed my mother and I (I’m an only child) a documentary by Ty Bollinger – The Truth About Cancer – which attacked mainstream cancer treatments and advocated for various alternatives such as dieting, Rigvir, and prayer. He once insulted Angelina Jolie for getting a double mastectomy – “Removing your breasts for breast cancer – how about removing your brain for brain cancer?”
In a stroke of intense irony, in that same period, my mother was trying to self-medicate what she highly suspected was breast cancer. She told no one, not even my father.
In September 2019, my mother complained of breathing difficulties and was hospitalised. It was discovered that her breast cancer had metastasised to her entire body. She was given three months to live. Despite my atheism I prayed (though not to a specific god) for her recovery (“there are no atheists in foxholes!”), to no avail. My mother recited the Sinner’s Prayer on her deathbed. Her Christian relatives convinced her that conversion was her only hope of seeing her son again. She clung fast to that hope.
My mother had a Christian funeral, and during the service I was asked by someone if I was “a believer”. I replied, “Not yet”.
COVID came around. My father was so radicalised by that point that I had to block him on WhatsApp to make him stop sending me anti-vax Bitchute videos (because their creators had been banned from YouTube). He ordered Ivermectin off Amazon but the shipment was blocked, thankfully. I shot his “medical freedom” argument back at him to demand him to approve my Pfizer shot. Miraculously, he relented after 3 hours of intense argument (I also threatened to reveal to the extended family that he was a conspiracy theorist). I am now fully vaccinated against COVID-19.
In April 2021 I had an Instagram debate with a YEC acquaintance who insisted on a literal interpretation of Genesis. I scoured the web for relevant material and stumbled across BioLogos. Amidst my life’s turmoil, the discussions on this forum were refreshingly rational and stimulating – a breath of cool, unpolluted air. I have been reading this forum for emotional and intellectual therapy ever since. I am also now an agnostic.
This is my convoluted but dramatic story of how I have arrived at this point. I hope I will be able to contribute a new perspective to and drink from the fountain of knowledge of this beautiful community.
PS: I recently found out that my father has been a practicing Taoist for some years now. He studies Taoist scriptures with like-minded friends, although he has admitted he is the only one among them who has not gotten the COVID jab. He has also rejected the theory of human evolution in favour of the Annunaki Genesis. (Seriously.)
