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i finally read why i am an atheist by bhagat singh today. i've been meaning to read it for a long time and i'm glad i finally did (thankyou ribbon). reading it was so validating for me. while reading it you will realise that this isn't the writing of someone rejecting religion out of rebellion or a desire to be provocative. you can see that it's the work of someone who has questioned, reflected, read and reasoned his way to a conclusion. whether you agree with him or not is secondary. what deserves admiration is the intellectual integrity with which he writes.
i also think calling it "an essay about atheism" misses the point cuz it's an essay about intellectual integrity, about having the courage to subject your own beliefs to scrutiny instead of accepting them simply because they were handed to you.
there's an irony in how often bhagat singh is reduced to a symbol. so many people invoke his name, quote him or idolize him without ever engaging with what he actually believed in and i'm sure many of them would be genuinely surprised by this essay.
492
okay um i am speaking from what i have consistently observed and why because of that i personally cannot believe in the whole thing.
now, religion is deeply personal. different people derive different things from it but as far as i have seen, it is very often practiced through unquestioning obedience. i'm not saying religious texts themselves necessarily demand that but this is what many people and institutions seem to encourage and what i have repeatedly witnessed.
what i also struggle with is the very idea of faith. faith, almost by definition, asks you to trust despite uncertainty. if things work out, faith is affirmed, if they don't, you're often told you didn't believe enough, didn't pray enough or that it's part of a larger plan you cannot yet understand. to me, that makes faith difficult to meaningfully question because almost any outcome can be interpreted as confirming it. i simply cannot reconcile myself with that.
