One of my ear­li­est mem­o­ries from pri­ma­ry school was a spelling test I had back in Stan­dard 1 when I was a pupil at the Mal­abar RC School in Ari­ma. One of the words we were asked to spell was "athe­ist", which I in­cor­rect­ly wrote down as "athi­est." None of my class­mates, in­clud­ing me, knew the mean­ing of the word how­ev­er. When Ms Downes il­lu­mi­nat­ed our in­no­cent minds, I was hor­ri­fied, as was most of the class. How could some­one not be­lieve in God? So who cre­at­ed the sky, then? This must be a vile, dis­gust­ing, im­moral group of peo­ple! Do any cur­rent­ly ex­ist? Why does God al­low them to ex­ist?

For­tu­nate­ly, my world­view has changed since then, so much so that I now con­sid­er my­self part of this group that I once re­viled. But con­ver­sion, or de-con­ver­sion, is not the pur­pose of this let­ter. My in­ten­tion is quite sim­ple and marked­ly less am­bi­tious than my past writ­ings. I would sim­ply like to il­lu­mi­nate the minds of Trinida­di­ans that athe­ists do ex­ist, and they are among you.

There are peo­ple out there that do not be­lieve in God. They do not be­lieve in the su­per­nat­ur­al, be­cause no con­vinc­ing ev­i­dence has been pre­sent­ed to in­di­cate oth­er­wise. They are not closed to the idea of a su­per­nat­ur­al realm, but choose to live their lives as if there were none. They ex­er­cise ra­tio­nal thought and scep­ti­cism, and be­lieve the pur­suit of knowl­edge about the world we live in is in­te­gral to the sur­vival of our species on this plan­et. They un­der­stand the fact of evo­lu­tion, and the im­pli­ca­tions for our pur­pose in life and place in this uni­verse. And they look just like every­one else.

To­day's cit­i­zens face chal­lenges, dilem­mas and threats un­known to all of our an­ces­tors. In most cas­es, there is no prece­dent, no rule of thumb or frame­work to guide us for­ward. Re­li­gious dog­ma has shown re­peat­ed­ly that it is a failed sci­ence, and can­not pro­vide any­thing of sub­stance to as­sist our sur­vival and well-be­ing on this plan­et. Maybe it is time for hu­man­i­ty to grow up and out of child­hood fan­tasies of mag­ic and sor­cery. Af­ter all, no peo­ple, no na­tion and no civil­i­sa­tion ever suf­fered be­cause they be­came too rea­son­able.

Name giv­en

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