B00A3OGH1O EBOK by Allen Wong Read Free Book Online

used to be stubborn and close-minded whenever there was an argument.
    I finally got the wake-up call after having a long shouting contest with my close college friend over a science problem (something that only nerds do). Later on, I realized that I was the one who was wrong the entire time. I felt really stupid for not really listening to her arguments. I physically listened, but it did not penetrate into my cerebral cortex. Something had to change with the way I approached arguments.
    One of the reasons for my early close-mindedness was that I was raised to be a skeptic. I’ve been scammed a few times when I was really young. When you’re young, you tend to be trusting of people and tend to be more gullible. I’ve also been surrounded by people who claimed to be right, but were later proven to be wrong. This led me to be skeptical about anything anyone says to me.
    I slowly grew out of my close-mindedness as I found time after time again that my ideas may not have been the best ones. My ego wanted me to believe that I was always in the right, but I quickly learned to ignore my ego after having many humbling experiences with people who were smarter and more educated than I was.
    So how do you overcome your close-mindedness?
    Don’t identify yourself by your thoughts and beliefs. When Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist and director of the Hayden Planetarium, was asked whether he was an atheist or not, he replied with a response that summed up my philosophy pretty well:
     
    “The only ‘ist’ I am is a scientist… I don’t associate with movements. I'm not an ‘ism’. I just – I think for myself. The moment when someone attaches to a philosophy or a movement, then they assign all the baggage and all the rest of the philosophy that goes with it to you. And when you want to have a conversation, they will assert that they already know everything important there is to know about you because of that association. And that’s not the way to have a conversation. I'm sorry. It’s not. I’d rather we explore each other’s ideas in real time rather than assign a label to it and assert, you know, what’s going to happen in advance.”
    – Neil deGrasse Tyson
    My skepticism led me to become an atheist when I was just a teenager. I was raised as a Christian, because my mother was a firm believer in Christianity. I even attended church every Sunday against my will until around high school. After studying science and taking a hard look into Christianity and other religions, I realized that religion was an unproven belief system. Religion, along with most of the stories associated with religion, made no sense to me. It went against logic and reasoning.
    That’s when I started to associate myself with atheism. It was a reaction to feeling scammed and lied to. I went to the opposite extremity to distance myself as far as possible from what I believed at the time were fairy tales told to people to make them feel better about themselves for doing righteous things and shameful for doing unethical things. I saw it as a tool for kings to socially engineer his people into doing the things he wanted them to do without questioning his authority (which he would claim came from God himself). With this belief in mind, I saw it as my rightful duty to stop people from falling for this lie.
    I have had many heated debates with my mother and brother about this issue, because they were both firm believers of Christianity. And the debates always ended up diminishing my relationship with them. But, my ego was pushing me to further pursue the issue until they believed what I believed in. I honestly believed that they were being scammed, and that I was their savior. But what were the end results? They are still believers of Christianity, and nothing really progressed.
    My mother once asked me, “If religion makes me feel happy, then why would you want to take that happiness away?” After that, I realized what the purpose of religion was to