I suppose many of us have ruminated on the possibility of meeting up with your past self when you reach a pivotal age in your life. We've all had dreams and aspirations growing up, and the more idealistic among us tend to set goals, or "things I should have accomplished at this point in my life", failing to realize, due to our naiveity and immaturity, that life never gives us what we want on a silver platter, and that the so called priorities and ambitions that one has a child are never set in stone. Growing up exposes you to a variety of stimuli and influences, some of which may steer your life in a direction Furthermore, we barely know any better as children (I use this term loosely), and thus our ambitions in life tend to be narrow, juvenile and extremely idealistic.
Throughout my childhood I was miles ahead of my peers, who either lacked the motivation to be successful in life or already had their futures set in stone (coming from rich, Caucasian or Chinese families, it's hard to blame them). Because of this, and partially due to my parent's influence, I groomed myself into pursuing a medical career. Whenever I'd need to go to the doctor, I'd exhibit the enthusiasm not usually seen in those afflicted by illness, due to my excitement to ask our family doctors all sorts of questions about the field of medicine.
I became extremely fond of biology in high school, enamored by the elegance of life and its rich diversity, as well as the brilliance in which organisms have organized themselves from such humble beginnings. Perhaps this was due to watching Nat Geo, Discovery and Animal Planet throughout my childhood? That wouldn't surprise me in the slightest. I loved studying evolution, and how brilliant minds like Lamarck and Darwin sought to explain the reason as to how life came to be how it is today, and I enjoyed the computational aspects of genetics, and how ingenius Mendel was with his Pisum breeding experiments. Despite this enamoration for biology, I still had medicine in mind for the long run. But deep down, a fascination for the pure science of biology remained, so when I filed out my UPCAT and USTET forms, I put BS Biology as my first choice for both, with the mentality that if I was not going to pursue medicine, I wouldn't want to be involved in the health sciences at all, as I would refuse to work underneath doctors, knowing that if I had the opportunity I should be working alongside them, not under them.
College was an eye-opener for me. For starters, my world view changed. Let's backtrack a little bit. When I was in late elementary, around 10-12 years of age, I started becoming internet savvy. This, couple with the facts that I loved Pokemon and that I was still living in a culturally "English" household led me to join a British Pokemon website known as pkmn.co.uk (It's now known as pkmn.net. It's still up, and my account still works, though the forums aren't as active as they used to be). The community was extremely vibrant, with numerous age groups conversing about a wide array of matters not limited to Pokemon. As a British website however, it reflected general British sentiments and popular opinions. This was when I was first introduced to atheism. One bloke, Phil Mccauley (his username was "irrevilent") was really firm on his atheism, debating the theists left, right and center. As a Catholic growing up (Dad never talked about religion, keeping his beliefs to himself, though I suspect that he was an atheist) I felt extremely offended and insulted by his arguments. But, he made sense, he made perfect sense, and it really struck me. Alas, my emotional crutch for religion and the implications of not having a god (When I die, I cease to exist?) prevented reason from getting the better of me, and I stuck with religion. Once that shimmer of doubt has been triggered in your head however, it never stops, and it just kept ticking and ticking and ticking indefinitely. Despite this, I continued to live my delusion, and even joined my local church's music ministry.
When my father died in July 2005, my faith was shaken tremendously. How could a benevolent and omnipotent God allow something like this to happen to me? The emotional turmoil distracted me from my education, and I lost my scholarship. Furthermore, my mother continued to struggle with her nicotine addiction, and the shock of my father's death lead to her developing heart conditions. Up to this day she still takes stroke medicine and blood pressure maintenance medication, and it hasn't been pleasant. I learned about theodicies, and though none of the explanations given by apologists seemed satisfyingly sound, I eventually just stuck with the faith, after all, what was there to lose? Perhaps Pascal's Wager had an influence on my naive mind, since the mathematics made sense to me at the time. Either way, it was clear, I believed in God, but I never "liked" him. I prayed, but I prayed in the sense of a slave begging to a master. There was no affection in it, and I felt like a pawn. It was not a happy time in my life.
Come college. I stopped going to church in college, and I broke up with my super-conservative girlfriend. I had no religious influences whatsoever. I learned of a group called the Filipino Freethinkers which just formed a few months prior to me going to college. I followed their blog entries avidly and was fascinated that a group could be so passionate about causes that, at first seemed odd for me, as I assumed they were a given in society, but then upon further research, I realized how necessary the fight is for them. Reason. Secularism. Science. This led me to discovering Dawkins and Hitchens, as well as watching numerous debates on Youtube with regards to secularism and the new atheist movement. This, coupled with conversations with my friends Dhainee Pfafflin and Cleve Arguelles, as well as watching Letting Go of God in the FF Film Fest, cemented the deal for me, and I finally learned to let go of God.
Upon letting go of God, I had new questions to ask. "Where did we come from, then?" I gained and garnered an extreme fascination for evolutionary biology in the latter years of my undergraduate life. I fell in love with the concepts studied in the Neo-Darwinian synthesis, and watching Creation starring Paul Bettany moved me in ways I didn't deem possible at the time. Biology made me intellectually and spiritually satisfied as an atheist, and it gave me a sense of wonder and awe about the earth and life like no other.
How does this all connect to my starting paragraph? I was a devout, aspiring doctor wannabe as a young lad, and now I'm a strong atheist, working at a science museum, and from the looks of things, I'll be pursuing an evol bio/ethology track as my career/research path of choice. Upon hindsight, it saddens me that I'm not pursuing a path that I longed for my whole life. At times I wish I could warn my past self of all the things to happen to prepare him for things ahead. In all honesty, if I knew where I'd be at this point in my life I would have done things very differently in the past. I don't want to live my life in regret. I've never been one to think of the "what ifs". I just wish I knew better in the past. I wish I had proper objective, reasoned guidance. I hated the indoctrination I had as a kid. I hate how opportunities were never opened up to me. I wish a child wasn't trusted with decisions he obviously was to naive to make. If I had children, I wouldn't bring them up like how I was brought.
*sigh* Perhaps I have more regrets than I thought. I'm just grateful that I know better now. Or at least, I'd like to think that I do.
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