A Burmese atheist who takes inspiration from George Carlin and Bart Simpson

by Naomi Gingold

When Kyaw Moe Khine was in 9th grade, he told his parents that he was an atheist. His parents didn’t quite get it, he says.

They didn’t even know what atheism meant.

Kyaw Moe Khine, who goes by the name “Bart,” is from Myanmar, frequently referred to as Burma, and it’s a pretty religious place. Most Burmese are Theravada Buddhists, but there are also plenty of religious minorities that have been there for centuries, from Catholics to Muslims of diverse origins all over the country.

Bart says now that he’s 19, his mom knows about atheism, but she still hasn’t come to terms with his new “faith.”

Occasionally she still says things to him like, “You’re going to burn in hell! Allah’s going to punish you!”

He laughs: “Yeah. She says stuff like that.”

Bart was raised Muslim, but even as a kid he questioned everything: in Islam and the Quran, and in the Buddhism around him. He even read the Bible to see what it had to offer.

But he says in all of these faiths, people seemed as if they were just robotically following rules, mostly out of fear; and the rules didn’t make sense in the modern world.

He did find some kindred spirits, though.

“When you read people like [Friedrich] Nietzsche or when you listen to people like George Carlin, they’re really making a point. And those books are not!”

Yes, the George Carlin, who regularly ranted about religion as “utter bulls—.”

Bart wholeheartedly agrees with that.

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