Hey there lalib here (and I'll bet this is the first forum where people will instantly recognize teh significance of my username, others usually miss it
)
I am a junior in college and have had doubts about religion since late high school. I have told a couple of people that I am an now an atheist but am effectively still in the closet to my family. My family are devout Muslims and raised me as such to the point where I was a creationist, 9/11 conspiracy theorist, Holocaust denier, etc up until the 10th grade! I am studying Biology and Philosophy with the intent to go to Medical school.
As to how I came to my senses, well, that's quite the story. I went to a small private religious school up to the 8th grade, however my mother passed away at the end of the 5th grade, 9/11 happened shortly thereafter, and I acquired a stepmother who pushed our family to a more fundamentalist position.
Prior to these events, I was your typical, moderately religious child with a love of science. The earliest show I remember watching was the magic school bus/Bill Nye and I honestly didn't learn anything in science class until the 6th grade because I had already learned it elsewhere. My mother's death naturally raised the question 'why?'especially concerning why god would do such a thing. 9/11 made me question the actual religious teachings instilled in me, I wondered how anyone could take the Quran and use it to promote violence (of course I hadn't actually read the thing yet), I eventually concluded 9/11 was a conspiracy to justify hatred against muslims. The third event was the real kicker, instead of the previous two events pushing me out of religion, my fundamentalist stepmother pushed me back into religion. I was never truly sincere, but I 'protected' myself by doing everything a 'good' muslim was supposed to do.
High school really opened my eyes (especially since my 8th grade class had 7 students and my high school class had 500) to other world views. I had stopped denying evolution by 10th grade (ie, when I actually learned about it in school, my religious school had conveniently skipped over it). By the 12th grade, I was no longer a fundie, nor was I sincere in my belief but it hadn't truly occured to me to believe in nothing. By my last semester in high school I had only met one openly agnostic fellow (and by openly I mean he shared his view when asked, but otherwise was just a normal guy). Come freshman year in college, I suddenly began noticing how religious the world was, granted I was attending a Jesuit university, but I also noticed Facebook friends with religious statuses who I didn't realize were very religious. Ironically, the final push to atheism came from the required theology classes at my Jesuit university. The classes were academic in nature, but required reading the OT, NT, and bits of the Quran. Imagine my surprise when after taking a theology class or two I was taught by Christians that the Bible is indeed written down by men and was originally an oral tradition. My professor also traced the evolution of judaism based on important events in their history and after that very class I confronted my professor "If we can so easily trace the evolution of religion, why bother following it?" His response was that there was still truth in them, even if they changed. From that day I internally identified as an atheist, it became clear that the whole damn thing was a mass self inflicted delusions, and the fact that the religious know it's all hogwash but don't give a damn surprised me the most.
Now I'm trying to perfect the art of the HitchSlap.
Topic: Hello from an ex-muslim in America!