Hey!
OP - July 13, 2013, 12:50 AM
Hello there, Brazilian ex-muslim here.
First of all, sorry about my english, i'm not very good at it but i'll do my best.
I was born in Brazil. My 4 grandparents are lebanese, and when they came here in the 30's, they brought Islam with them. There are actually just a few muslims in Brazil, maybe less than 1% of the entire population, but yeah, i am/was one of them.
When i was a child, i was afraid of Islam. I thought that God was a man, and a very angry man, and anything that i could do would potentially throw me in hellfire. My teachers and the shaikh's had a very stupid habit of talking a lot about hell, Judgement day, sins and stuff like that. But ok, i was just a child, so... I really didn't care that much about religion.
Time has passed, and when i became a teenager, in my early 12~13, i started to question myself about... pretty much everything. Existencial crisis, hate myself, i'm ugly, meaning of life, pimples...
Islam still didn't gave me answers, but i didn't thought that much about that, for my parents, i still was a child, and i didn't have to pray 5x a day... so life was "easy".
17 years old, just finished highschool. I didn't know much about islam, so i decided to study and take it seriously in my life, because in my mind, i was mature enough to assimilate things and act like a responsible person, i should know about my religion and take it seriously. At this age, i started to pray 5 times a day.
Damn, it was hard. I didn't agree with polygamy, heaven concept, hell concept, i didn't agree with things said in Quran and in the Hadith's, i didn't agree with ANYTHING! But i've struggled to accept this philosophy, because everybody around (my family and all the arab community) was(were?) sure about the right path.
Time has passed a little more, and i suffered in silence. Most of my friends didn't have a religion, and most of them were atheists, but they were wonderful people. My parents hated the fact that i prefered my brazilian amigo's over the arab ones. They didn't let me go out with my brazilian friends, because they thought they were a bad influence, and things go on and you can imagine what happens next.
I'm tired of this, i never actually believed in this. Today i'm 19 y/o, still live with my family, i'm in college and i'm stuck in this damn house. If i say anything contrary about the religion, they'll piss me off until i kill myself. I have like a hundred relatives, and all of them muslims. I NEED TO GET OUT.
That's it, thanks for reading. Any brotips?
Topic: Hey!