Sword of truth (former Muslim)
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Testimony of Leaving Islam
I am 27 years old, and I have been a fake Muslim since age 13. I am openly an atheist, now, where I am living, but I have yet to tell my parents. My mother is a Christian, so she doesn't care, but my father has shown his outrage already when my sister threatened to marry a non-Muslim. However, they are still in the relationship, and he has calmed down for now. It remains to be seen what he will think if they try to get married. I expect at least as big of a reaction when I tell him I have left Islam, and that day must come eventually.
I grew up in America. I was never devout, but I was definitely a real, practicing Muslim up until age 13. As a child, Islam represented to me everything that was good about human nature. I went to the mosque and all the Muslims always seemed very nice. I am reminded of C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, where the 3 protagonists enter the house of the giants, and they all seem very hospitable and friendly. Later, they discover a cookbook with recipes for man-flesh. In my own story, no one ever told me that the punishment for thieves was to have a hand cut off. No one ever told me that the punishment for adultery was stoning. So it happened that one of my non-Muslim friends mentioned that in Iraq they cut people's hands off for stealing. I think I was 11 at the time. I thought it was ridiculous. Muslims would never do such a thing! Muslims do good and forbid evil. They were VERY nice people. So, of course, this caused me no trouble because it was so obviously a lie, a thought. I had no doubt in my mind about that.
Fast forward two years. An atheist girl I was talking to in class said, "There's no God, right?" Something hit me at that moment. I quickly dismissed it. I knew there was a God. Being shy and not wanting to argue, I just said meekly, "I don't know." Then I told myself I did know there was a God. Yet, at the same time, I realized that it was just something I had been told to believe and had not being justified.
Also, around that time, I was expected to learn more and more about the religion. I had been told, after accepting evolution fully, that it was not compatible with the religion, at least so far as human evolution is concerned. I don't remember what my opinion was at that point. I think I believed that everything did evolve except humans. I also learned about stoning, and finally, the truth about cutting the hands of thieves. I don't remember my reaction. I wasn't that bothered that much by stoning at first, although I was a bit surprised by it. I don't know why. I had a very primitive sense of justice at that age. Eye for an eye. Very aggressive towards wrong-doers. I also read about the death penalty prescribed for those who leave Islam, although I was never sure what the consensus was on that. It seemed so extreme that even after reading it in this "well-known" book, according to my father, I questioned whether Muslims would really advocate such a thing. Indeed, the issue turned out to be somewhat more complex than it was portrayed in the book. I'm still not sure what the general consensus is on that, but yes, there is such a death penalty in that consensus. I'm still not exactly sure when it is supposed to be applied. For anyone critical of Islam at all?
It also dawned on me that it was unjust for Allah to punish people forever in hell just for a lack of belief. And when I thought about it more and more, it became clear that it was not only just a little bit unjust. It is mind-blowingly, horrifically, insanely unjust. It is incredible that so few people notice anything strange about the idea of hell. It is unbelievable to think that I had never even thought of it in this light until I was 13! Perhaps, it is easier for Muslims who have never known a non-believer to accept such a thing. Half of my family and most of my friends were most likely doomed to suffer eternally! This was unacceptable to me.
At any rate, things were starting to add up. It really WASN'T clear that Allah existed. And as such, it made the idea of hell all the more horrific and unfair. I renounced Islam in my mind. Then I repented. All this time, I had thought it was Shaytan trying to plant doubts in my mind, and fought against it. I remember those very remorseful prayers.
After wavering back and forth, increasing in unbelief, as the Quran puts it, I drifted into unbelief, telling no one about it. My four reasons were hell, amputation for thieves, stoning for adulterers, and the execution of apostates. It is my opinion that when a Muslim learns of these things, it is his MORAL OBLIGATION to leave the religion. They are also things that mainstream/moderate Muslims don't even argue with. They are well-established. I also don't care how great the rest of the religion is (which, it is not, although I disagree with Ali Sina about there being NOTHING good about it). If just one of these things is part of it, that would turn it from a beautiful religion in to a shameful, immoral, hideous one. These are irrelevant details of religion to most Muslims, but to me they are defining characteristics because they demonstrate a truly mind-blowing lack of compassion. Stoning is an incredibly SICK, SICK, SICK punishment. I am disgusted that anyone would approve of it, let alone actually carry it out. This cannot be forgiven, no matter how nice and polite Muslims are otherwise. They have blood on their hands. And this is why people like me and Ali Sina are so passionate about opposing Islam. Things like this are extremely upsetting, and even though I disagree with him on so many things, it is completely understandable for someone to be driven close to the point of insanity when faced with such barbarity. Sometimes, when I think of these things--real live stoning actually happening, the blood gushing out, the ruthless mob--I feel like I can't breath under the weight of such insane cruelty and the thought that my own family implicitly approves of these things, since they are Muslims. That's why I am proud to be Islamophobic. Why would I not be afraid of such cruelty?
I then become a deist, at first towards the agnostic side, and then a full-fledged deist until I was 20, after falling for a speech my father gave about why he thought there was a God. Needless to say, the existence of a God does not imply that it is Allah or the God of the Bible. At age 20, I admitted that the argument from design is just an argument from lack of imagination. The fact that we do not understand why something is so does not imply that God must have done it. So, I called myself an agnostic, until now. I have recently declared myself to be an atheist because, for one thing, if there isn't a God, there may as well not be one because, at least until we die, it would make no discernible difference. And secondly, there are billions of things that I couldn't disprove, but I don't need to take the time to acknowledge that they might possibly exist. Maybe Leprechauns are real, too, after all.
Recently, I have also been finding more about Islam from Ali Sina, and answering Islam and I have discovered that it also rests on a very questionable historical foundation. I think most critics of Islam have been very inept. Islam is really very easy to bring down, but the relevant hadith have been ignored. The hadith are a gold-mine for critics of Islam, but sadly, it took me a very long time before I read the ones that expose Muhammed as the immoral man he was. One of my favorites is the one where Muhammed reveals his clear disrespect towards women, calling them deficient in intelligence and religion, and that most of the people in hell are women. However, this is not a surprise for a religion that thinks stoning people is anything close to being justice.
So that's my story. I guess I am living happily ever after (although, it's clear from what I said at the beginning, that this story isn't quite over yet).
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