Some good news
Offline http://ex-muslim.org.uk/members/uk/
Some extracts:
The second shock came when I read the Quran in a language I understood, English. For years, I was reading it and trying to memorize it in Arabic without understanding a single word accept maybe "Allah" and "Muhammad".
I had no idea what I was reading. But through my curiosity I decided to read it from front to back, Surah after Surah. This was meant to be God's word so what kind of a religion was I following in which I didn't even know what my God said to me.
Again, the same thing happened. The more I read, the more I was disturbed.
I found the Quran to be repetitive, full of ugly and unnecessary threats, intimidating and rather boring. My life changed during that period forever. I began to find it pointless praying to Allah when I didn't even know what I was saying to him since just like the Quran, I read Namaz in a language I didn't understand.
One day my friend was giving dawah to me and telling me about the story of Buraq, the flying donkey; as he was telling me about it, I realised there and then that I didn't really believe in Islam. A few months later, I fully apostatised from Islam.
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It may have been a good thing you didn't understand the language when you were younger. You may have never recovered. In the end all of these religious books read like this- "#@%$#@%$ don't think ^%$#@$$".
I'm glad you made it out.
I really don't hear too many stories of Muslims leaving their faith. Most of us Americans are very ignorant of any Eastern religions. We mainly see religion in two groups- christians, and then the rest of the fanatical nutbags ( maybe excluding some far-eastern cults that are seemingly tranquil ). Since most of us don't have too much relation with Muslims on a personal level, we are at the mercy of our sometimes ridiculously biased media press and their portrayed images. For example, if I were to close my eyes and you were to suddenly say to me the words- "Allah, Quran, Muslum, Nation, Islaam.". - I see a mob of lunatics with machine guns, towels on their heads, black cloth over their mouth, and jumping up and down chanting "Death to Tony Jeffers the American swine".
We just don't picture people in those religions ever being capable of leaving their profound faiths.
Good for you !
"...but truth is a point of view, and so it is changeable. And to rule by fettering the mind through fear of punishment in another world is just as base as to use force." -Hypatia
Nah, I was just quoting some of the people on the site.
I was just so pleased to see an organisation that is specifically devoted to ex-Muslims.
I'd seen some before but they were not so well organised.
As a fierce critic of Islam it's great to get this sort of confirmation that humans are humans everywhere - that muslims themselves bridle at their situation. Unfortunately many of the comments indicate that too many of these former muslims remain in the closet in fear of violence, threats, abuse or familial excommunication. Threats of hellfire are obviously everywhere. Funny to think their minds are as tortured as ours are and by exactly the same lies.
What a sad thing fundamentalist religion is. A crime against our collective humanity. I think the best thing we could do is to give every muslim woman a free university degree, something with the chance of a good job at the end of it.
"Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. The rest is poetry, imagination." Max Planck
"ours"?
Mind you, I faced some rather unnecessary tortures in my adolescent years, but I grew out of them. edit; Most of them weren't even based on religion so much as lingering American puritanism and asinine social conformity.
“A meritocratic society is one in which inequalities of wealth and social position solely reflect the unequal distribution of merit or skills amongst human beings, or are based upon factors beyond human control, for example luck or chance. Such a society is socially just because individuals are judged not by their gender, the colour of their skin or their religion, but according to their talents and willingness to work, or on what Martin Luther King called 'the content of their character'. By extension, social equality is unjust because it treats unequal individuals equally.” "Political Ideologies" by Andrew Heywood (2003)