I'm interested in your back story about what led to your current views.
I grew up in Saudi Arabia, where I spent almost all of the first two decades of my life. Until late 2011, I was a highly conservative Muslim with beliefs that were typical of someone with that worldview where I lived: anyone who heard about my religion but didn't follow it was destined to Hell for eternity, homosexual sex should be forbidden by law and punished severely, women should be subordinate to men in marriages and family matters, etc.
I joined RF in May 2011 to debate people into believing in Islam, and I thought the arguments I posted were watertight. Ironically, after participating in debates here, I started having doubts about many of the beliefs I had previously held as unshakeable truths:
• On RF, I saw that many atheists, Buddhists, Pagans, Hindus, and various other groups I believed would go to Hell for eternity or were following their whims (because they didn't follow my religion) were decent, friendly people who welcomed me here, even though they knew what I believed about them. Most of them weren't fixated on hating Muslims like I thought they were, nor did most of them even care what religion I believed in as long as I respected that they were also free to have their own beliefs. Pagans weren't a bunch of hedonistic idol worshipers. Hindus didn't mindlessly worship cows or look down on me for being a Muslim. In fact, one of my oldest friends from this forum was a Hindu. Buddhists didn't hate Muslims by default.
There were also many LGBT people here who befriended me, and again, I saw that they weren't sex-obsessed and that their lives didn't revolve around sex, contrary to the oversimplifications and stereotypes I had believed in. I met many intelligent, knowledgeable women here, including some who were full-time professors and scientists—certainly a far cry from the stereotype that women were "less rational" or "less logical" than men.
I started asking myself questions and having excruciating doubts because, back then, I believed that I would also go to Hell if I lost faith. "Is this what I would see if what I believed about those people for all of these years were true? And if my beliefs about them were wrong, what else were my beliefs wrong about?"
• I also got into some debates about evolution and realized, contrary to what I had believed for my entire life up until that point, that the theory hadn't been "scientifically rejected" or "refuted." I struggled for months to reconcile that fact with my belief in creation and humanity's descent from Adam and Eve, and those months were extremely difficult because of what I said above regarding going to Hell due to losing faith. Sometimes I had nightmares about Hell, too, and it didn't help that the country I lived in officially had the death penalty as the punishment for "apostasy." As far as I was concerned back then, my fate both in this world and the afterlife hinged on answering those doubts and making sure I didn't lose my faith.
I spent months looking up "refutations" of the theory, responses to those questions from imams and clerics, etc. I found none of them convincing; I only found excessive reliance on texts and scripture without much regard for science. The idea was that if religion and science conflicted, then religion—being of a divine rather than human source, unlike science—should automatically be prioritized and science dismissed wherever the conflict occurred.
I also never found a convincing answer for why decent people should go to Hell, let alone for eternity, just for having a different religion. My best and only (offline) friend at the time was a Christian, and the thought that he would suffer the most horrible tortures after death merely for having the "wrong religion" haunted me only slightly less than did my worry about my own doubts.
The more I looked at the society around me, read the core texts of the religion, listened to Friday speeches at the mosque, and turned to clerics for answers to the questions I had, the more I was repelled both morally and intellectually, and the more questions I was left with.
• After months of doubts, unconvincing answers, and extreme worry about Hell, I finally came to terms with leaving religion. That was in mid-late 2012. I became an agnostic, although I still had a lot of lingering worry about ending up in Hell and being tortured for eternity for what I had just done. Around that time, two Saudi bloggers,
Hamza Kashgari and
Raif Badawi, were arrested on charges of "blasphemy" and "apostasy," which could lead to capital punishment. While that terrified me and made me even more extremely cautious about revealing anything about my own beliefs to people I didn't fully trust, it also solidified my view that I had made the right decision by no longer subscribing to the same kind of worldview that enabled such horrendous treatment of people for exercising their freedom of thought and speech.
I was highly impressed by what I saw as the "rationality" of vocally atheist figures like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens, and I became a fan of them and a supporter of "New Atheism" for several years, especially when I saw how fiercely they defended secularism and stood against things like blasphemy laws and theocracy. I was quite anti-religious during that time, and a lot of that was accompanied by bitterness I had harbored due to my own experience with living as a closeted ex-Muslim atheist in conservative societies.
This gradually changed around 2021, mainly after I had been conscripted and met many people from all sorts of different backgrounds in the military. One of the moments that caused me to reflect the most was when an illiterate conscript from the countryside told me that his "biggest dream" was to learn how to read and write and that he wanted to be able to read the Qur'an without help. I started thinking how I would have ended up if I had been born in those same conditions—poverty, meager access to basic infrastructure and sanitation, and community pressure to be outwardly religious—and eventually concluded that those factors played a much larger part in forming the beliefs of the vast majority of people than whether they were "rational," "logical," etc.
I think that many people who congratulate themselves on being "rational" are essentially congratulating themselves for being born at the right time in the right place and in the right circumstances. This also applies to some who see most or all people who lived in past historical periods as "savage," "evil," etc. I generally see that as a simplistic viewpoint: I'm more interested in what could make an average and normal person believe or do terrible things and in how that could be prevented or minimized than in writing off everyone who has harmful beliefs as some anomaly or aberration of human nature, or as someone who merely isn't "progressive" enough as if that alone could cover the large range of factors that shape most people's worldviews.
I'm still an atheist, but I'm no longer anti-religious, as I believe that religions, like other types of worldviews (e.g., philosophies, political ideologies, etc.), are highly diverse. I think what matters the most is how people treat others and what values they have, not whether they're religious or irreligious, or whether they're atheists or theists. I have also experienced the value of many religious teachings first-hand, as I mentioned in my previous post, and think it would be an unnuanced, overgeneralizing take to dismiss religion wholesale as "irrational," "superstitious," "harmful," etc. I have also seen many atheists exhibit prejudice, cognitive biases, and hatred like many people who have other beliefs do; I see these as human failings that are not unique to any one group or worldview.
I tried to condense some of this response so that it wouldn't be even longer, but I also didn't want to leave out central details. I hope it isn't too long and that it sufficiently answers your question!
