hello,,
I’m an ex Muslim, born and brought up in Saudi Arabia, in the south (which is even worse).
My family are open minded people (in the lines of Islam), for example they are okay with women having the chose to wear the hijab or not, but they are not “pro-choice”. I was always five steps more liberal than my family and friends.
In school 40% of our subjects ware religion and the other subjects like science god were mentioned 50% of the time. Of course i always was good at religious studies due to the fact i always were looking for ways to understand the ridiculous things that i couldn’t be okay with. And ask myself questions such as why is it if slave runs away from his master he gets killed? Or why the slave women couldn't wear hijab and get hit for doing that? It just didn’t feel right at all.
I hated the fact that if someone gets killed the murderer gets to pay the family off, and if the victim is a woman he pays half of what he would pays for a man. And if the victim is slave he pays half of what he pays for a free person.
i think the fact that i am black and female who lives in SA also contributed to me become an atheist later, in fact i love that i lived in a town in south of SA for the first 18 years of my life, because i was always so different to them (i'm not even Saudi) made the idea of becoming atheist not that hard.
on the day that i became atheist i was googling " how to not be scared of flying" i hate airplanes :), and i came across an article about of how people think because children are on the plane surely god would not allow it to crash and about how they should save their prayers to nature at least it has something to do with it.
It was the first time I read something like that I felt weird about it, you need to understand that the only thing I knew about atheist was from school and that was that they worshiped nature.
So I googled that and came across an atheist forum for ex Muslims I spent hours reading and reading by the end of that day I was an atheist it didn’t even take me 24 hours.
Of course after that came the time of worries if I made the right decision or not which caused me to read more and more and every day after that I knew that I have made the best decision that I could have made for myself and for my life.
I have been happily atheist for 4 years from the age of 16.
(I do apologies for my English I know it’s not perfect I’m working on it :D)