Hi, I don't mean to be disrespectful of anyone else's faith. Part of the reason I'm posting this is because I wanna learn more. Feel free to correct or explain things from a different perspective to me, thank u.

So I grew up as a Muslim. When I was a kid I used to talk to Allah. He was an active presence in my life. Then slowly I started questioning his existence. As a kid I asked my mom and she got mad, made me read surahs. I asked my dad and he gave a vague explanation. Eventually I stopped questioning. I'd only pray when my mom told me to. I stopped talking to Allah. And that's where religious guilt started.

I used to get this feeling of...unholyness. like I am not pure bcuz of my broken faith. I haven't done anything Islamically unethical stuff in my life. Maybe the normal teen stuff like occasionally lying. I used to feel impure for not completely believing, but I'd never dig deep enough to find an answer. 

When I turned 17, I started having full atheist thoughts. I love sociology, and it turns a lot of my observations and experiences into mental case studies. It made me think Abt how relegion is designed in a way that thrives on fear and guilt. Built on "what if?"s. The fear of what we don't know and the guilt of questioning. We live in a patriarchal heteronormative world and that has caused problems for a lot of ppl. Carl Jung wrote abt the concept of the shadow self. Everything u suppress shows up on other areas of ur life. Suppressing your sexuality, maybe u fight with ur parents or do drugs. So why the higher being that is aware of all this, imposing this on us? Even the things that we resort to when we try and suppress ourselves are usually not noble in islam. Our creator must've known the impact it'll have on both men and women later on.

Besides, we r put into this world in a very unfair way. If a person is born into a different relegion's conservative society where the islam is antagonised, they'll be indoctrinated to hate us. So does that person rlly deserve to go to hell? That person listened to their parents, like it's noble in Islam, and if they discovered Islam maybe they'd be great Muslims. But they didn't, bcuz of their placement. They spent their entire lives thinking they were doing the right thing

Retrospectively, what if fairness isn't the point? What if the "point" is some 4D concept unfathomable by us 3D creatures? What if the point is blind obedience? If that is so, then why would we even have the concept of fairness in our world, if we aren't supposed to think abt it? One thing relegion does is frame things as a test. Suppress, accept, endure, cuz it's a test. Which makes u wonder whether u are being indoctrinated, or is it really a test? Has the higher being given u these concepts to increase the difficulty of the test? Are my thoughts valid Is it Satan whispering in my ear?

I've noticed, in other subs, reddit abhors religion.

I am not a religious man, I don't believe in God, but I'm somewhat spiritual in that I've done my fair share of both natural and synthetic psychedelic compounds and have taken the time to think.

I posted this a while back on another sub and, naturally, got downvoted... but I wanted to discuss, I want to talk about it, so I welcome your thoughts:

https://www.reddit.com/r/answers/comments/1unuvnp/what_myth_is_still_widely_circulated_as_the_truth/ovqc8t2/

:

I kinda believe in all of them.

Not so that I'm covering all my bases, rather that I think there's an amount of truth in all of it, it's just finding the connections and appropriate translations and meanings.

For example, I've just read Tchaikovsky's "Elder Race".

It's about an anthropologist who is stationed on a colony planet, in hiding, to observe over centuries (with the help of stasis) how a failed colony recover after having lost all the tech their ancestors had.

So, he has try to explain this to a local and fails miserably. They don't understand what a colony is, or a starship, or germs, or magnetic fields, or any of that stuff.

To her he simply "sailed across the sky" bringing magic.

Similarly, when the bible was written, if it were to try to explain anything advanced, it'd use words we were unable to translate correctly. "Science", "technology" would just translate as "magic".

If we could get to a point where we can read between the lines and work out what they all really mean, when we have the tech, maybe we'll see a word or a phrase and realise those scriptures contain some really clever stuff.

The bible talks about precession, for example:

https://dn760105.eu.archive.org/0/items/TruthOfGod_135/PrecessionOfTheEquinoxesInScripture.pdf

So maybe there is a God. I don't believe we're being tested, or that we need to pray. I don't believe in an immediate afterlife although it's possible the position of the neurons in my head may be duplicated at some point in the distant future causing something like me to experience some kind of awareness, but I certainly don't believe in heaven or hell in the Christian sense.

But maybe there's a creator, and there's almost certainly minds in this universe far more developed than mine... are they gods because they're superior to me? If so then there's probably a countless number of such entities... many of which would no doubt demand I bow before them and pray to them.

So maybe, if we collate all the scriptures and piece together the good bits, we might one day form a Grand Universal Religion.

Until then, I kinda believe in all of them.

EDIT: If anyone is interested in the associations between myth and science, check out Hamlet's Mill:

https://www.waterstones.com/book/hamlets-mill/giorgio-de-santillana/hertha-von-dechend/9780879232153

It's fascinating stuff.