My name is Brahim and I am 20 years old. I am Algerian (north Africa) and I live in Algiers, which is the capital on the Mediterranean coast. I have a younger brother who lives in another city with my dad while i am living with my mom.
We are financially OK as in lower middle class, so i don't consider my life as hard. I am currently studying Electronics automation in my 3rd year at the USTHB university. I like to surf the net, i learned a lot from the net and it became my heaven. I love video games, epic music and a good book as well as documentaries and movies. Overall i am a huge digital media consumer.
Like most students, i spend the year between the university and the comfort of my home. I don't go out much and rarely socialize in the physical world.
On the other hand, I think a lot. The society where I live is highly conservative and religious, so I am interested for example in the status of individual freedoms in my society, the future of politics, the meaning of life as well as many other things.
I’d like to think of myself as someone who seeks truth and not comfort, because the seductive simplicity of some common answers is usually not enough for me.
Ever since i was a kid i cared a lot about what is the best way to think reliably thus i have developed a big appreciation for logic and i aspire to improve and be as rational and logical as possible. Which however is a hard thing to achieve considering all the tricks our own mind can play on us.
For a while it made me avoid all kinds of feelings, because I was afraid of losing objectivity and straight thinking. At one point, even being a human machine -a very bad name to many- was very appealing to me. But then I grew up a bit more and realized that emotions aren't supposed to be fought. Sometimes, when you need to make an important decision or handle ideas, you just have to keep them under control. Some feelings are in fact simply beautiful and make this world more humanic, like empathy, compassion and love.
I had a different teen experience than my peers, because I was struggling with my feeling. Almost every friend and person i knew was either experiencing love or wishing for it. Being in a relationships was for many of them the meaning of life, but i was proud of successfully shielding myself from that. I can't say i regret it, because the opposite is true. Some of these anti-romance philosophy even maintained over my teen years til presence.
Admiring logical thinking is not exactly a national sport in this part of the world. I, like many others born in the Arab world, especially north Africans, are born in a Muslim family. Even more precisely the Sunni sect of Islam. Growing up in such a conservative, irrational and religiously homogeneous society has huge consequences. For that reason thinking about religion and its claims was for the most part of my life simply not an option. So i postponed thinking about the Faith for as long as i could.
While fastening in the holy Islamic month of Ramadan i broke that hidden rule. That allowed me to not censor my thoughts anymore. I started to think about religion purely rationally and by evidence-based thought. Soon i began to notice how fragile religion is;not just Islam but religion in general.
It's a rule that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but i discovered how religion made a virtue out of faith, believe things that lack evidence (which, in my opinion, is the only valid way to discover truth). I kept thinking for several days trying to find wisdom in religion until all means were exhausted and i realized that religion is not truth for me anymore.
I became an Atheist. At first i wasn't happy about it. My mind got my heart out of faith kicking and screaming. It took me some time to get comfortable with labeling myself as an Atheist. It was difficult especially after so many years of negative opinions about godless people. I kept telling myself in awe that i am an Atheist, I... AM... AN ATHEIST! Im am one of those who are wrongfully accused of being without a moral compass, murderers, devil worshipers and baby eaters!
Morals! How come I no longer be a moral person according to the religion, when i am as moral as ever. I suddenly realized how immoral it is to behave well just because of fear from god's punishment and not because we simply should behave well.
To conclude, leaving my faith had the most impact on my life so far, and i doubt that i will ever go through such a change again. It would be too dangerous to come out as an atheist in the place where I live, so no one knows that. But I began to look at the world from a different perspective. The meaning of life just got upgraded precisely. Now I know that we are fortunate to be alive and I can fully appreciate how precious life is.
to be continued...