I never really believed despite growing up in a muslim household because my family was pretty lax on religious stuff in early childhood. I just never voiced my opinion because I could somehow tell it would cause problems. I guess indoctrination never took hold because of this.

It got worse later but I didn’t start looking for atheist and exmuslim communities until 17(my father was also very very strict on us using technology). That’s about when I started considering myself an atheist though I had doubts for as long as I can remember.

A reason why I never considered trying to believe in any religion is because they never seem to have any proof. And religion like islam makes it obvious that someone(muhammad in this case) or some group made everything up (or borrowed parts from other religions) for their own benefits.

I guess you could say I’m not really an exmuslim because I never really truly considered myself a muslim at any point despite my background but it’s one of the closer things I can relate to.

Since you asked my reason for leaving, would you be willing to share why you left or still believe?

I have always been the black sheep of my family. Unlike many of my friends and family, I’m a curious person who asked a lot of questions. I always wondered about the contradictions in the Qur’an. But reading the hadiths and tafsirs really did it for me. I realized that Muslims do not read the Hadith and let their Imams explain it to them. I realized that it really is a religion of picking and choosing. You want it to be peaceful? Pick peaceful Hadiths and Quranic verses! But what about those hadiths that say women are not intelligent and other worse hadiths? Well… they choose to ignore them.

When I confronted imams with these problematic hadiths, they told me they weren’t sahih. But isn’t it sahih if a lot of scholars say it is? And the concept of abrogation really did it for me. When you read the Quran, you didn’t know if the verse you were reading was abrogated by another verse.

All in all, religion didn’t make sense and I decided to leave.

The largest … so far**.

**not including reddit