My story begins early in life, but is one that takes a long while in completion. I grew up in a Muslim family and, as you can imagine, was brought up in teachings of the faith. Around the age of 7, my household was one of the typical/common households you could find in the Islamic state of Pakistan in 1990\'s. Domestic violence was a way of living and questioning against it was not an available option to choose. Ever since I can remember, ever since I was taught to pray, I would pray with all my might, on days with tears in my eyes, sitting in my room with the door shut tight but the voices still finding their way through. I would pray for it all to stop! I would pray for it all to be better, and on days I would even pray for my dad to be punished! But never did my prayers reach their destination, or never were they answered. That is of course before I found out that \'God\' had a different view on wife-beating than the one I had.

I do not think I even questioned the existence of God at such an early age but rather rationalised these incidents and the lack of response to my prayers. The one explanation I remember giving myself was that God is testing us and my prayers will be answered when the time is right. But these incidents did achieve in giving me the gift of critical thinking at an early age. A few years on and I realised that praying, on a general note, is not the magical antidote to all of life\'s problem as is so claimed by faith. It was the same, be it something as juvenile as praying for that special something on the birthdays or better grades in school, to things more selfless as praying for my dying grandma, or a sick friend. God seemed to have his own plan no matter what I prayed for, so what was the point in asking me to pray in the first place?! As its said, \'it wasn\'t ment to be\' or \'it was God\'s will\', then why even bother to pray when it does nothing to change the will of God. In fact, praying seemed to be the upmost waste of one\'s time in the name of self gratification, to get the false feeling that you are at least doing something towards the desired goal, and also, when things don\'t work out, be able to say later on \'we prayed all we could but..\' and fill the need to avoid feeling useless for not being able to do anything to help. I was able to observe that prayers did not cure my friend of typhoid, medicine did. That my grades were not effected by the amount of time I spent praying, but on the time I spent preparing. And that it wasn\'t because of God\'s will that my grandma died despite all our prayers and the prayers held on her name by different mosques accounting up to 100\'s of people wishing her good health. It was her inability to survive, even with the medical support, due to the simple nature of old age. So why?! Why place so much emphasis on \'praying\', when it is only wishful thinking in disguise!

But thanks to my strict upbringing, I still did not dare to doubt the absolute religion and its authenticity. Once again I rationalised by telling myself that medicine only exists because God lets it to be, science only progressed because God created the human brain with such capability otherwise it wouldn\'t have been possible. That life and death are indeed in God\'s hand and who am I to question his motives. It was only at the age of 17 that I came across a question which drastically changed my way of reasoning, \"Who\'s God?!\"

I started asking myself, is it my God that is allowing me to live and the world to be as it is? Creating shakes in the water, flooding the land of non-believers through layers of tsunami in an attempt to wake them up to their wrong doings? Or is it the God of the Jew, allowing the special people of the God to prosper and creating havoc in the world for the Muslims? Or is it indeed the Gods/Goddesses of the Hindu, who allowed something as horrific as the Holocaust to take place. Who\'s going to heaven and who\'s going to hell when each believes their God to be true. When paradise is in the mind of the murderers/terrorists in the name of Islam, paradise is the destination of their victims, who\'s right and who\'s wrong? Everything is in God\'s will, ok. But who decides which one\'s!

When you start considering the plausibility that half of the world\'s population is going to hell simply because they were born in a different religion, that their only sin is to have parents belonging to another faith, this alone will get you questioning the credibility of the source. At least that\'s what it did for me. I stopped trying to justify everything through religion, and started questioning religion and faith it\'s self until I came across an answer for myself, which was that religion is a man made phenomenon, there to serve it\'s creator the purpose it was created for. It varies from one person to the other, but for the majority it gives them a false sense of meaning in life, and rules to live by, which gives them a false sense of satisfaction when they obey them. Religion is indeed the biggest lie humans ever came up with, hence here I am..