Salam everyone
I'm not new to Islam. I converted many years ago.
I'll give a brief background of myself: My family is a conservative Evangelical Christian family from the west coast. I became an atheist after I read Richard Dawkin's book titled "The God Delusion" and I was convinced God did not exist. This was a common trend among my friends too--this person had much influence in the culture. At the time, this book's arguments seemed extremely well formed and sound. As such, I began joining atheists in online debate against theists. I became familiar with the works of Sam Harris, Hitchens, Dennet. These are other popular atheists--and at the time, they the only vocal atheists with a popular presence. I went to college with a Muslim and we'd have many debates on atheism vs theism. Overtime, I remember him telling me that I should look at both sides of the argument. I am debating online theist laymen and that I should be reading the works of academic atheists and theists--the postings of the laymen are nowhere near the academic debates on religion. So I started doing this and overtime, the arguments against theism I've known have been shown to be poor arguments--even by academic atheists! As I started reading the works of theists, I began to slowly lose my faith atheism. It didn't seem so clear cut as the popular atheists made it. It was too ambiguous and it was not apparent at all that God doesn't exist.
One major thing I've gained from this research is I've gotten myself well situated with academic philosophy and critical analysis. This will carry on with me for life. After a while, I saw that The proposition [God does not exist] is itself a faith about the nature of reality. And as I became more and more convinced by the theist arguments, I became a theist. However, I began researching religions. I had more of curiosity of the eastern religions so I started to focus initially on them-- I definitely looked heavily into Wicca, Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Baha'.
So much more research took place, and ultimately (years later), I became Muslim. The funniest thing about my conversion to Islam is that it was catalyzed by the website "AnsweringIslam". This is a website that is critical of Islam and attempts to show contradictions in the Quran or scientific errors in the Quran. There are so many of those websites, but the one that I was using was answeringIslam. I was trying to convince myself Islam was false. Ultimately, through the Islamic responses to answeringislam, Islam and the Quran gained more credibility. I was noticing that Muslims always refer to the original Arabic--so I looked into learning Arabic--nothing significant, but just enough to be able to understand word-for-word translations and be more careful with the Arabic. I found the Quran gained so much credibility and so did Islam after my studies.
This is just a short explanation. This was a long journey and nothing happened overnight. This was all a gradual transition back to theism and then to Islam. This happened over 10 years.
But over those years, I've learned many skills in critical analysis, reasoning, and textual criticism.
I'm not new to this forum either! I'm not much of a poster on forums. I used this forum to search certain alleged contradictions in the Quran and to see your responses.
What prompted me here first is an ex-Muslim who posted on ShiaChat (this is a shia forum, although I'm not Shia, I do also check out that forum--I look at many forums) about 13:3 being a contradiction with science and so on. I noticed that the responses to him were very weak, I also noticed that online no one mentioned double fertilization before. There are usually websites like "miracles of the Quran" that cover this, but I didn't see it covered. So I created an account and debating with him on ShiaChat. Ultimately, he stopped responding. I also looked at this forum and still, I see no one answered 13:3 here! So I just copied and pasted from what I wrote on ShiaChat on here. And then I went on all the other Islamic forums I know and posted the same thing. This wasn't talked about enough by Muslims, so I wanted to make sure that each forum had this information. I did not want to be quiet about this because many anti-Muslims will keep on using this to show a contradiction, I want to ensure Muslims have the tools to defend Islam. That's what brought my here as a poster
