NameWajid Yaseen
Statement

Glad to be here and to have found you as an organisation....my name\'s Wajid and I suppose I should give you some background on myself.....I was brought up as a Muslim child.....the earlier recollection I have of my doubt in Islam was when I became curious about the hearing range of dogs at the age of about 9 (the neighbour had an alsation and blew on a dog whistle I couldn\'t hear)....Ii remember going to the library and discovering that dogs had 4 rings in their inner ears as opposed to humans who have 3 hence the greater frequency range....I started to think about how it would be to transplant the inner ear of a dog into my own and became fixated with the idea....after a while I realised that if I was to do this, I would be tampering with god\'s perfect creation and to do so would be utterly blasphemous....I became quite anxious about these thoughts and went to the mosque to pray for some sort of forgiveness I suppose although it\'s hard to recall exactly the reason....was to offload anxiety but as a child it was difficult to form clear thoughts....I remember going into the sajda position in prayer and I remember constant voices in my head - 4 rings, 4 rings....I took this to be the voice of shataan - the devil.....and he could reach me in god\'s house.....was absolutely terrifying but that moment was the critical turning point....if shataan could reach me there, then either god wasn\'t as powerful as i had been told he was OR he didnt care about me and my safety.....either way the seed of question and doubt crept in.....my atheism grew from that point onwards till today where I\'m thankfully free of the pernicious barbs of religion and free of the malevalence that is Islam....I\'ve grown up with quite turbulent battles with my Asian friends about the god concept and thankfully have broken free of many of the chains that tied me to dogma and superstition.....when returning to my family (they\'re in Manchester, I\'m in London) I\'m constantly amazed at the backwardness of Islam and quite agree with the excellent Richard Dawkins that religion forced on children is a form of child abuse....I\'ll continue to inject the spirit of questioning and debate in my nephews and neices with the hope that they\'ll also break free of the noxious teachings of organised religion and see it for the surreal nonsense that it really is...please keep me informed of any meetings and discussions you decide to hold in london....will be good to meet up with like-minded individuals...