Salam 'alaikum,
Although we are all born Muslims, I was raised Catholic, and later I formally converted to Buddhism before Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala in His Infinate Mercy and Love offered the Truth to me.
As a child I went to Catholic School, and by the time I was a teenager I had found things about Catholic Christianity that did not make sense to me. I used to ask questions like "if God is omnipotent, why must He come to earth in the person of Jesus, and then sacrifice Himself so that our sins can be forgiven? Wouldn't it make more sense for God to forigve the sins of those who cry out to Him in sincere regret and sorrow for their sins?" That question in particular I asked to a well-known priest who told me it was a "Holy Mystery" and that "there are some things you must accept without question, otherwise you don't have faith." I also asked, again concerning the omnopotence of God, why He should divide Himself (as in the Trinity) in order for believers to better connect with Him? Or why we had to drink wine representing the supposed blood of Christ and eat wafers representing the body of Christ in order to "keep our souls full of the Holy Spirit?" It just made no sense at all, especially when priests would be confirming that God is indeed omnipotent and then at the same time would introduce such silly dogmas and contradictions like the need for Christ to "die on the cross" for us to be "saved."
Eventually I just got sick of trying to find the answers to these questions and decided there must be some serious flaws in the doctrines of Christianity and I should remove myself from it.
By this time I had begun to develop some of my own beliefs based on what I considered to be logic and just "what makes sense." Due to already having an interest in things East Asian, I ended up learning about Buddhism, which seemed great to me (except for the fact that Buddhists are either atheistic or they deify the Buddha). I kept to myself the belief in the God of Christianity without accepting anything else of Christianity and decided to take on Buddhism as my religion.
After two years of practicing Buddhism, I had learned that in order for me to call myself "a true Buddhist" I would have to stop believing in God and either accept that there is no god or that Buddha himself was a god (even though I had read direct quotes from him saying that he refused to be deified and had even objected to people making images of him, saying always that he was only a man, and had no more power than any other human). As I began to see the flaws in Buddhism, I first looked into other schools of Buddhism, and then decided the doctrine of Buddhism is itself, like Christianity, flawed.
Although I tried, I could not accept atheism because it just made sense to me that there must be a Creator for everything that exists. Everything in the world (in nature as they say) just seems to work so well and be so precise. It made no sense to me that it was all just chance or coincidence. I had to find something that, like Buddhism, promoted equality of all people, wisdom over war, real peace among humanity and nature, and yet was centred around the same God Who I refused to believe did not exist.
I took another look at Christianity, this time not to practice, but to study. I saw that there were some truths within the religion, and that some of it made sense. However I concluded that Jesus could not have been more than a man, and my study of the Bible only confirmed this, since he never said he was more than "a servant of the Chrildren of Isreal" or "the Son of Man." The idea that he had to be God because he was called the son of God was also refuted since God had called other people His "son" at various times throughout the Bible, and I concluded we are all "children of God" and thus Jesus must be no more "the same substance as God" as any other human.
I began praying to God to show me the Truth, and promised I would accept it no matter what it was called or what I had to do. I knew that if God would send me the Truth, I would never have to do anything I already believed was wrong, and so there was no fear or anxiety in making such a promise.
Mere days after my prayer I went to a Multicultural Festival in Halifax, Nova Scotia, since I had for years been interested in other cultures. I found myself standing in front of a booth called "Islam: The Religion of True Peace."
And the rest, I will save for a future thread should I be asked to continue my story. I would imagine anyone could guess as to what happened next, alhamdulillah.
Wa salam.
