I, a son of a Jordanian mother and a Swedish father, grew up and experienced life from two different cultures, I grew up and lived my early years of childhood in Sweden, a country known throughout the world for its freedom, for its race, age and sex equality and it’s separation of religion and state.

The rest of my childhood took place in Saudi Arabia, a country known for its separation of the two sexes and for its extreme religious rulings.

Booth of these two different contradicting cultures have participated in forming the adult that I am today, their affects can be clearly seen on me from my outfit, music taste, food taste to my personal opinions and religious believes.

These cultures made me into a new individual, an individual that didn’t belong to any one of those cultures.

I have always felt different, it all started on a Christmas Eve, I was only three years old, my mom asked me not to accept any gifts from my relatives, when I asked her why? She just answered me by saying ‘Because we are different, we don’t celebrate what they believe in’.

I didn’t really understand what she meant, at the age I was at I didn’t care much either, I was given a nice blue truck toy as a Christmas present and I couldn’t resist taking it for some weird opinion my parents had, for me a toy was a toy and it seemed like a lot of fun.

As I grew older I gradually started to realize the differences between me and the other kids around me, being served with special food was one of the early signs that made me realize that I am different.

I remember whenever we were invited to coffee, a pick nick or a party, I was always allowed to eat only from a special plate, the cookies or doughnuts were usually homemade, old, hard and dry, mean while everybody else ate from the fresh, colorful, juicy once, it never seemed fair to me nor did the excuse that we don’t eat foods that are cooked in that kind of oil seem reasonable.

When I moved to Saudi Arabia I didn’t feel different any more; everybody celebrated the same events and ate from the same food which seemed fairer to me.

I have never asked myself why people behave the way they did, probably I was too young to bother think or find answers to such big questions.

Just like all other children, I was programmed to believe whatever I was told by my parents. If my parents told me not to stand close to the edge or in the lake with the crocodiles I will have to listen to them, if I try to experiment how true are their claims I wouldn’t be standing here in front of you today.

But in a way or another I convinced myself that all these people can’t be wrong.

I grew up and adapted to the way society behaved, stopped wearing shorts, started praying five times a day, started to understand how society reasoned its behaviors and started to form my own opinions.

Opinions that are based on what I was told to be ‘the words of God’.

Among many other believes I believed that there is a person known as Satan who goes around people whispering them with negative thoughts that provoke hate, violence, sex etc… if I listen to him, I disobey god and by doing that I shall be condemned to eternity in hell.

I also believed that my positive thoughts and feeling are made by an angel sitting on my right shoulder and the negative ones are made by a devil on my left shoulder, and they record everything I do, if I do good things I would be rewarded in this life and in the afterlife, and the opposite happens if I do bad things.

Back at that time, it wasn’t possible to see how god was punishing the disobeyers, global media was filtered, internet and satellites were banned and everybody around me was a Muslim, but we were told through the news that there are frequently volcanoes, floods, storms, forest fires and other natural disaster in countries where people disobey god’s orders.

At the same time we the believers seemed to live a happy safe life compared to them, and everything that we gained through my father’s hard work at the university seemed to be a reward from god.

So in a way or another it seemed like reliable evidence that we are right and they are wrong, and most importantly we are on the right path to heaven.

My father’s contract with the university he worked in has ended and it was time we go back to Sweden.

Everything was different, hardly anybody believed in god, students of different sexes were not separated at school, male and female teachers worked in the same rooms with closed doors, gay people held hands in parks and showed love to each other and nobody did anything about it.

I realized immediately that these are the people my religious teachers were referring to as god’s disobeyers; I started to wonder why isn’t god punishing them? We are obeying god’s rules yet they are living a better life than we are, that isn’t fair.

That question raised other questions with it; will I be punished if I behave like they do? What if god didn’t really exist? How do I know if god really exists? Is there a way to know if god really exists?

Slowly I started to adapt to the new society that contradicts with everything that I was taught earlier in my life and realized that there is nothing really wrong with what they are doing.

But the question was not answered; the consequences of taking the wrong decision are extreme so I needed to know for sure, does god really exist?

My seek of truth has started; I wasn’t able to see or predict how my journey is going to end, but one thing is for sure, I had a lot of questions that needed to be answered.

The Imam of the local mosque was visiting my father one day and I took advantage of the situation and asked him a couple of questions.

The Imam seemed to be sure about all his answers which gave me a feeling that he knows what he is talking about, he insisted that there must be a purpose for our existence, that there must be a creator for every creation, that there should be some sort of authority that punishes the evil or guilty and rewards the good.

He then referred to some verses from the holy book as evidence or support of what he is claiming without questioning the credibility of the holy book.

The answers he gave were not backed up by any sort of reliable empirical evidence, they might sound reasonable or correct but that doesn’t mean that they are true!

I insisted that he proves to me the existence of god using reliable evidence, he tried over and over but all he managed to do is to raise more questions on the reliability of his holy book and its history.

These answers were very similar to the once I have received earlier in my life by Imams in Saudi Arabia and Jordan, it seemed kind of convincing, two different people agree so much on a given topic in such detail although they have never meet, they seemed so sure about their answers as if they have seen the truth with their own eyes.

However, the Imam has managed to convince me that scientific theories keep on changing the whole time, what seems to be true to us today might not be true tomorrow and that is usually the case, so we shouldn’t rely and base our faith on them.

Plus, we cannot reach the absolute truth about god’s existence, through science man will never reach the ultimate truth, 100% error free truth, there are always uncertainties and no matter how small they are, they are still there.

When I confronted scientific people with the same questions, I was generally answered with ‘I don’t know’, most of them were honest about it, none of them claimed to know the whole absolute truth.

I got different answers; each one had his own understanding of the world, which in a way or another made me feel that they weren’t sure about their answers or at least the majority of them have to be wrong.

How can there be different scientific conclusions when we only have only one truth?

I was told that there is no scientific evidence what so ever that supports the existence of god, but this doesn’t mean that god doesn’t exist, the absence of evidence of something’s existence does not prove its inexistence!

If I have never seen a green rabbit in my life does not mean that there is no such thing as a green rabbit, so after all, god might exist even though we have no evidence that supports his existence.

I didn’t really get the answers I want to hear, they all had opinions limited to specific fields in science and I had to investigate more in order to come to a more precise conclusion because although science is a realistic understanding of our world it is a very deep, confusing and a hard to grasp subject.

It didn’t take a lot of effort to find contradictions between science and religion.

There are contradictions from the age of the universe, the time taken for the creation of our universe to the origin of mankind.

The Quran, Bible and the Torah all state that god created the world in 6 days, which science has proven wrong, today we know that the our world is a result of a 14 billion years old process known as the big bang.

The Quran, Bible and the Torah also state that Adam and Eve are the fist two Human beings on earth, which science has also proven wrong, today we know that Humans have evolved from an ape like mammal who himself has also evolved from a previous creature, this process is known to us today as evolution.

When I confront religious people with these scientific facts they either ignorantly claim that there is no proof or evidence that supports them, and claim that those are just theories, not more nor less.

Or they will try to interpret the verses in a different way or claim that it is just something symbolic and not to be taken literarily.

I have also experienced people who claim that scientific theories and researches such us the big bang theory and the theory of evolution are done by biased parties and funders looking for ways to back up their own agenda.

Now that to me sounds very silly, why would anyone do that and what agenda are they talking about, atheism isn’t an organization, atheists do not go with their kids every Friday or Sunday to a Church or a Mosque, they don’t have any commandments or goals that they have to accomplish or fulfill, atheists are just people that accept reality as it is.

So far, my journey has brought up more questions than it has answered.

Why would god lie to us or tell us something that we don’t need to know?

The way I see it is that finding the truth is a lot harder process than proving it, once a scientist finds the truth in the field that he is researching, it is very easy for him to prove it, religious people already know the truth so why is it so hard for them to prove it? Well, at least prove the scientific theories against them to be false, which they haven’t succeeded at either.

My journey or seek of truth seems endless; It doesn’t seem as if I or anyone else will ever reach the final truth to my question.

Science will keep on developing; in its process it will continue to break down ancient myths and fairy tales, and it will make new discoveries that will crack down previously made once, and there will always be errors and uncertainties.

On the other hand, religious people will keep on interpreting their holy books in different ways and rely on the fact that science cannot prove the inexistence of their god as proof they can’t be proven wrong.

So here I am standing in front of you, confused, not knowing if to allow my life to be governed by irrational religious believes that have been passed on from a generation to the next, that are based on anything but reliable, scientific, empirical, testable evidence, that contradict with the physically testable reality that I know just for the sake of avoiding the infinitely small chances of being condemned to eternity in hell in the so claimed to be next life?

Or should I take the infinitely small risk and live my life freely as a free thinker.

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This is an oral investigation that I will present in front of the class next week, it should be about 10 minutes long and shoul prove complex thinking combined with personal experience.

Comments on the presentation and tips on improving the presentation are highly appreciated.