Writing in English?! not used to it and my English is not that good. However I will copy and paste a comment I made on an English blog. It is about my personal experience with religion.Not really complete and wrote it feeling sleepy.
You may find many grammatical errors:no:

My parents were Muslims but I have never been a Muslim since my childhood. I have never believed in God. Probably because of the Salafists (also called Wahabists) whom I knew at a very early age and who introduced to me the most violent and stupid set of so-called values and teachings that contradicted my inherent good. Another possible reason was my mother's stories about hell that I was told every night before sleeping :-)
I thought my mother was crazy. And I came to questioning the presence of God and all these things associated with him when I was 6 or 7 years old. I denied the presence of the merciless god (whom I could not see or touch like the hell mom preached about).
He was a violent god because:
-He would put me in hell fire if I lie to my younger brother!.
-He wanted me to pray 5 time a day without reasons I could understand. Why the hell should I do that?! Common ready reasons could not persuade me.
-He wanted me to love him more than anything else! and that was impossible. How can I love him more than my remote-controlled car and video games!
-Dad wanted me to sleep early and mom wanted me to keep tidy and I was fed up. Now somebody called Allah that I don't see comes to ask me for more. Could not accept that.

This is how I slowly became an atheist (of course i did not know there was the word "atheist" or its Arabic "ملحد").

When I was 16 or so, I made fun of my uncle Ayman when once he was praying in our house. And asked him a lot of questions about his god that he could not answer. He admitted beliefs had nothing to do with logic but insisted that I should accompany him to the mosque for some time and preached that I would find a peace of mind he did not see in me.
I accepted because of the respect I had towards him. He was an intelligent man and I thought that "let me give it a try".

Now I recognize that I really needed some spiritual relief at that time.

Ayman asked me to feel god while praying! and to try not think of anything else. I did that and liked it.

Now the above statements say that I could believe in God only when I disabled logical thinking for a while.

Day after day, I became obsessed with praying and fasting. I prayed at least 5 hours aday continuously for more than a year during which I was fasting day on and day off and slowly became a SUFI(did not know that there was something called Sufism). I was closing my room's door, talking to God, feeling his answers. I also memorized the whole Quran during that time.

Day after day, I was feeling that I am becoming God's special friend! And later I discovered that most Sufis feel the same.

And one day, while praying, I asked God: Who is better now me or Mohammed? Am I not your best friend now?...etc..
This time,I did not feel any answers.

I still don't know why it happened, but when I woke up the other day, I felt I am very far away from righteousness and that I became as crazy as others.

Suddenly, I abandoned prayers, fasting and everything that has to do anything with religion. And I was to become an atheist again.

I remained in this transitional space for sometime feeling very bad (left God whom I loved very much) and recognized that the effects of the brainwashing I did to myself during Sufism were very very hard to reverse without killing the emotional part of myself. I became a man nearly devoid of emotions. And this new personality change expressed itself in my interaction with people around me .Later on, my friends could easily describe me beginning with "heartless".

Later after I felt need for belief, and after reversal of the insane changes caused by Sufism, I thought that I should be fair towards what I inherited from my parents as I was fair towards everything else.

I had to first check if there was really no lamp to lighten the room I was born in. Maybe somebody else played with it or turned it off!.

I would have left the whole religion (room) once and for all if I knew that there was no lamp. There are other rooms I could try.
And here started researching the real basis of this religion called Islam. And found the lamp. This device illuminates gradually and its button cannot be pressed, rather, it looks like the volume controller of a music set. I found that it has been turned off immediately after the death of Mohammed. And with 1400 years of no usage, people got used to it and thought they were enlightened while there were actually hallucinating visually like a mentally sick blind man.

I am still researching.

To summarize my view of what Mohammed gave my Arab ancestors:
I think of his lamp comprised of two main parts:
1-Social, Economical, and Political reforms formulated to match the corresponding problems Arabs had before his coming.
2-God asking the Arabs at that time to thank him for what he sent with Mohammed and hence praying and pilgrimage etc...

Nowadays, I think of Mohammed solely as an Arab reformer who had a divine message from God that perfectly matched his own attitudes towards Mecca's problems. And I don't like the word ISLAM as it is a term developed by his early followers to reduce the only-basic and can-be-improved ideas he came with into a name to exploit for political and other reasons. I love him as secular think-tanks in turkey love their Ataturk. I call my religion Mohammedanism. I think that all other believers in other religions are Muslims (the word not the term). They believe in one God. Mohammedanism is the Arab version of the one divine message as I see it.

I will review this post later and add or clarify things that may come to my mind.