Deconversion Has Been a Real Productivity-Booster

I should have done this years ago!

Disclaimer: posts for the foreseeable future will likely be much shorter. Deconversion after being pretty damn religious makes for quite a lot of material. Super brief introduction for a little context—my name is Laiba Rehman. I am currently a second-year undergraduate Astrophysics student. I live in England, having been raised in Berkshire since I was a toddler after my parents moved here from Pakistan. I think this post doubles as a fairly good introduction to who I am as a person, which is nice because this is my first post!

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Leaving religion is a pretty intense experience, as you may be able to imagine (or be familiar with). Over the course of the past month or so, I have had to “come to terms with” the true deaths and unnecessary suffering of every single human being who has ever lived and died, ever. I put “come to terms with” in speech marks because I do not intend to accept this state of existence.

For most of my life I thought an honest-to-goodness afterlife existed. If a twelve-year-old child died having known nothing but hunger, rape and a loveless existence, she would be duly compensated in heaven with such unimaginable wonders that we’d wish we had lived the sad life she did to receive the same. After all, this life is just a test, and the afterlife is eternal.

I remember a time I was going through a particularly shaky patch in my faith and gave myself permission to conceptualise a true Death. I knew I wouldn’t be able to truly grasp it, but I let myself try, really try, for the first time. The idea that I would have my conscious experience swept out from under me, that everyone and everything I love would one day be unknowable to me and that life would be stolen from me by uncaring existence was overwhelming to the point of genuinely making my heart race. Head held in my hands on my prayer mat, trying to internalise an eternity of nonexistence, nothingness, absence.

If I had gone through the past month in the 14th Century, I genuinely don’t know if I could have pulled through. No cryonics, no nanobots, no gene-editing, no hope, none at all. As it were, the majority of my fury and panic is being redirected into existential risk prevention—but I’ll come back to that in a bit. First, how did I deconvert after over nineteen years of brainwashing?

This wasn’t a sudden process. The falling of the final domino was fairly sudden, but doubts had slowly been building up since around the time I hit double digits. I had had a pretty severe Crisis of Faith last summer, but, embarrassingly, I managed to cling on through some dangerous and arcane combination of, Oh goodness I just can’t do this anymore, let’s come back to this, and, Deconversion is just out of the question regardless, I’m not interested in killing my family with the news, and what would I really gain anyway? Focus on your science and stop philosophising, you have work to do.

When I applied for my summer job I had thought it would be teaching coding and robotics, but it’s really just glorified babysitting. At first I was angry and felt a little cheated—other than the money, I really wanted the coding experience—but then I realised how easy it was when we get lucky with well-behaved children. I finished a couple books on the job and dealt with a lot of admin on my phone. However, there were periods of time where I just had to sit and watch, or do menial tasks like tidying LEGO. This gave me a lot of time to think. Before my job started I had been filling my summer with special relativity, personal knowledge management, cyber security, admin, Outer Wilds… But my job forced me to sit with my thoughts for once. It didn’t take long for the threads of my carefully woven self-delusions to start rapidly unravelling. It reached the point where one week I was genuinely concerned I’d have to be institutionalised—it felt like I was losing my mind, as in actually going crazy, and this is coming from someone who has never so much as taken a day off school for mental health. My Crisis of Faith had taken over my brain. I am a pretty obsessive person about my interests in general, but this was the longest I had been thinking about something for an almost unbroken stretch (and the first time it had been about something negative). Days and days! The first thing to come to mind when I woke up and the last thing stirring dread within me when I went to bed! I dreamt about it! And the whole while I had an impeccable act in place at home. (I was a miserable sock at my summer job though—apologies to my coworkers, though I think I did a decent enough job when playing with the children.)

I would fervently pray every night, pleading and begging with Allah to save me despite being unsure of his existence, saying I could do nothing without his help, and that if he didn’t bring me back I was certainly lost.

I was keeping a document (“Crisis of Faith sandbox”) of some of my haphazard thoughts during the past month. Many of them were practicalities or things to read, but I did have some more journal-esque bullet points. Here is the most egregious of them:

Past midnight so technically 20/08/2025. I feel a little better now than I did earlier but when it’s bad it’s so horrible. The dread is a physical thing pulling down on my trachea. I feel no urge to breathe and each breath is slow and lifeless. In those moments I have to slowly move my hands, which feel disembodied, to open up a video or story demanding enough for me to forget for a while until even the slightest reference brings the dread back. Isn’t it telling that almost all my interests and their communities champion atheism? Isn’t that a sign? This is such embarrassingly Victorian prose but it’s the most accurate way I can express the all-encompassing dread at the moment.

This was genuinely written with zero irony. This state was clearly unsustainable. The last Crisis of Faith had been bad but not inescapable.

I gave myself a grim ultimatum. I had three days, a PDF of an English translation of the Quran, and the power of the internet. Once those three days were up, I had to make a decision one way or another. Even deciding that felt like a death sentence.

Within the first half hour of those three days I was crying on the second floor of a library with an online page on scientific errors in the Quran open in front of me. The holy book I had followed my whole life was full of utter rubbish. Why I had only ever read the English translations I had been given and not read more is beyond me. You’d think reading a version of the Quran that you actually understand would be mandatory, a coming-of-age event, no?

This was followed by many nights of crying myself to sleep, meeting up with friends to cry to them and have a general panic in their direction, overwhelming dread, the works. But even during the worst of it I was waiting for my brain to hurry up and adjust already, because what did I have running through my head, unlike many other atheists?

Death is for real, huh? Well. I’d better do something about that.

I remember being very angry at religion slowing down humanity’s progress, and feeling that I’d wasted so much time due to religion holding me back. (I still feel that way abstractly, just not chemically right this second.) But then I started telling my atheist friends about curing ageing and cryonics and so on, thinking that they just hadn’t thought about these very much before and would immediately be on board once they did. But no! The atheists were almost as bad as religious people with denying these things! Why? What reason did they have? I had the belief I would be able to live forever taken away from me, and now I had a gap to fill, I suppose. I’m now more anti-religion than a lot of my atheist friends. Having consumed rationalist/transhumanist/futurist etc media for many years before my deconversion, I had all these arguments built up in my head that “would totally make sense, if Islam weren’t real”. I remember having a debate with one of my atheist friends and asking why, if they’re truly an atheist, they’re not working on immortality?

(I will sign up for cryonics with Alcor as soon as I can afford it. I genuinely cannot afford it right now. I do not have enough money in my account. This terrifies me. I can’t sign my family up for cryonics. I have yet to convince any of my friends. None of my loved ones have signed up for cryonics yet. This keeps me up at night.)

Here’s one particularly interesting experience I have been having. I’ll be in an emotionally neutral state and finding my thoughts fairly interesting as I idly scan the possibilities—how do I save everyone, how can I convince my loved ones to sign up for cryonics, how do I prevent my family suffering emotionally once they find out about my atheism… As if I’m strategising for a video game or what have you, and then suddenly snapping back into, Oh, God,¹ this is real, those are your actual friends and family and real humans, and it was real the whole time I was daydreaming. Those past few minutes of idly musing were about actual lives.

It’s also a funny experience to constantly be switching between despair over two situations with such vastly different “orders of magnitude”, for lack of a better phrase. A person is dying now, and now, and now! I have no idea how to talk to men,² aren’t I extremely susceptible to being manipulated and hurt by one? What if one of my loved ones die before I can convince them to sign up for cryonics? Can I sign up for Student Finance England without my parents finding out?³

I said I’d get back to existential risk prevention. PauseAI is a community of volunteers, many of whom are part of local groups, that aims to mitigate the risks of AI with a focus on the risk of human extinction. I heard about (and then read) the book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies shortly after my deconversion. The concept of existential risk from an ASI (artificial superintelligence) was not new to me. I was familiar with the general concept through many different forms of media, one of them being the fantastic YouTube channel Rational Animations. I had just never taken the issue too seriously because of my religion, and whenever I felt the slow creep of, Hm, this really does seem plausible and I can’t think of any sound counterarguments, well, I’d have to discard Islam to even begin to fully conceptualise it.

Religion is insidious in its slowing of progress.

As I said earlier, the majority of my feelings are being redirected into existential risk prevention. Whilst counting down the days to moving back to university I was mainly dealing with practicalities and planning regarding my deconversion and my family not knowing about it,⁴ but the moment I was back on campus I hit the ground running. I read IABIED among other resources and decided to found a PauseAI Society at my university, with plans to branch out into a city organisation.

I can’t believe I’m the first PauseAI or, from what I can tell, anti-ASI student society worldwide. That is awful. I’m having a conversation with our MP soon and I’ll be visiting the House of Commons this month. This is ridiculous. I literally just started taking this problem seriously. What! What is happening!

I am working very hard at the moment balancing all my new developments, but deconversion has led to me actually doing the things right now. I understand you don’t have to be an atheist to have this attitude, but that has been my personal experience. Before, I had this idea of wanting to do something revolutionary in theoretical astrophysics, something that might not have many applications right now but would be integral in the future and leave a respected legacy. Space is awesome and I love studying it, and it didn’t really matter when my work came into effect, just that it would come into effect. Now, everything seems pressing. There’s a time limit. Two more people dead every second-and-a-bit. Now, I just have to make the things happen.

Whilst I’ve always been somewhat more agentic than average, for a while I thought that had wildly ticked up since deconverting. However, I’d already internalised for a few years now that in order for something to happen, I actually have to do it, and if my days aren’t full of hours spent making things happen, they won’t magically happen. So what really changed? Why am I now working almost double the amount I was working this time last year, about as much as I was working during exam season?⁵

I think there are two major components of this: I’ve stopped thinking in vague grandiosity, and what I think really matters has completely changed (which has led to urgency).

What do you think really matters? Given that, what can you actually do to advance the edge of that? I’m a second-year undergraduate astrophysics student; I can’t contribute to AI alignment research or start passing laws. Could I work to get to that point? Yes, but this is a pressing issue, so what can I do now to contribute to the edge? To actually advance humanity in that direction? Operating within the field of human accomplishment is not appropriate here, the edge is where we need to be working. Activism is a big gap in the anti-ASI cause. I’m organised and confident enough and I have enough free time—I can actually do this thing. I naturally lean more towards the technical side of things, and I am better at that than at being charismatic, but there are already many people working on the technical edge and I am not at the point where I could join the technical edge, but I can join the activism edge. I’m charismatic enough for it. I’m not vaguely moving in the direction of making something happen someday, I’m actually making it happen. I can actually do things now, even as an undergraduate, given my current set of skills and circumstances.

Deconversion has set me free. There are no magic background laws. Humans can go extinct. One person can do a lot (with other people). I’m not worrying about butterfly-effects of my small sins propagating into other people sinning. I’m not refraining from debates for fear of accidentally saying something blasphemous. I can be honest about my thoughts and beliefs, when I choose to be. I can talk to men (who largely dominate the STEM fields I want to interact within) without worry of sinning.⁶ Each day is spent making real change. I can hold my convictions lightly and let them go if I need to. I can disagree with my past self boldly and publicly. I can be perceived without fear. I can save lives, and lives are meant to be saved. I’ve wasted enough time.

More from the Crisis of Faith sandbox:

As long as you sign up for cryonics, and do something great for humanity, everything will be okay! You will be okay!

Physics is a great distraction.

Do things that are beneficial in both realities.

It took *doubt* to make me read the Quran

19/08/2025 I have noticed I alternate between phases of “I want the truth” and “I can’t do this anymore, let me believe what makes me happiest”

1st September I’ve done it. I was in [Home City Central] Library the moment I rejected Islam.

1. The word “God” is so separated from “Allah” in my head that I feel zero discomfort using it in any capacity.

2. I went to an all-girls secondary school and Sixth Form and wasn’t allowed to talk to boys in any non-formal capacity. On top of that, my all-girls school was a grammar school full of South-Asian girls, a lot of whose parents were also quite strict about this thing, so I rarely even heard people talk about having guy friends.

3. Getting involved with financial interest in any way is haram. (Haram means forbidden by Islamic law.) From my extremely limited knowledge the impression I have gotten is that it’s to do with imbalance of wealth and how it makes the rich richer and the poor poorer, which I agree with in principle, but seeing as I am, in fact, a broke student in danger of being financially cut off, and university loans in England don’t damage your credit score and are written off eventually, the effect of this boycott really does not do me (or anyone) any net good. Er, yes, myself and my financially insecure family are currently paying my rent, tuition fees etc out of our own pockets.

4. I would completely understand someone reading this and thinking, If her family don’t know and it would be bad for them to find out, why on Earth is she blogging about it? The reality is they’ll likely find out sooner or later from the news or through other people, especially because I’ve taken off my headscarf and a lot of work I need to do will involve me talking negatively about religion. I’ve just accepted this risk. I’d rather that than have to significantly slow my progress on things I want to accomplish. My biggest issue with them finding out in the next five years is that my brother, who I’m fairly certain will deconvert eventually due to his interests, won’t be eighteen so he couldn’t legally choose to stay with me if the worst happens between my parents and I. However, once he turns eighteen he’ll easily be able to find me if he wants that. Regardless, my parents and their friends aren’t really the Substack type.

5. Side-tangent: this exam season I was super super religious, despite my Crisis of Faith last summer. I had totally internalised Victor Frankenstein and Henry Jekyll’s God-given science-mission delusions. My home isn’t the most conducive environment for work for various reasons and I never really managed to revise well for exams, so being at university and having total control over my time and space all of a sudden combined with my past wishes of wanting to work more but being unable to was insane. I was not eating well, not sleeping well, and totally convinced Allah had chosen me to figure out some truth of the universe as yet undiscovered. I did get First-Class Honours, but didn’t score as highly as I could have because I was trying to Deeply and Truly Understand instead of learning what I needed for the exams. I had a great time though. It was so rewarding to finally break through that upper limit of five or six hours—I used to average three hours a day of revision and many more of feeling guilty and disgusting. Fasting for Ramadan when I first starting revising was also interesting—I ended up experimenting with a biphasic sleep schedule and greatly improved my ability to take naps, which was completely nonexistent before. One thing about a biphasic sleep schedule is you have to be extra strict due to the increased margin for error—your chances of messing up by staying up late or sleeping in have been doubled.

6. It’s really funny to remember myself despairing over how on Earth I was going to find a Muslim man to marry with the interests I have, looking at the set of Muslim men. Should have been a major red flag about Islam to be honest.