Stuff and Such

1.  I made a yummy stir-fry of sliced kielbasa with onions, garlic, and shredded cabbage and carrots (your basic coleslaw vegetables) with a side of red skin potato salad.  The boys want me to cook.  They insist they do.  But when it was ready and on the table, they took half an hour to get there because they were so tied up in their Call of Duty.  Grr.  When Jeb cooks, he’ll follow me around the house irritably nagging me to hurry and get to the table.  I was ready to just put away the left overs by the time they showed up.  Male type people!  Does a  body really need them?  I mean seriously…..

2.  I finally found my Xanga archives!  I’d just been going to the wrong page to sign in is all.  But before I found the right one, I tried googling my avatar name, Ampbreia, and was surprised to see it show up in a FaithFreedom.org testimony.  Granted, my testimony is there, has been for years, but this was in someone else’s testimony.  Turns out I’d made a difference for him, which was very nice to know.  I also recognized him from way back when I used to be an active participant in the forums there:  I’ll call him Ahboo; not his real name, but it will do.

He was there a lot too; a very fiesty hardliners at the time.  This was around 7 years ago I guess.  Towards the end, we’d both mellowed out some and were doing more talking than actual arguing, just trying to understand one another’s view point.  But many of the long-time forumers had left and some of the new ones that took their place were so very crudely argumentative and rude to visiting Muslims and some of them had a regular cow over the fact that Ahboo and I weren’t really arguing any more but had settled into respectful conversation.  I got a flurry of private messages, some quite angry at me, telling me not to believe anything he said, that he couldn’t be trusted, and even that they thought he was a terrorist set on luring apostates into harm’s way.  Not that this never happens, because it DOES.  But I trust my instincts and my instincts were telling me he was sincere, so I didn’t listen.  I did, however, soon leave because the forum was becoming a place I no longer wanted to be.

I should explain here that Islam, despite being a large organized religion that many people are born into, is nonetheless very insecure in that it commonly uses fear and blunt force to make it’s followers adhere to it.  This being the case, people who leave Islam to convert to other religions or non-religions are typically arrested and executed for it.  If you leave it and you happen to live in Dar Islam, it’s therefore a good idea to go quietly so you might stand a chance of living a little longer.

I’m worried about Ahboo.  Not only is he obviously feeling very isolated in the midst of an entirely Muslim society that would kill him if they knew he wasn’t, but If he really is/was sincere as I felt him to be, then he made a big mistake by posting his email address in the testimony in the hope that fellow apostates would reach out and touch him.  Others might have reached out and touched him as well.  I hope not, but it’s a likely scenario.

I tried his email myself.  I just wanted to reassure him that he wasn’t as alone as he probably felt he was.  That I’ve heard from many apostates of Islam that live over there.  They’re just afraid to tell each other because they don’t know who would turn them in or not.  Heck, even family might.  But his email didn’t work.

Ahboo, if you see this and recognize yourself in my description, please let me know you’re okay.  All right?