One of the hard won privileges of a free and open society, even one like Britain which has an Established Church in parts of it, is the ability to freely believe or not in a religion. No law prevents you choosing to follow Judaism, Methodism or neo-Paganism or the Flying Spaghetti Monster. You cannot be excluded from being a member of Parliament or from becoming a doctor or a train driver or anything else, apart that is from being Head of State as that job must by law go to a communicant of the Church of England. To all intents and purposes Britain has a free market in faith. But if you are born Muslim your choices might be much more limited. You can with Islam as the old song said ‘check in any time you like but you can never leave’. Those who do leave Islam sometimes have an awful time of it and that applies whether the ex-Muslim chooses another faith or becomes agnostic or atheist.

My argument with Islam has always been with the ideology itself. But my argument has not been against individual Muslims apart from those who believe that self detonating and killing people will get him to heaven. There are Muslims who acknowledge the often disturbing words of Islamic scripture’s and see how these words clash with reality and disregard them, just as Christians and Jews in the modern world read Biblical texts about the stoning to death of adulterers but know and understand that humanity has moved on from that, at least in civilised nations.

I was trolling around the internet and I came across an old article in Vice magazine about a man’s journey out of Islam and how he started to see so much wrong with Islam that it smashed it for him. It’s a good reminder of what ex Muslims go through psychologically when they start to leave Islam. It should also make people realise that there must be hundreds of thousands of other Muslims in Britain who feel like this person but because of fear of communal ostracism or violence pretend to be Muslim when they’d rather be leaving.

Vice Magazine said:

I stopped believing mountains were “stakes” or “pegs,” protecting the Earth from earthquakes. Ironically, mountains are actually most common where earthquakes are most plentiful: in tectonic zones.

I no longer believed that Islam had come down to slowly phase out the loathsome institution of slavery. Instead I began to feel that the institutionalization of slavery in Islamic scripture under the auspices of “prisoners of war” allowed for millions of Africans and other non-Arabs to be taken as slaves by the various Caliphates, in some places exceeding even the horrific Transatlantic slave trade.

I had thought that Islam had given women equal rights to men, and this may or may not have been true if we were talking about 1,400 years ago. However, taken literally the same scripture can be used to reduce the inheritance and legal rights of women, enforce certain ritualistic clothing and practices on women but make them either a choice or non-existent for men, ban women from marrying non-Muslims but extend that right to men… the list went on and on in my mind.

It’s well worth reading the rest of this piece. This author seems to have had a reasonable experience when leaving Islam but as he points out in his piece others have not been so lucky.