First and Second Thoughts About A Sad Story

A 29-year old man who lives in Malaysia has discovered that he is actualy the descendant of Chinese parents. All well and good, except now he wants to renounce Islam and become a Buddhist.

My first reaction is, "It's an awful thing that he can't do this." Malaysia is a Muslim country and non-Muslims are lucky if their religious observances are tolerated at all. So reading this story -- he has to hire lobbyists and lawyers to even switch religions, and he can't move to certain states within Malaysia because those states have criminalized apostasy. Kind of makes you grateful if you live in a country that respects freedom of individual religious conscience, doesn't it?

But my second reaction was a little different. There isn't any individual religious conscience going on here at all. Just because this guy was born into a Muslim family, why does that mean he should have to be a Muslim himself? Clearly Islam is a bad fit for him. But even more ridiculous is his own attitude -- now that he has found out that his birth parents are Chinese Buddhists, he wants to become a Buddhist himself. If Buddhism calls him for whatever reason, that's a good thing. But he seems to think he's got to be a Buddhist for the same reason he has black hair, because his biological parents are that way.

This is an issue with more direct application to a liberal, Western society like my United States. Certainly, if this man lived here, he would simply stop attending his mosque and start an association with a temple, monastery, or stupa. There would be no lawyers, no involvement by the government whatsoever. But that does not mean that people in our society enjoy the practical freedom to find a religion that suits them.

Many people who live in small communities are only vaguely aware that there are religions other than their own out there. I recall that in Knoxville, people wore their Christianity on their sleeve, and when they said "I'm a Christian," that meant "I'm a Baptist." But this does not seem like a big issue to me; those who find themselves somehow dissatisfied with the options available in their communities do have options to look elsewhere, especially in the Internet age.

But as a practical matter, people are raised within families that teach their parents' religions, and by and large these religions are taught in absolutist terms ("We're right, other kinds of people are wrong"). Considering the subject of the story above, it's to be expected that the family of this young man, who did what they thought was right and raised this boy as a Muslim, is probably quite upset that their son is leaving what they consider to be the true faith. This may seem particularly insulting because he is doing it to be like biological "parents" whom he never knew until recently.

Depending on the closeness of one's relationship to such people, it can take an act of tremendous courage to "come out" to family members and admit a different view of religion. One friend of ours in Tennessee eventually felt the need to explain his atheism to his wife and children, all of whom were very observent, knowing that he risked divorce and maybe not being able to see or be with his kids again. It seems as though he was able to preserve his family, but it must have been tough all around.

The thing of it is, there is nothing genetic about religion. You are not born Christian or Muslim or athiest or Hindu. Instead, you are indoctrinated into your religion. Parents impose their religion on their children -- because of the parents' desire to obey their own religious instruction. A society imposes its religious view on its members to encourage them to conform. Often, there are good intentions for doing so, but at the same time one must recognize that religious belief is ultimately internal and irrational. As I've written to some correspondents on the blog recently, faith is at its root an emotional experience, not a logical decision based on evidence. Indeed, from my perspective faith often seems to be a decision to adopt a world view despite the state of available evidence that would seem to contradict that world view.

Maybe it's easy for me to be critical of this issue because to me, one religion looks pretty much as valid as any other; to me it carries the significance of picking one flavor of ice cream over another and there is no "correct" choice, simply a personal preference. Maybe to someone who sees both Buddhism and Islam as incorrect choices, this story looks a little bit different.

But regardless, respecting the rights of others means recognizing that people have these emotional experiences, which are often simply part of being human. People need to respond to these emotions and should be given the latitude to act on them. Social rejection, particularly from close friends and intimate family members, can be an even more powerful inhibitor on a person's ability to have these emotional experiences than the oppressive and ultimately nonsensical restrictions on religious alienation that theocratic (or just plain intolerant) governments can impose.

Atheists are well familiar with the idea of religious-based social rejection. Demanding tolerance for my own world view requires that I give that tolerance to others in return. But at another level, I have to wonder if respecting individual rights means leaving people, particularly children, free to make up their own minds.

So the story is sad for a couple of reasons. It's sad because this guy is in a prison of a society that won't let him change religions even though he has already abandoned his faith. But it's even sadder because he's in a prison of his own mind, a social construct he's bought into that says he has to be one thing or the other not because of anything within himself but rather because of people who he's never even met. The idea that he could decide how (or whether) to worship for himself seems to have never entered his mind, or for that matter anyone else's, either.