What leaving actually costs

This is a claim about the world, and it can be checked like any other. Notice first what it is not: it is not an argument that Islam is false. It is a prospectus, offered to someone deciding, describing what they will find. Prospectuses can be inaccurate, and this one is.

What is genuinely gained

Begin here, because a ledger that only runs one way is not a ledger. Someone who leaves a community that policed them is released from being policed. Someone who was frightened stops being frightened of that particular thing. Someone who was performing belief they did not hold stops performing. These are real, and anyone who pretends otherwise is doing the same arithmetic as the claim, in the opposite direction.

What the prospectus omits

The accounts written by people who have actually left do not read like the promise. What surfaces in them, again and again, is not liberation from superstition. It is a mother. It is a house one is no longer invited into. It is the discovery that Ramadan had been less a rule than a shape the year held, that the congregation had been less a doctrine than the people who came when someone died, and that a language for grief does not appear on request when the old one has been discarded.

There is also a quieter item. The moral confidence that made the objections feel urgent, that cruelty is genuinely wrong and not merely disliked, does not automatically survive the move. It can be rebuilt, and serious people have spent careers rebuilding it. But it now has to be funded from somewhere, and the funding is not free, and it was not mentioned in the prospectus.

What this does not establish

Nothing about truth. If Islam is false, then everything above is the price of accuracy, and accuracy is worth paying for. Cost does not make a claim true, and a faith held because leaving looks expensive is not a faith, it is an accommodation. This site has said so on its other pages and does not withdraw it here.

What the ledger establishes is that a decision is being taken on a false description. The person who leaves having counted, and judges it worth the price, has done something intelligible and has our respect for the honesty of it. The person who leaves having been told there was no price will meet the price anyway, several months later, with no preparation and no warning that it was coming. That is the difference this entry is for.