Whatever you call it - heart, soul, mind - it is sacred to you, influenced by outsiders, yes, but controlled only by you. They can only reach it if you allow them to. It is yours and yours alone. You alone have the final say. Yours is what makes you, you: theirs is what makes them, them.
You know that, and so do they. So why do they they sometimes go on trying to control what they know they cannot, just for the sake of appearances?
Of course, sometimes it isn’t worth the hassle and you decide it is best to agree with them and keep the peace. It is a bit like saying something but keeping your fingers crossed in your pocket so that you know it is a lie. They think they have you, and you know they haven’t. What you say and sing behind the closed door of your mind is your business, and they will never know.
At other times you decide that it is too important to keep quiet. You don’t want to hide the truth. You are proud of who you are and want to assert your core in public. You know the risks - peer disapproval, potential social embarrassment - but you cannot do any other. There you stand! In most cases, in many societies, that is it. But in other cases it isn’t. They have to bring out the big guns - torture, imprisonment, and death.
Strange as it may seem, your singular difference is a huge threat to their collective security. You have to be stopped. And even as they try, in their heart of hearts they know that frightening you to say something different is so futile because they can never, ever reach that sacred part of you where you alone have power. However big the guns, you always have the power. Always.
Last Saturday in Cairo, Egypt’s highest civil court ruled that 12 Coptic Christians who had converted to Islam could return to their old faith, ending a yearlong legal battle over the predominantly Muslim state’s tolerance for conversion. The court overturned an April 2007 ruling by a lower court that forbade the 12 Muslims from returning to Christianity on the grounds that Islamic law would consider that apostasy. Under a widespread interpretation of Islamic law, converting from Islam is apostasy and punishable by death. While lower courts have ruled in favor of conversions in the past, Saturday’s ruling was the first in a high court. Government bodies have until now refused to recognize conversions away from Islam.
Although Mamdouh Nakhlah, a lawyer for the 12, described the ruling as a victory for human rights and freedom of religion in Egypt, and said that this would open the door for many others to return to Christianity, he is probably being over-optimistic.
Judge Mohammed el-Husseini sidestepped the issue by saying the 12 should not be considered apostates since they were born Christian. It is extremely unlikely that people who were born Muslims would be allowed to de-convert.
Egyptian Christians can easily convert to Islam and many do so to obtain a divorce, which is prohibited by the conservative Coptic Church. But many change their minds or say they were converted against their will by a parent and want to become Christians again.
Coptic Christians make up about 10 percent of Egypt’s 76 million population and generally live in peace with the Sunni Muslim majority.
As I have argued before, the notion of forcing someone to hold a particular faith is absurd. At the core of all religions that I am aware of is the notion of sincerity and genuineness of faith and a condemnation of the routine practice of externals for their own sake. So forcing a Muslim to remain a Muslim while she or he wishes in her heart to be a Christian undermines the very faith that the persecutors are trying to impose. Fundamentalists may believe they are doing someone a favour by saving their souls from hell, but if she or he exists, I am sure that god is unimpressed with the sham.
I want to continue to argue for a world where:
- Muslims can become Christians if they wish to do so (and vice-versa);
- both Christians and Muslims can become atheists if they wish to do so (and vice-versa);
- people baptised into the Roman Catholic faith are allowed to have their baptism annulled and be officially removed from Catholic records;
- people of all faiths and none recognize that whatever you call it - heart, soul, mind - it is but controlled only by an individual and completely beyond the power of others to change against a person’s will.
(Information Source: Washington Post)
Powerful writing athinkingman. I did not know of Coptic christians until now.
People should be allowed to follow their conscience of faith, and have ultimate freedom of expression as to how they wish to express that in their personal lives; but not to dictate or impose that faith on others.
I have been thinking about this. I would like to write a short snappy reply but I find it impossible. This is because the subject is a very deep one with many twists and turns to explore.
Let me say that I do not think it right - in fact, I consider it very wrong - for people to try to “convert” others by coercion or force. Do I think, like you, that all attempts to do so must fail? I’m not so sure. I think that it is possible over a long period of time to break someone down so that he is no longer sure what he believes and then to substitute other certainties in place of the lost ones. Is the resulting mind still a free mind but with a different set of beliefs? I am not sure but I do not think so. I think it is a wounded mind. George Orwell examines this process with terrifying realism in his protagonist Winston in 1984.
Another problem is how you define force. Anyone who experienced the Billy Graham crusades would have seen hundreds of people “converted” by the powerful mixture of preaching, music and exhortation. Can this be defined as “force”? Or merely “persuasion”? And where is the boundary between “persuasion” and “force”? I don’t think I can place it with any certainty.
Those who followed up the progress of the new Graham converts will know that many reverted, some immediately, some over longer periods of time. Does this mean that Billy Graham’s methods were ineffectual or simply that he was not able to follow up the initial conversion sufficiently to keep his converts faithful? Think of the ceremonies and shows used by Nazis and Communists to encourage faith and belief in the party line.
But even if I think I own my beliefs and resent and reject any attempts to be coerced away from them, how true is it that I really do freely own these beliefs? Why did those erstwhile Christians revert back to Christianity from Islam? Was it because they looked at Islam and Christianity, weighed the evidence and made a logical deduction that Christianity was true whereas Islam was false? Of course not: they had been programmed in Christianity when young and the programming was so strong that it pulled them back from their new religion. If they were victims of coercion when they became Muslims they were victims of coercion - perhaps a gentler coercion but a coercion nonetheless - when as children they were made Christians.
It is a wise wo/man who not only knows what s/he believes but also knows why s/he believes it. Do you know why you believed in Christianity and why you believe in atheism now? I know the reasons I give in support of atheism but I am not convinced that it was these reasons that made me an atheist. I am also a vegetarian and while I can give you reasons in support of vegetarianism, I learned these reasons after becoming a vegetarian.
I will end there, with more questions than answers, otherwise this risks becoming a thesis, for the subject is, as I said, so very deep.
I’m not sure that I do think that all attempts at coercive conversions will fail. I think I agree that some people (perhaps all of us) could be beaten down after sustained pressure.
I think what moved me to write was the aburdity of the notion that there must be people pretending to be Muslim in Egypt out of fear, rather than conviction, and that 1) such a false faith is presumably ridiculous to any god, and that 2) the state can control the outside but the inside is private. However, after reading your helpful contribution, I concede I may have overstated my case somewhat.