if you subscribe to a set of established beliefs, you are thereby committing yourself to certain forms of rules and rituals, including possibly the proscription of certain behaviours, and if you then breach those proscriptions it is legitimate for the organisation you’ve joined to have the authority to expel you. But that’s as far as it goes. A sentence of death for holding certain opinions, including the belief that the organisation you joined and are now leaving is in some ways incorrect, is totally contrary to the most fundamental principles of a liberal society. People in an organisation which holds such views are simply not free. Their views are forced on them, even if they may assert that they hold those views voluntarily, because they are not free to disavow them.
I don’t know the solution to the problem, but it seems to me a crucial one when it comes to a discussion of the place of Islam in a modern Western culture. But maybe I’m just being Islamophobic.
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