The greatest and most consequential innovations in human history have never resulted from an abundance of religious piety. The progress that improves lives comes as a result of scientific inquiry and a spirit of rationality.
Thousand-year-old religious texts cannot provide meaningful insight into the material nature of our world, nor does orthodoxy tend to respect free inquiry. Today in the Islamic world, many states enforce anti-science laws as a direct result of their non-secular nature. Meanwhile, distrust for naturalistic explanations of the world is a problem that runs through religious communities of all stripes.
Scientific facts nearly always begin as heresies. It is only by recognizing this that we can hope to understand ourselves and the world we live in.
Washington, D.C. - Ex-Muslims of North America (EXMNA) today announced the launch of the Arabic WikiIslam, an online encyclopedia dedicated to information on Islamic beliefs, customs, and history from a skeptical but objective perspective.
Some people think that as atheists, ex-Muslims must harbor some anger, even hatred, towards their former communities. But while they have criticisms and frustrations about the faith, ex-Muslim often have a different relationship with believers.
Nigeria is a closely-divided country along religious lines: a majority-Christian south and a majority-Muslim north. The religious culture is deeply conservative, repressive, and antagonistic — a dysfunctional and sometimes violent situation that northern ex-Muslim Mubarak Bala wanted to change. An Islamist-turned-humanist, his activism attracted the attention — and the ire — of the political and religious authorities of the state of Kano.
There’s a lot of confusion as to just why people leave religious groups–and especially what leads ex-Muslims out of the faith. It’s not, for example, abusive parents, or cultural alienation, or even “hating God.” So what are the main reasons people leave Islam?
Ex-Muslims of North America (EXMNA) strongly condemns the recent murder of Mahsa Amini while in police custody, supports the protests unfolding across Iran in response, and demands an immediate end to the compulsory hijab and other legal subjugation of women in Iran and in all Islamic states. Amini was admitted to the hospital on the 13th of September after spending roughly two hours in police custody for failure to adhere to the Islamic Republic’s mandatory hijab policy. Having lost consciousness and suffered apparent head injuries, she spent three days in a coma before being pronounced dead on the 16th. Iranian police have denied that Amini’s death was the result of physical abuse in police custody, instead alleging past health issues that led to a stroke or a heart attack — allegations which family members have denied. “The attempts of the Iranian regime to deny that Mahsa Amini is dead because of deliberate police misconduct are transparently false and already refuted by contradictions from her own family, as well as eyewitness accounts of the abuse she suffered,” said Muhammad Syed, President of EXMNA. “This only underscores the reality of what the hijab represents — the coercion and repression of women in fundamentalist Islamic societies. The theocracies that make this possible have no place in the world.” The protests that have unfolded across Iran, initially in response to the Amini murder, have expanded to cover a range of demands, including an end to the current Islamic Republic. Already, additional deaths have occurred as a result of police crackdowns, including several young women who themselves refused to wear the hijab. This comes in addition to extensive efforts of censorship, including internet blackouts. “The increasingly brutal methods of suppression employed by Iranian authorities in an attempt to quell these protests are as unacceptable as they are desperate,” continued Syed. “The people of Iran have a right to demand a more just society and future, something which the current theocratic leadership of Iran will never provide.”
