[Maceman]

As reported by the Barnabas Fund, a British watchdog group, as many as 22 Christian converts "have been taken from Alexandria to police stations in Cairo and are being beaten, interrogated and tortured."

Whenever I read that there are over a billion Muslims in the world, I can't help wondering how many fewer there would be if people in the Muslim world were freely allowed to abandon Islam without fear of torture, imprisonment and social ostracism.

[bvw]

The cataclismic turn-arounds of populations of such scale in human history are rare, not unknown -- just exceedingly rare. It is very very hard to give up all that a person has grown up with, generation on generation, even when conditions exist that would make such a change the clear rational choice without all that cultural, social and psychological inertia and baggage.

The Declaration of Independence notes a similar dynamic very well:

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.