my happy ending by avril lavigne
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Act I: do your own research
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i spent nine years in Islamic schools.
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i keep saying that. i don’t particularly want to make my education the entrance fee for having an opinion, but apparently there is an entrance fee, and somehow i keep being told i haven’t paid it.
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“makanya belajar agama yang benar, ke ahlinya.”
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okay. which part?
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which part did i misunderstand? the words, the history, the explanation? i can be wrong about something. tell me what it is. but often the mistake is never identified. i disagreed, so i must have misunderstood. i left, so i must not have learned enough.
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nine years, and we are back at “have you tried learning?”
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i did. sometimes the explanation was exactly what made me disagree.
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you can explain why a society practiced slavery. i can follow the explanation and still reject the practice. what keeps frustrating me is the expectation that understanding the circumstances should restore my respect for the teaching. if it doesn’t, apparently there is more learning to do.
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i am talking here about the authority claimed for religious books: scriptures, canonical accounts, the teachings people ask me to trust because of where they come from. i cannot account for every private version of religion someone has made for themselves. i can examine a passage and the reasons offered for defending it.
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and i want the examination to be allowed to end somewhere its defenders dislike.
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can the expert conclude that the book got something wrong? because if that answer is forbidden before we begin, i need to know what all this permission to question actually amounts to.
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Act II: read that again
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words weigh a lot to me.
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Sahih al-Bukhari contains an account in which Aisha was six at marriage and nine at consummation. Leviticus permits acquiring enslaved people from surrounding peoples and passing them on as inherited property. these are things the texts contain. whether an account is historically reliable and whether the conduct it describes is defensible are separate questions. Bukhari 5134, Leviticus 25:44–46
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“it was a different time.”
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yes. that is part of my problem with calling it timeless.
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an old book reflecting its time makes sense to me. i cannot follow the demand that i treat its moral authority as perfect while giving it every allowance we would make for an imperfect human being. knowing why people accepted something does not make the people subjected to it matter less.
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i do have to read carefully. a translation can mislead. a sentence can refer to a particular situation. an exception elsewhere in the text can limit a command. i cannot insist that words matter and then ignore the ones that complicate my objection.
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take Qur’an 9:4–6. the passage includes a command to kill polytheists after a specified period, but it also requires honoring treaties that have been upheld and providing protection and safe passage to a polytheist who requests it. verse 5 names repentance, prayer, and almsgiving as grounds for release. an account of the passage has to include those provisions. Qur’an 9:4–6
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i cannot honestly reduce that to permission to kill anyone who believes differently. i can still ask why religious observance figures in the conditions for release, or why religious identity is the category through which the people being targeted are described.
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showing me a restriction on violence does not finish the discussion of whether the rule is just.
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that is what i mean when i say the sentence is still there. i will correct my reading when there is a reason to. i will not assume that the most reassuring explanation must be the correct one, or that understanding a teaching obliges me to admire it.
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if two passages conflict, i am willing to consider that the book is inconsistent. if they fit together, i can judge the resulting rule. neither possibility guarantees a good rule.
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sometimes i imagine encountering the same account with unfamiliar names. no childhood memories attached, no parents to disappoint. someone hands me the book and tells me the people in it are examples of moral excellence.
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would the explanation convince me then?
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i keep coming back to how much the familiar name does before the argument even begins. how early did i learn that this particular book needed defending?
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Act III: won’t somebody think of the children?
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by the time someone says a child can choose when they grow up, a lot has already happened.
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the child has learned what the family does, what makes the adults proud, which questions receive an answer and which change the mood. a belief can become part of belonging before the child knows enough about it to disagree.
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nobody has to shout.
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research on religious learning gives some support to this concern. in two studies of Americans, exposure to people acting on their religious commitments was associated with participants’ own religious belief, beyond broader religious socialization. that doesn’t tell us what every child will believe or whether they will regret it. it does give us reason to take example and practice seriously. Lanman and Buhrmester, Religious Actions Speak Louder Than Words
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my concern is what happens when a child is taught to love a religion before they know what they are being asked to love.
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later, they encounter a teaching they find cruel. now they have to examine something already attached to the people who raised them, their earliest habits, perhaps their understanding of what makes them good. the parents may never have intended that difficulty. the child still has to deal with it.
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this is why “we never forced them” does not settle it for me.
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i don’t think a parent has to pretend they have no beliefs. seeing a parent pray is not enough, by itself, to tell me that the child is being mistreated. but parents should be much more careful about turning their own commitment into a child’s identity. “this matters to me” should not quietly become “this is who you are.”
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if the religion contains teachings the parent themselves rejects, the child should eventually hear that rejection as clearly as the praise. if other ways of living are possible, they should encounter people living them without those people being presented as lost or defective.
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and refusing participation has to be a real possibility.
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teaching “don’t hurt someone” involves a moral judgment too. i should be able to explain whose interests i am protecting and listen if the child questions my reasoning. it does not require asking them to trust an entire religious tradition, including teachings they have not encountered yet.
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that difference matters to me.
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i don’t need to claim that every religious child will regret their upbringing. i want the person who eventually rejects it to have less to undo. i want them to be able to think without first wondering what their thinking will do to everyone they love.
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the same obligation applies to me. if a child became religious, i would argue with their reasons. i would expect them to argue back. i would still owe them care when neither of us was persuaded.
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“think for yourself” cannot expire at the first answer i dislike.
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Act IV: rules for thee, not for me
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John Rawls’s veil of ignorance asks us to consider principles of justice without knowing our own place in the society they will govern. i find that useful here: decide what freedom someone should have before knowing whether you will approve of what they do with it. Rawls, A Theory of Justice
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i might be born into the majority religion. i might belong to a persecuted minority. i might be the child who believes everything, or the one who stops believing and is afraid to say so.
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i would want protection in each position. i would want to practice a belief without being attacked, and to reject one without losing my safety. i cannot make either freedom depend on getting lucky about which family i am born into.
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this is where some conversations about protecting religion lose me. i want religious people protected from discrimination. that includes the people inside their communities who are frightened of religious expectations.
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when someone answers an account of abuse with “that is not Islam,” i want to know what follows. will they challenge the authority being invoked? help the person affected? remain on that person’s side if they leave the religion altogether?
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explaining your own beliefs can be useful. the person being hurt still needs help after you have explained them.
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i encounter versions of “gay people shouldn’t be hated; they need to be cured” presented as kindness. i hear the condition. you can be treated gently while everyone waits for you to stop being yourself.
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what happens when you become happy and they still think your happiness is wrong?
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the same question applies when people defend a woman’s choice to cover. i want that choice respected. i also want to know whether they will defend her tomorrow if she removes it. her freedom cannot depend on continuing to make the decision they wanted.
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i don’t want a community’s reputation to become more urgent than the lives being lived inside it. belonging to a persecuted group does not make someone incapable of hurting another person. protecting that group has to leave room to say so.
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Act V: just leave bro
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i sometimes ask why people keep the name.
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if you reject the cruelty, reject the demand for obedience, reject the authority of the passages used to justify it, what are you still defending? i understand keeping something valuable from your past. i have more difficulty understanding why the whole tradition must continue to receive the praise.
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the name matters too. what sounds like home to one person may be the name another person heard while being told to submit. i cannot expect them to hear it as an innocent word.
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but a name does not tell me everything about the person carrying it.
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someone might openly reject a teaching and remain religious. someone else might privately reject almost everything and be unable to say so. i can question what the first person still treats as authoritative. i cannot demand that the second person risk their life becoming unrecognizable just to make their public identity satisfy me.
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i am closed about a lot of what i think. i know that understanding your own position does not make it equally safe to express everywhere.
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there is housing. education. money. the people you would call if something went wrong. a person can reach a conclusion long before they can afford the consequences of announcing it.
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and there is the attachment.
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familiar prayers can still feel like home. i don’t have to pretend that every part of the past was empty because i no longer believe what gave it its shape. sometimes the comfort remains after the explanation stops convincing me. sometimes i wish leaving could be as straightforward as reaching a conclusion.
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none of that makes the teachings true. it does make a person’s continued identification less simple than an endorsement of everything in a book.
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when someone freely defends that book as a moral authority, i will ask them to account for what it contains. when someone is trying to get through their life, i want them to have somewhere to go.
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“you can leave” means very little if leaving costs everything that would help you survive it.
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Act VI: my happy ending, for now, and probably forever
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i am an agnostic atheist and an anti-theist.
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i don’t believe in a god. i don’t claim to have proved that no god could exist. i oppose giving religious claims authority over people’s lives on the strength of being religious, and teaching children to owe those claims loyalty before they can examine them.
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there are things i don’t know. that does not mean every conclusion has to remain suspended until i know everything.
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my questions are part of the criticism. when i ask why a teaching is justified, i am asking its defenders to account for it. having questions does not mean i am waiting to be brought back.
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i can reconsider when there is a reason to. i can correct a quotation, abandon an objection that fails, admit that someone’s argument is better than i first thought. none of that requires treating my departure as unfinished religious education.
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nine years was not a guarantee that i would be right. it was not a promise that i would stay.
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if you tell me i haven’t learned enough, identify something i missed. give me a reason to change my mind. don’t make agreement the only evidence you will accept that i have thought at all.
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i learned. i thought about it. i rejected it.
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you can challenge my reasons. you don’t get to pretend i never had any.
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