Damian over at Daimnation! has an excellent post about the life and death struggle of Muslim apostates. For me, as a teenager, to renounce my faith in the Catholic Church, it was a matter of saying "f**k it, I don't care." My parents didn't beat or disown me. My life was not in danger. For the most part, nobody even mentioned the state of my immortal soul.

But for a Muslim to renounce the faith, it is an automatic Fatwa.

In his post, Damian quote the Times:

Yasmin, who was raised in the North of England, has been forced out of her town once, and is now trying to resist being chased out again. Brought up in a Muslim family, she converted after having a vision of Jesus when she gave birth to her youngest son, and was baptised in her thirties.. "My family completely disowned me. They thought I had committed the biggest sin - I was born a Muslim, and so I must die a Muslim. When my husband found out, he totally disowned my sons. One friend tried to strangle me when I told him I was converting," she said.

"We had bricks though our windows, I was spat at in the street because they thought I was dishonouring Islam. We had to call the police so many times. I had to go to court to get an injunction against my husband because he was inciting others to attack me."

She fled to another part of Britain, but the attacks soon started again as locals found out about her. "I wasn't going to leave again," she said, adding that it was the double standards of her attackers that made her most angry. "They are such hypocrites - they want us to be tolerant of everything they want, but they are intolerant of everything about us."