Ali A. Rizvi

His commitment to religious freedom is sometimes interpreted as an appreciation for religion, which it really wasn’t; it was more a function of his wish to keep church and state separate, and prevent the establishment of a state religion, as was ultimately achieved with the First Amendment. Indeed, Jefferson was a key proponent not just of freedom of religion, but freedom from religion

A second upside to this was the realization that my family and friends were truly decent human beings. As much as their denialism could be frustrating in an argument, their flat-out refusal to accept that their religion prescribed bad things meant, to me anyway, that they were good people. And they weren’t good people because of their holy book; they were good people in spite of it. They were also unwilling to accept at face value any verse or passage that didn’t align with their personal ethics and morality. This was also telling: they didn’t get their morality from the Quran; they used their already-present morality to interpret it—or at least to interpret what they thought was in it. Why not cut out the middleman? I thought. You already have what you’re hoping to get from a book that tells you that you need the book in order to get what you already have without the book in the first place, right?

Was this really about extremists corrupting the religion? Or was it about moderates sanitizing it?