If a single person breaking ranks on a single belief can threaten the cohesion of an entire community, it can also—and perhaps even more alarmingly—threaten the entire nature of believing. This is the point I gestured toward at the beginning of this chapter: if our beliefs can change when we cross a border (or meet a Catholic aid worker), then truth comes to seem like nothing more than a local perspective. That’s disturbing, because the whole point of truth is that it is supposed to be universal. Shahnawaz Farooqui, a Muslim journalist and commentator who supported the death penalty for Abdul
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