An apology with no 'but'

This is a letter written by people who still hold what you have left, to those who left it. And we shall not begin with an argument, because the argument is not the first thing between us, and because whoever begins with it here has answered a question that has not yet been asked.

And before anything else: we are not writing to get you back. There is a debt upon us that we are discharging, and the discharging of a debt does not depend on what its owner does with it afterwards. So if you read and turn the page still as you are, the apology has fallen where it belongs, and we ask for no receipt.

And we do not speak for an institution. Nobody has authorised us, and we have no power to apologise in anyone's name. These are individuals writing about their own silence, and about gatherings they attended and did not say in them what ought to have been said. And whoever waits for an official apology from a body with a name and a seal will not find it here, and may find it nowhere — and waiting until a collective with no face apologises is a waiting with no end. So take what is offered by those who are able to offer it.

And we shall try hard at one thing: that you find no 'but' after an admission. For most of what has been written in this line of ours is an apology in its opening and a defence in its body, and you know the formula from its first line: 'yes, we were wrong, but the religion is innocent'. This is not one sentence, it is two: the first is said so that the second may be let through.

And 'rather' is the sister of 'but', and putting the acquittal before the admission is a third device. We wrote this letter once, and then it was read to us by someone who does not agree with us, and he showed us that we had fallen into both of them while we were promising to leave them off: we said 'this is not from the religion, rather it is from custom', and we put the acquittal first and then followed it with what weighed it down — so the reader came away with the admission in his ear and the acquittal on the page. And this serves the speaker better than the old formula, not less. And the order has been redone in this version, and we say so here and not in a footnote: because whoever corrects in private keeps for himself the credit of a man who never erred.

And we do not know which of you we are writing to. For among you is the one who left out of pain, and among you is the one who read and weighed and found what we have insufficient, whose house was warm and whose father was merciful and whose question was never put down. And most of what is written in this line of ours is written for the first, because the first is easier on us: we console him and so appear generous, and we defer the question and so are not asked about it. So if you are the second, read what follows as an admission of what we did, not a diagnosis of what ails you. And what is in this letter of the mention of a wound is our own history and not yours.

First: what we admit

Some of you were harmed, harmed in the name of God, and the guilt is the guilt of the one who did the harm, and we kept silent.

And we shall not say 'ignorant men'. That is a comfortable word for us, because it puts the harm in a margin we do not live in. And the truth is that some of it came from a scholar pointed to with fingers, and scholars who knew kept silent about it. And silence about what is known is not heedlessness, it is a choice taken in its moment: we put the keeping of the ranks above the wronged, and named that wisdom, and deferred speech that ought to have been said on its own day — and what good is a word said after ten years to a man who needed it in a single gathering.

And you may say: name them. Which gathering? Which scholar kept silent? And it is an objection in its place, and we answer it with what weakens our position and not with what strengthens it. We do not name other people's incidents: whoever was harmed, the story is his, and to publish it without his leave is a second harm we inflict upon him to win a gathering by it. And we do not name a man we accuse in a paper he cannot answer in. So what remains for us to name is what came out of our own mouths. We said to the one who asked: 'this is a doubt, not a question'. And we said to the one who objected: 'look into your heart before you look into the matter'. And we said of the one who left: 'he wanted an appetite and sought a door for it'. And we said to the girl being beaten in her house: 'be patient, houses have their secrets'. And we gave a ruling for a custom on no ground we could find but that it was the custom of our own people. These are particular sentences that were said, and we are the ones who said them.

And you have every right to notice how the scale tilts: what earns us credit we described, and what costs us we left in general terms. So an apology that names not a single incident is deficient, and we claim nothing else — and what is named here is our own act alone.

And you asked as children and your questions were put down, and whoever put them down was hiding that he did not know.

And the heaviest part of that is not the ignorance — ignorance is the state of all people in most of what they know. I mean: one of us knows that the earth turns and cannot raise a single argument of his own for it; so most of our knowledge is inherited, trusted in its transmitter, and not established by us. And what cannot be borne is not that the shaykh did not know, but that he did not say 'I do not know', and turned the question into an accusation. So the child learned in that moment a lesson nobody meant him to learn: that this door is not to be knocked at, and that whoever knocks becomes a suspect in himself and not in his question.

And how many a child asked and was told in front of his family: this is the question of a man with a sickness in his heart. And we do not claim that your objections today are the effect of that hour — an objection is weighed by itself and not by the history of the man who raises it — we only admit what we did to the question while it was still a question.

And in our discourse there is condescension, and imputation of motive, and inflation of the branches, and belittling of the roots.

Sermons on the length of a garment and the music at weddings, and silence about a bribe called a gift, and about a labourer underpaid, and about a woman beaten in a house where prayers are said. Then — and this is the harshest of them — we answer the weakest of what you say and leave the strongest. We go on at length about 'who created God' because we have a memorised answer to it, and we pick the feeblest of its forms, and we do not go near the question of hiddenness: why it should be hard for an honest man to find. Nor near the problem of evil in the form that no illustration solves, that is, in the pain of one who has done nothing. Nor near your saying that the faith of most people is read off a map and not off an argument. And whoever answers the weakest of what you have has spared himself and has not touched you.

And we have read in ourselves what does not please us: that an increase of knowledge may increase the capacity to defend more than it increases the readiness to reconsider. And this was measured on political opinions and not on religion — American students, on two questions — and those better informed on the question were found to be the more polarised after balanced arguments had been put to them. So carrying it over to ourselves is an analogy by which we accuse ourselves, not a verdict we bring down upon you, and what was measured does not say that argument is of no use, nor that correction entrenches error.

And we brought you numbers and called them a miracle, and then we counted them and they came out otherwise. And we have counted for ourselves in this work what we could, and what fell of them fell. And a claim attributed to the religion and then belied by the count is more harmful than silence — the reader receives it as religion, then finds it an error, and the effect rebounds upon what it was built upon.

And custom did not put on the dress of religion by itself: we are the ones who dressed it in it.

We gave rulings for it, and defended it in gatherings, and made departure from it a departure from God. So whoever left it found himself outside everything, and that is a door we shut behind him. Then again, much of what drove you off is not from the religion in our own judgement. And we say this after the admission and not before it, and we do not ask that it be counted for us: whoever manufactured the confusion and then came to explain it deserves no wage for the explanation. And you may call it an evasion — and our saying that we know how it will be read does not relieve you of reading it so; naming the objection before its owner is a device that strips its weapon without answering it, and we used it in an earlier version of this letter.

And of that is what we raised in the price of asking. And the truest thing we have read on this is interviews with thirty-five people who left — in Britain and Canada and not in our own countries, so take it at that measure — that what occupied them after their leaving was not the matter of belief alone, but what would happen to them: the family, and the scandal, and expulsion, and fear for a livelihood and a child. And there is nothing in that to say that the cost is the reason for leaving, nor any percentage by which numbers in a country might be estimated. And whoever raised the price to that height and then asked 'and why do you not debate in the open?' has asked a question whose answer he knows.

And of that too is that we get the address of the one we are speaking to wrong. We put in one category the man who left the community, and the man for whom the claim of faith no longer holds, and the man who still prays in his house and cannot bear the mosque. And harsher than that, we made every departure a wound: we look for a harsh father or a repressive gathering behind everyone who left, and whoever refers every departure back to a wound has imputed motives in the dress of mercy. And whoever gets his reader's address wrong pushes him into a rank he did not choose — so we have done by that some of what we were warning against.

And we said as well that education takes the children away, and we had nothing to show for it — and the nearest thing measured (in America, in a particular period, and establishing no cause in either direction) found religious decline more marked among those who did not enter higher education. And we do not bring it forward as a witness for us: it will not serve as a witness that learning preserves religion any more than it serves as a witness to the contrary — we bring it forward only because it pulls down our claim and puts nothing in its place. So we made an enemy of learning for no cause, and lost our children in it twice over.

Second: between God and those who spoke in His name

We draw a distinction, and we do not make the distinction a slogan raised when we are pressed. And here is where it sits, in something you can feel:

One sentence — 'God sees you' — said in two houses. In the first a father says it to a boy of ten to stop him opening the fridge at night, and repeats it whenever he wants obedience without cost, until it becomes in the boy's ear an eye that watches and does not love. And in the second a mother says it to a child who is afraid of the dark, and he sleeps. The words are one, and the difference — in our own belief — is not in the one spoken of; the difference is in two mouths.

Then the first grows up. And he may hear in the words nothing but his father's hand.

And we do not say that this is your case. Most of you never passed through it, and whoever did pass through it may have left for something else, and whoever left out of sheer reflection is not what this whole section is about.

Then we say what is heavier upon our own position: this passage is an argument, even if it came in the form of a scene. Its purport is that the origin of a belief in the soul is one thing and the truth of the claim another, and that is a known move with known answers. And it was put as a scene and not as an argument, and a scene is harder to answer than an argument — so we name it by its name and set it in your hands: answer it. And whoever tells you that what he says is a picture and not an argument, and then withholds from you the right of discussion, has taken the profit of the argument and dropped its cost.

And here is where honesty lies: this distinction does not acquit us. The boy had no power to go to the other mouth; we were the mouths available. And we shall not tell you that what your father did to you has nothing to do with the religion, for the connection stands in your experience even where it does not stand in the ruling, and to deny it is to call you liars about the plainest thing you know. And what we offer is a possibility you may hold, not an obligation we impose, and not a condition of your being heard. And we do not ask you to draw the distinction today, nor to forgive: forgiveness on demand is a new debt added to a debt.

Third: and what we do not apologise for

And so that there be no disguised courting in the letter, we say what we do not apologise for, in terms that admit of no interpretation:

We believe what we believe, and we do not disown it to please anyone. And this is not to be said in general terms, for whoever leaves his claim vague has left you nothing to answer. So what we do not soften: that we believe there is a God who exists, not in the figurative sense, and that He spoke to men, and that what we hold of that is true, and that after this life there is a reckoning. These are heavy claims and we know their weight, and we do not put forward a religion with its nails drawn and then name that tolerance. And had we done so, what is between us would be a courtesy, and you would be the first to despise it — and whoever among you has read Graham Oppy or Sean Carroll or Richard Dawkins knows when an opponent weakens his own argument to win a gathering. (And they are three men in three separate valleys, and we know that; nor do we assume that you have read them — and whoever flatters his reader with a list has begun to do what we promise to leave off.)

And we do not apologise for calling. Calling to what we take to be true is not in itself an aggression. And we do not pretend that the two callings are on equal terms: we said a moment ago that the price of asking among us is family and scandal and expulsion, and in some countries a text in the law. So whoever says after this that we and you are alike has contradicted his own line with his line. The field slopes in our favour, and while it slopes, sameness is a claim that does not hold — and what is asked of us is not that we leave off calling, but that we stop using the slope and then claiming that we argue on level ground. And what we apologise for is the manner and not the belief. And apology for injury is not apology for belief, and whoever mixed the two was truthful in neither of them — for if he gave up his belief to placate you, what is to stop him giving up his apology to placate someone else?

And we do not apologise for thinking you mistaken. As we do not ask you to apologise for thinking us mistaken. A man who does not think his interlocutor mistaken in anything is not arguing with him, he is flattering him.

Fourth: what we call you to

We do not call you to a return. We call you to one sitting in which what has not been said is said.

A sitting on four conditions, which we bind ourselves to first and ask of you second:

The first: that we frame your objection in the strongest form we can manage, then put it to you and ask: is this it? And if you say no, then the framing is ours and we do not answer it. The second: that we not demand of you a certainty we do not ourselves possess. The third: that each of us say 'I do not know' where it belongs, and that it be counted for him and not against him. The fourth: that each party be judged by the best that it has.

And this fourth we ourselves begin by discharging in two directions, not in one. As for towards you: we shall not try you by the worst that has been written in the name of atheism, gloating in a post at night, but by the question of hiddenness, and by evil in the form that no illustration solves, and by the geography of faith.

And as for towards ourselves, we name the best we have so that you may try us by it, since a condition that falls upon one party alone is no condition: that there is an existent that does not carry the cause of its own existence within itself; that moral obligation is found as though it were laid upon us and not made within us; and that the claim of prophecy is a report to be examined as reports are examined — in its transmitter, its route and its content — and not as abstract proofs are examined. And we do not argue from them here, and each of them has a known answer that we know; we name them only so that you may know what you are trying us by, so that you do not try us by the weakest we have, as we did with you.

And we lay down no form for the sitting: a room will do, and a written page will do, and a letter no third person reads will do. What we do stipulate is that there be no audience in it. For an audience makes a retreat a loss counted against the man who retreats, so that the keeping of face prevails in both of them over the seeking of the truth. And we argue from no measured finding in this: it is what we have seen in our own gatherings, and we set it before you for you to weigh against what you have seen.

And we stipulate the closed room and apologise from the widest platform we possess. And this is a contradiction we do not hide. And it has a reason and a beneficiary. As for the reason, it is that we do not know the address of the one we apologise to, and an apology in a room does not reach whoever was not invited into it. And as for the second beneficiary, he is a believer who reads this page and sees himself in the ranks of those who apologised, so he takes the fruit of the apology without having apologised to anyone — and an apology falls to the one who said it to the one he wronged, not to the one who read it and liked it.

And this is a letter, not a proof. Its aim is to correct a report about us, not to establish a report about God. And we had written that there is not a single argument in it, and that did not hold: there is one place in it that resembles an argument, and it is the two houses, and we have named it in its place and put it up for answer. And what is besides that is admission and description and an invitation to sit. And whoever comes out of it as he went in, no error has occurred in the reckoning: it opens an eye, it does not conclude a contract.

Then if nothing comes after it — no sitting, no answer, no line — the written thing has remained written: that people were wronged in the name of God, and that we were in the room, and that we kept silent. We say it with nothing in return, because an apology hung upon its acceptance is a bargain in the dress of remorse.

And two questions: one of them upon us

The first is upon us, and none of you has put it to us because we never opened a door for it: what — were it to hold — would make us leave off believing? And we stipulate 'I do not know' upon both parties, so let us begin with ourselves. We say: were we to find in what we hold a thing that will bear no meaning but one we ourselves see as plain injustice, and then find ourselves defending it because it is ours and not because it is true. Or were it to turn out that what we support our belief with is the very thing we reject when it is brought to us from others, so that we keep two scales. Or were it to appear that the route by which what we hold was transmitted is impugned beyond what it can bear, and that we knew of the impugning and kept quiet about it.

And among us is the one who says: nothing. And we say to him what we say to you: whoever does not know what would move him is not arguing, he is announcing — and an announcement needs no sitting and does not need you.

And the second is to you. And we had written in a first version: 'if you have an old question with us that you were told was the question of a man with a sickness in his heart, then put it to us again' — then we saw that in this there is an invitation to the child and not to the man, and an offer of healing to a man who is asking for an answer. So whoever has that question, let him put it again, and we shall sit until he has finished it.

And whoever has no wound to put again, our question to him is one: what is the strongest thing you have today? Not the first thing that came to you, nor what you silence a preacher with — but the thing whose falling would move you yourself. Put it in the strongest form you can manage, and we shall frame it in a stronger one if we can and put it to you: is this it? Then we shall say, if we do not know: we do not know.