How does it treat those who leave it?

No one is forced in (Qur'an 2:256); obligations follow choosing to join. The classical apostasy penalty is state law under heavy conditions — no state applies it today, private disbelief was never punished, and the door back is always open.

There is no penalty and no mechanism for one: a person who comes to believe in God simply stops being an atheist, keeping job, family, and standing. The honest contrast: under 20th-century state atheism, open religiosity could cost a career or worse — a state practice contemporary atheists disown.

Nothing happens. There is no membership to revoke and no community to lose; one simply starts affirming or denying, and the traffic runs in both directions — agnostics who find faith and agnostics who settle into atheism.

The New Testament assigns no earthly penalty for leaving: apostasy is warned against as spiritual loss (Hebrews 6:4–6), and the prescribed response is grief and prayer for return. For centuries, however, Christian states did punish apostasy and heresy by law — from the Theodosian Code to the Inquisition. Modern Christianity has renounced this: leaving can carry social cost in tight communities, but every major church today affirms the freedom to walk away.

Classically, 'a Jew, even if he sins, remains a Jew': the one who leaves keeps the status but historically lost communal standing, sometimes by formal ban (herem) — Spinoza's in Amsterdam, 1656, is the famous case. The Torah's death penalty for apostasy was rendered inoperative by rabbinic procedure and is not practiced; today there is no penalty, though those leaving strict Haredi communities often bear a heavy social cost.

Freely: there is no apostasy penalty and no doctrine of punishing those who leave. A monk may disrobe and return to lay life without disgrace in most Theravada cultures — in Thailand temporary ordination is even customary — and lay people drift in and out with, at most, family or social disappointment.

No text prescribes a penalty for leaving, and rebirth doctrine gives every soul endless chances — but historically, conversion meant expulsion from caste, which was social death in a society organized by it. Today the cost is familial rather than legal, while Hindutva groups run controversial "ghar wapsi" (homecoming) campaigns to bring converts back.

No earthly punishment is prescribed for leaving. A lapsed initiate (patit) loses religious standing until re-initiation, and family and social pressure — especially over cutting the hair or marrying out — can be heavy; but Sikh institutions claim no coercive power over the one who leaves.

Leaving any religion is protected as a core right: freedom of conscience includes the freedom to change it, as Article 18 of the Universal Declaration states, and secular law attaches no penalty to leaving any faith. Leaving secularism itself is ordinary political dissent, carrying no legal consequence at all.

With complete freedom: leaving carries no penalty, no shunning, and no change of civil status. Humanists go further — defending everyone’s right to leave any belief, and campaigning against the world’s apostasy and blasphemy laws.

Exit is sacred. Liberalism has no concept of apostasy: anyone may leave any faith, party, association, or the country itself without penalty — the Universal Declaration makes leaving one's country and changing one's religion explicit rights, and a state that blocks exit fails the liberal test.

There is no apostasy: anyone may stop calling herself a feminist with no formal consequence. Honestly said, prominent critics and defectors can face sharp social censure within movement circles, and feminists themselves debate whether such 'call-outs' have grown too harsh.

Leaving is ordinary: modern states recognize emigration and change of citizenship, and the right to leave any country is written into the Universal Declaration. Nationalism's harsh word — traitor — is reserved for aiding the nation's enemies, though closed regimes have punished exit itself; diasporas, meanwhile, are often embraced as the nation abroad, what Anderson called long-distance nationalism.