Uan-aa-Boa
Speaking from personal experience here as well: when you are baptised (Catholic in my case) you’re also formally registered as a member of the Catholic Church at the church that you were baptised. As long as you are registered in that registry (whether it is an old-fashioned book or electronic) you are formally a Catholic. At one point in my life, a few years ago, I had come to the conclusion that the Catholic church and its teachings were completely at odds with my personal convictions, and so I felt the need to separate myself from it. In other words, I wanted to commit apostasy (it sounds more dramatic than it is). It is a formal process within the Catholic church where you notify your parish, send a formal letter to the parish head, they try to talk you out of it bla bla bla, and if you maintain long enough that you want to commit apostasy, you get your way. You’re then formally removed from the registry at the church you were baptised, and huzzah, you’re formally an apostate.
Now, imagine that I lived in a more religious country, for example, a certain country in East Europe that’s introducing LGBTQ-exclusion zones. Catholicism in that country is very high, and especially the smaller towns can be very… devout when it comes to religious affairs. Had I committed apostasy in such a community, I might have faced consequences for that. Not from the state, but from the religious community. Think of societal exclusion, aggressive behaviour, verbal abuse, or even being harassed at home. Sadly, that has happened in Poland at times.
The intent of this resolution is to prevent that, so that every person can freely and without repercussion renounce their faith formally (either to ease their conscience or for practical purposes as Terrabod described). My intent was to create a sort of counterweight to Freedom of Religion, so that those who want to be free of religion can be. Yet not from state acts, those are prohibited by Freedom of Religion, but in this case from religious communities.
If some of the clauses are indeed strong and invasive, I can add wording about “harm” or “injury”, because if someone doesn’t want to be friends with someone who doesn’t share a religion, they could do that with that wording (I think). Yet if I am honest, if someone doesn’t want to be friends with someone because they renounced their faith, I question the sincerity of that friendship in the first place 😛
