"Option #3 does not work."

Analogy: You have a child. You are a good parent. You teach them right from wrong. They are clearly brought up with a moral code. When your child is an adult, he or she leaves the home......and holds up a liquor store with a gun, and kills the clerk.

By your reasoning, that's your fault. Is it? Personally, I wouldn't blame you.

"You can compare it, in a sense, to gun rights in the US: responsible gun owners believe they are not responsible for the actions of irresponsible gun owners."

And there you have it. We have a philosophical disagreement on the extent of individual vs. group agency. No sense in continuing this branch of the discussion further. We'll have to agree to disagree.

"Saudi Arabia, in its changing of its laws, never once changed them because it thought it was the right thing to do under Islam."

That's not precisely correct. The laws never changed. What changed was that the sharia courts acknowledged that they had available to them other punishments that they had not chosen to use in the past.

Analogy: A judge sentencing a DUI first offender is fully empowered to sentence them to a year in jail. However, they generally CHOOSE a different sentence, preferring to use a tableau of fines, DUI courses, license suspensions, and community service. The law doesn't change; the judge simply chooses a different option. Same in the Arabian case.

"The same reason was more or less publically given when Saudi Arabia allowed women to drive; it wasn't because they had changed their minds on Islamic law, but they had realised they needed better diplomatic status on the world stage."

Again, not precisely correct. Prohibiting women from driving anything (buggies, cars, anything) is not and had never been part of Islamic law. The driving prohibition was a derived interpretation of other parts of the law unique to the Arabian religious history. (Also, it had nothing to do with world opinion. It had entirely to do with Mohammad bin Salman's desire to increase Arabian GDP by deploying the entirety of its workforce.)

"As I said before, this means Muslims are making a choice: the Quran is only unchangeable, and seen as inerrant, because Muslims believe that it is."

It is what it is.

"Religion doesn't take a short or long view: it takes no view at all. "

Misunderstanding of the term "view". When I refer to the "long view", I mean that the goal of religion's existence is to achieve the next life, which is done according to the religious precepts the faith. Thus, it exists (in theory) outside of sociology and politics, for example.

"Christianity in Europe is another - in most of western Europe it no longer holds any serious influence, because numerous wars caused by Christians destroyed its influence, and Christianity was forced to change or be destroyed. Even now the Catholic Church is facing this, because so many around the world revile its negative influence and the pain it creates, and it knows this affects its image and its ability to convert new followers."

Exactly. Muslims are acutely aware of how Christianity has "modernized" itself out of existence in some locations.

"You can use any definition of intolerance that pleases you, but that does not make your definition valid."

That works both ways.

"I would certainly agree that, in your specific case for example, the fact that you don't agree with people who question the Quran is not a sign of intolerance, just disagreement. That is not something I can say of many religious believers, and certainly not in past times - but even now."

Sure. Reasoned discussion is a function of liberal education. If you don't have a liberal education (and I use the term "liberal" in the generic sense, not the political sense) it seems incomprehensible to discuss these matters at all.

"I think you might be confusing the difficulty of emigration with the difficulty of emigrating under bad circumstances - a person who has renounced their religion in a country where this is practically seen as treasonous by many will have an extremely hard time emigrating, and may not succeed at all."

I think you'd find that those who are willing to renounce their religion *publicaly* are generally educated and have resources.