Toleration was a compromise, because error has not part in truth. It came at the end of a series of religious wars, and is a foundation of the nation-state. But the nation-state is artificial: the large European empires were Protestant (the British) Catholic (the Habsburgs) and Orthodox (The Romanovs). The modern Russians have banned Jehovah’s Witness.
Well, they are heretics.
Religious freedom is a bogus and ill-considered pseudoright. In practice, it has been turned into a weapon that is almost solely used against Christianity across the West, and therefore it has to be abandoned. It has always been a charade anyhow; any religious belief or practice that challenges the state is always going to be banned no matter how sincerely held it may be. No one is about to let Aztecs start mass sacrificing to the sun or permit Druids to burn people in wicker baskets, no matter how historically legitimate their religious traditions are.
In like manner, any religion that harms the commonwealth merits similar outlaw status. Let people live among others of like religion if they wish to practice their religious traditions. How serious and sincere can their beliefs be anyway, and how much do those beliefs merit respect, if non-Christians would rather live in Christendom among Christians than where Islam, Hinduism, Shinto, or Judaism are the state religion?
Don’t be fooled by the appeal to imaginary fears for Protestants. The concept of religious freedom died the moment prayer was banned in the public schools and the coffin was nailed shut when Muslim immigration was encouraged.
Brother Cail expands.
The Church has always taught that we’re supposed to be free to practice the true faith, but not that false religions have any rights. Error has no rights. In practice, the Church has normally said states shouldn’t force people to convert or worship correctly, but that’s where their freedom ends; no one has a right to worship or proselytize for a false religion, and a state doesn’t have to allow them to.
The way they present it now — that every religion has an equal right to be practiced — goes much further into heresy, not to mention naive stupidity. They’re hoping that if we agree never to ban false religions, they’ll never try to ban ours where they’re dominant, which is a vain hope.
Yes, that means Catholic or Orthodox or Protestant nations could end up banning each other’s public worship along with non-Christian types. That would be preferable to Christian nations playing along with this New Age Churchian “all faiths have value and must be respected” garbage.
I see this as a form of pushback. The liberals would ban Christ. This has led to the Christians uniting, and as liberalism becomes one with the ideology of the Hittites or the worship of Ba’al, God may be merciful, and allow Christendom to be restored.
If we repent, he may bring revival. But this means that there will be truth, and truth is terrible, like a fire, removing error and not tolerating those who will preach evil.
The liberals have banned free speech. The wind is sown. The whirlwind will bring the fall of their religion. Which, like the fall of Babylon, will be great.
This is an interesting issue. History shows that you cannot keep God down and I sometimes wonder, in brave moments, if increasing “difficulty” would see the church flourish in NZ. Less numbers perhaps but more devotion, In my view a liberal church is no church at all – we cannot bring God down to our level of comfort like ticking boxes on a list of options when buying a car.
We have to deal with the parts of God’s character we find hard just as we embrace the parts we find easy. A friend who would claim to be a long standing Christian is being challenged by her long held view that God is love (and that’s about where it stops) in light of beautiful OT passages like Isiah 6. The concept of holiness, righteousness, judgement, sin, repentance and so on are novel and not quite what she wants. Its painful to watch but she needs to be challenged because she does not know the Gospel.