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24 Dec 2008 10:08 am

Freedom, Power, And Toleration

Noah Millman responds to Jacobs:

Religion (as opposed to conscience) is a corporate rather than an individual matter – Milton may have belonged to a sect of one, but most of us who are in any meaningful sense religious are members of corporate bodies extending through time and space. And corporate bodies to exist at all must define their boundaries: this is who we are, this is what we believe, this is how we behave. And this requires an implicitly if not explicitly excluded “not that.” This being the case, if freedom of religion means, most fundamentally, the freedom to be a heretic, it equally means the freedom to declare that the other guy is a heretic. In a very real sense, a social environment that is hostile to religious intolerance must necessarily be hostile to religious freedom.

And yet it always comes back to the impossibility of humankind ever being able to know the Godhead with sufficient certainty to use power to restrain the heretic. Again: the true believer will, in my view, seek freedom for God rather than power against heresy. To repeat Montaigne:

"Some impose upon the world beliefs they do not hold; others, more in number, impose beliefs upon themselves, not being able to penetrate into what it really is to believe."

And others believe.

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