Can you explain why my concept of "contextually appropriate intolerance" wouldn't solve your concerns?
In the context of this conversation, for example, your comment represents what I would call a contextually appropriate intolerance of my article. You read my article, disagreed, and offered your own opinion. And now I'm offering a contextually appropriate pushback. That's how it's supposed to work. And I really don't think there is any other way that we can expect it to work.
There's ultimately not any way to distinguish a person's religion from anything else they think or do. So when we grant people "freedom of religion", what we’re implicitly granting is "total freedom of thought and action".
But within a community of people, we can't allow for total freedom of action, because some actions are harmful to other people. So you have to at least put some restrictions on people's actions, which requires physical policing. That's contextually appropriate intolerance.
But since bad actions are often preceded by bad ideas, that means we sometimes have to address those bad ideas in some way, before they lead to bad actions. Especially in a Democracy, people's thoughts and words can become laws that affect the community in physical ways. We obviously can't (and shouldn't try to) literally force people what to think, but we can provide gentle pushback, in the form of words and conversations, as we are doing here on Medium.
That's appropriate intolerance. And that's what we need to condone in society.
"Freedom of religion" ultimately means "total freedom of thought and action". But what we need instead is "freedom of thought and action insofar as they don't harm other people's chances at happiness".
In other words, by default, you can do and think anything. But if your thoughts lead to actions that harm other people, then we need to apply contextually appropriate intolerance of those ideas and actions.
To me, that seems so obvious. It protects people's right to do what they want, as long as it doesn't hurt other people. It's logical and predictable.
But by contrast, "freedom of religion" causes paradoxes and inconsistencies, which leads to unpredictable and capricious rulings about what's legal or not. And an unpredictable legal system is one of the most fundamental hallmarks of governmental dysfunction and tyranny.
Does that make sense? Saying we want "freedom of religion" is really just an imprecise - and therefore highly abusable - way of getting what we really want, which is freedom of thought and action as long as it doesn't lead to actions that hurt other people.
