Get the latest tech news
The modern state, not ideas, brought about religious freedom (2017)
Locke, Spinoza and Voltaire were all brilliant, but religious freedom in Europe was driven by statecraft not philosophy
Showing the inherent volatility, for society, of such religious-truth claims, Bayle also argued that if people turned out to be mistaken about their religion, they could hardly be guilty of sin for nonetheless trying, in their sincerity, to observe its dictates. Between the Middle Ages and the modern era, Jewish intellectual culture had in many ways fallen behind that of Christian Europe – notwithstanding the occasional exceptional genius such as Spinoza or Moses Mendelssohn. The actual adoption of any meaningful practice of religious freedom followed neither from the arguments of philosophers, nor from the nature of Protestant belief, but from the political impossibility of achieving conformity after 1600 as Protestantism grew more and more sectarian.
Or read this on Hacker News
