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Comment by MichaelGG | Hacker News Reader

I just don't understand why "freedom of religion" is a thing. Freedom of thought gathering/etc subsumes any religious freedom and makes it redundant. The only use of religious freedom is to provide strange exceptions to other rights and create conflict. It's as silly as having a "freedom to play boggle" or "freedom to be wrong about weather predictions".

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It exists because the original settlers of America were persecuted for their religious beliefs. The Puritans were essentially ostracized from mainline Anglican Christianity. The new government didn't want religious persecution to happen again, just after having moved thousands of miles away to get away from it. Freedom of Religion makes plenty of sense when you consider that for most of history, all peoples were religious.

The story of original settlers of this country being Puritans escaping persecution, while trite, had nothing to do with the men who actually wrote and signed the Constitution.

"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law." - Thomas Jefferson

'"legislature" should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between church and State.' Thomas Jefferson

Jefferson had to deal with the settlers of the America being of a mix of religions, Catholic, Puritan, Quaker and others. And also he was aware that declaring one faith official and persecuting the others had caused problems in Europe. This had a lot to do with bringing in the separation of church and state. And with preventing the government prohibiting freedom of religion.

I guess you kind of forgot why the United States was founded?

Freedom of religion is more core to the US then any other law or concept. Freedom of speech was written to ensure freedom of religion, not the other way around.

In any case freedom of thought is not the same thing, freedom of religion includes actions, not just thought. And in order to avoid making freedom of ANY action, we limit it to actions required by religion. (And yes, that causes problems when people invent new religions that have actions some object to. Nothing is perfect, these things are dealt with as they come up.)

If you'll allow something for religious people, why not allow it always? Oh, but it's a bad thing? Then why are you allowing religious people to do it? :/

Because things can become bad or good depending on the reason and intention for which you do it?

>I just don't understand why "freedom of religion" is a thing.

It exists because people want to to exist, and the US is a democracy.

Note that democracy means the rule of the majority (or plurality), and not necessarily equal rights for everybody, which would be an a-priori decision unrelated to the democratic process.

The constitution was not instituted democratically, really, it is, effectively a coup on the previous form of government. The bill of rights were part of what was added to it to clarify that rights pre-existed the constitution and that they did not require the constitution to defend them (read the pre-amble to the bill of rights some time) .... which means as far as the writers of the constitution were concerned, the first amendment (which defends freedom of religion) was redundant.

EG: These rights don't require democracy but are "god given".

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