Why is freedom of religion a human right isn’t it a choice?How can something without any practical application protected?
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Look at the history of Europe. There were long, drawn-out, destructive wars over religion. Religious minorities like Cathars and Jews were massacred over and over again. Protestant and Catholic princes and kings used religion to rile up their people to war. At some points, “toleration” was considered a *sin*: refusing to persecute, torture, or kill your neighbor for their weird beliefs was taken as meaning that you couldn’t possibly be honest about your own.
This was, in short, really bad.
Religious freedom means that nobody gets killed for their weird beliefs. It also means that if one of their weird beliefs is “kill the unbeliever” and they actually try to act on that, we treat that as *ordinary crime* … and not a reason to murder them and all their relatives, even their children, the way the Catholics did to the Cathars.
In effect, religious freedom is *a peace treaty among religions:* “We’re all allowed to have our own weird beliefs and none of us is allowed to murder the others for them.”
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