How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the WestReligious intolerance, so terrible and deadly in its recent manifestations, is nothing new. In fact, until after the eighteenth century, Christianity was perhaps the most intolerant of all the great world religions. How Christian Europe and the West went from this extreme to their present universal belief in religious toleration is the momentous story fully told for the first time in this timely and important book by a leading historian of early modern Europe. |
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... worship. I have undertaken this book with the question Ayer broached never far from my mind. Its aim is to present readers with a broad historical account of the ideas of tolerance and religious freedom in their appearance and formative ...
... worship of the divine emperor as part of the state religion. Unlike Christianity and Judaism, Roman religion had no sacred scriptures and did not depend on any creed, dogmas, or ethical principles. It consisted very largely of ...
... worship any god but their own or take part in the imperial cult by offering sacrifices to the gods on the emperor's behalf. Christians proclaimed that the pagan gods did not exist or were malevolent demons, an attitude deeply offensive ...
... worship.”11 In the1560s in France, we find the words liberté de conscience beginning to be used to oppose the forcing of consciences as a form of oppression.12 As we shall see later, moreover, the most noted early fighters for ...
... worship or religious association upon them. I take this to be the proper understanding of religious toleration, in its fullest meaning, as it would be conceived today. The struggle to achieve such toleration has the further significance ...
Contents
1 | |
14 | |
The Advent of Protestantism and the Toleration Problem | 46 |
The First Champion of Religious Toleration Sebastian Castellio | 93 |
The Toleration Controversy in the Netherlands | 145 |
The Great English Toleration Controversy 16401660 | 188 |
John Locke and Pierre Bayle | 240 |
Conclusion The Idea of Religious Toleration in the Enlightenment and After | 289 |
NOTES | 313 |
INDEX | 367 |