No citizen enjoys genuine freedom of religious conviction until the state is indifferent to every form of religious outlook from Atheism to Zoroastrianism.
Interpretation
True religious freedom requires the state to remain neutral towards all belief systems.
Harold Laski's quote emphasizes the essential principle that for individuals to truly enjoy freedom of religious conviction, the government must adopt a position of indifference towards all religious beliefs, including atheism and various theistic traditions. This neutrality ensures that no particular religion is favored or discriminated against, thus allowing all citizens to freely express their beliefs without fear of state interference or favoritism.
In practice
During a lecture on religious tolerance, one might use this quote to highlight the importance of government neutrality.
The successful memoirist [blogger] respects facts, uses them accurately, rigorously represses the human impulse to lie or embellish, but knows that truth is both different from facts and greater than facts, and not always their sum.
To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude.
Such reciprocity is the very structure of perception. We experience the sensuous world only by rendering ourselves vulnerable to that world. Sensory perception is this ongoing interweavement: the terrain enters into us only to the extent that we allow ourselves to be taken up within that terrain.
Pray don't talk to me about the weather, Mr. Worthing. Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else. And that makes me quite nervous.
A ruling intelligentsia, whether in Europe, Asia or Africa, treats the masses as raw material to be experimented on, processed, and wasted at will.
Bad ideas flourish because they are in the interest of powerful groups.
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