This article on freedom of and from religions hits the nail on the head:
If your religion brings you happiness, no one has the right to turn you away from it. However, do not expect or demand that every one else must share your same beliefs.
Freedom as a Moral Issue
By Livy S. Richard
A young man and his best girl were strolling together down a street. Something prompted them to cross to the opposite pavement. A hydrant threatened to separate them. The young man crossed to the right of the hydrant. The young woman started to cross to the left, paused, giggled, retraced her steps and took the path he had chosen.
“I’m not taking chances of having anything come between us,” she said as he looked at her questioningly.
It was a harmless superstition, like being afraid of a black cat, afraid to walk under a ladder, scared of a shattered mirror. There wasn’t any sense in it. Yet the girl would have been uncomfortable if she had not gratified it. So why should we begrudge her the cheap consolation of a few extra steps?
As with one of these small secular superstitions, so with many of the ceremonies of religion. They may mean little or nothing to you; but if they give to others some measure of satisfaction, why, for heaven’s sake, make a fuss about them?
I never could sympathize with the spirit of those old saints and martyrs who used to put to fire or sword men and women that didn’t worship their way.
To be sure, lacking newspapers, movies, telephones, baseball and the I and R, they must often have been stumped to find sources of novel amusement; and perhaps the intensity with which they took to doctrinal controversies was largely due to the small variety of their human interests.
We owe much to the crowded life of today for doing away with religious acrimony.
If you have a pet superstition, defer to it, by all means, if doing so adds to your contentment.
But don’t try to force it upon others. Give to each his own way, remembering Lincoln’s motto: “With malice toward none and charity for all.”
For one can’t oneself be free if one denies freedom to others.
Source: The day book. (Chicago, Ill.), 25 July 1914.
