Freedom of Worship Quotes
Ahmad denied saying this although the reporter who wrote the original story insists that he did and she wrote it down at the time. Ahmad did not deny the statement when it first appeared in the Fremont Argus, but only did so several years later.
Those who claim that the founding fathers contemplated religion as a critical component of government often point to this article of the South Carolina Constitution. However, they ignore the almost simultaneous passage of the New York constitution as in {612166}. When the framers of the Constitution met in 1787 in Philadelphia the separation of church and state issue was not really resolved and awaited the Bill of Rights where the separatists won out.
The Punjab had been partitioned into a Pakistani part and an Indian part. The latter was a major province of the new state. But in the political process of drawing the boundaries, Jinnah and other Muslim leaders had used fanatic Muslim terrorists to massacre Sikhs and Hindus to ethnically cleanse areas and intimidate the ruling Indian Congress Party and the British government to obtain more area and resources for the Muslim state. However, at this point he had to govern, and there were still many Sikhs and Hindus as well as Christians and Buddhists in the new Muslim state. Jinnah's new state needed all the help it could get from the U. S. and others, and Jinnah started sounding like a passionate democrat. On paper religious freedom was guaranteed in Pakistan. However Pakistan became one of the most dangerous countries in the world for non-Muslims. Most historians agree that the Muslim terrorism in the short run had worked, as it would have been unlikely that India would have been partitioned in the absence of violence. However, it set in motion a cultural pattern of religious hate, bigotry, intolerance, violence and murder which would plague Pakistan thereafter. The politicians throughout the country's history have tried to use the Muslim religious, fundamentalist, extremists for their purposes only to find that the fanatics were out of control and the entire Pakistani population has lived in fear, lest an extremist decide that what they did or say was inimical to Islam and assassinate him or her. They have assassinated even the highest levels of politicians—President, Governors of Provinces, National Legislatures as well as Journalists, writers and academics. But the average Pakistani citizen has always been at risk of brutal murder with hundreds killed every year in an atmosphere of total impunity for the murderers. They have even murdered married women who had been raped on the grounds that they were adulterers and were therefore stoned.
The Empress provided freedom of religion in order to induce many settlers to immigrate to Russia. However, the clerics of the Russian Orthodox Church were terribly fearful that they would lose parishioners to other religions and they prevailed upon Catherine to outlaw preaching and conversion of the Russians. However, they were all for any attempt to convert the Muslims in the Russian Empier or at the borders. This limitation on conversion lasted until the Communist Revolution when the Communists even prohibited the Russian Orthodox from converting people. It was not until the fall of the Soviet Union that other religions were allowed to try and convert Russians and even then the number of sects that were allowed to do so were limited.
Williams was the first theologian who not only advocated religious toleration but argued that Christianity demanded it and the separation of church and state.
The same phrase was used by Count de Montalembert at a Catholic conference in Malines, August 20, 1863, and is sometimes attributed to him.
This is the first American ordinance of freedom of conscience. Note that it only provided freedom of religion for Christians. However, that was an important first step as different sects of Christianity had been persecuting each other whenever the opportunity arose.
This appears to be one of the first religious groups to withdraw and separate from a state church.
