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Raw_Power comments on The Problem Of Apostasy - Less Wrong
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Speaking in long term terms, what is the mechanism by which societies secularize themselves, and are there ways to trigger it? For instance, the Jews too have a very explicit, canonic policy of stoning proselytizing apostates to death. When did they stop doing that, and why?
I don't think that question's going to give you the information you want - when in the last couple thousand of years, if Jews had wanted to stone apostates to death, would they have been able to do it? The diasporan condition doesn't really allow it. I think Christianity really is the canonical example of the withering away of religiosity - and that happened through a succession of internal revolutions ("In Praise of Folly", Lutheranism, the English reformation etc.) which themselves happened for a variety of reasons, not all pure or based in rationality (Henry VIII's split with Rome, for example) but had the effect of demystifying the church and thereby shrinking the domain of its influence. I think. Although it's hard to interpret the Englightenment as a movement internal to Christianity, so this only gets you so far, I suppose.
Unless we're talking about apostates who converted to Christianity (or Islam etc.) and claimed that society's protection, then Jews could probably have stoned apostates at any point until civil rights were granted to Jews. Which happened in different European countries at any point between, offhand, 15th and 20th centuries.
You sure about this? I don't know much about this topic, but I remember reading somewhere that 200 or more years ago Jews were often allowed to give punishment to their own people within diaspora. They couldn't stone a Christian/Muslim from the majority population, but they could stone (or otherwise kill, or otherwise severely punish) one of their own -- unless the given sinner already converted to Christianity/Islam and left their community. So converting to majority religion could be safe, but converting to atheism or some heresy within Judaism would not.
There are cases of children of Jewish parents who were baptized in secret by Christian maids, and then taken away by the Christian authorities to be raised Christian when the maid informed said authorities of this.
Cite?
It happened, and was a significant international scandal ... in 1858.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgardo_Mortara
Nope, not sure at all.
Baruch Spinoza is probably the most famous available piece of evidence. He was shunned (cf. excommunication), not executed. Not sure what conclusion to draw, given the Enlightenment era.
Internal revolutions, i.e. schisms, are key in my understanding too. I suspect that all the wars of the Reformation had a lot to do with the re-invention of the concept of religious toleration and its eventual spread across Europe. But perhaps even without soaking a continent in blood, schism can do its work. Exposure to a variety of religions seems likely to make people skeptical of enthroning any one of them.
Thus, atheism is only marginally relevant to freedom from religious oppression. The real key is alternate religions. If you would free people, underwrite the books or broadcasts by the next Erasmus or Luther or Rumi.
The "next Luther" was, arguably, Hitler. Fortunately, Lutherans today do not think very highly of Luther's On the Jews and Their Lies or the frankly obscene Vom Schem Hamphoras.
See also: Yvain's "A Parable on Obsolete Ideologies".
In Europe, it took decades/centuries of religious wars.
As for the Jews, I think they stopped doing it because they were conquered.
There is no single mechanism by which realization of the overwhelming economic and technical advantages of intellectual freedom seeps in to other societies. The angry old religious man spitting at the girl who doesn't have her head covered seems to be a fact of human life. But so is the not-so-angry young family, learning technical truths by staying in the west for a few years, and even if they go back home and have some religion, never really resonating again with the reactionary backwardness of violently enforcing stupidity.
There is no magic bullet. The religious whackos are right. If you don't suppress rationality entirely, it will eventually supplant all the whacky ideas you are violently pushing on people. A big part of the way it does that is by simply starving the religious whackos of the fruits of the labor of intelligent not-too-whacky people.
That's a good question. I have no idea how much or if that law was enforced.