torekp comments on The Problem Of Apostasy - Less Wrong
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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.
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".