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Eugine_Nier comments on Rationality Quotes March 2014 - Less Wrong
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Like Salemicus said, no one of those things are persecutions. The closest of your examples is Bertrand Russell's firing, but even you admit that wasn't over his materialism.
By way of contrast there were in fact places in the developed world during the 1930's-1940's where one could be prosecuted for not being a materialist. And by prosecuted, I mean religious people were being semi-systematically arrested and/or executed (not necessarily in that order).
Saying "people in this time period are persecuted for their religion" implicitly limits it to Western democracies unless you specifically are talking about something else. It's like claiming that "in the 1980's, women weren't allowed to vote". That's literally true, because there are countries where in the 1980's (or even today) women could not vote, but it's not what most people would mean by saying such a thing.
Furthermore, the existence of laws implies persecution. If school prayer is compulsory, that means that people in schools are punished for not praying or have to pray against their will for fear of punishment. That's what "compulsory" means.
(Besides, if you're going to interpret it that way. I could point out that in countries like Saudi Arabia, people could be killed for not believing in God, and that this wasn't any better in the 1930's in most of those countries.)
Spain was certainly a democracy at the time this prosecutions were happening, granted it was engaged in a civil war, but it was the democratic side whose partisans were doing the prosecution. Furthermore, "Western democracies" wasn't a stable category during the period in question, so it was perfectly reasonable for a religious person living in a western democracy to worry that his country would stop being democratic shortly.
So can you cite an example of someone being imprisoned or executed for refusing to engage in school prayer?
I didn't say people were imprisoned or executed; I used it as an example of persecution. It certainly was that. You may think that persecution only means being imprisoned or executed, but I don't agree with that.