some very good words

Sebastian Castellio's Erasmian Liberalism,
by Edwin Curley, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Americans might have hoped, as we enter the 21st Century, that after more than two hundred years of debate about the meaning of First Amendment to our Constitution, we would have achieved some consensus about the proper relationship between government and religion. "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," the Amendment says. Does this mean that ‘faith-based’ organizations must be eligible to compete for federal funds to support their social-service programs? Are we, in fact, violating their right to the free exercise of their religion if we do not permit religious organizations to apply for tax money for those purposes? So the present administration urges.

I am skeptical about this. The administration concedes that it would be a violation of the establishment clause if the government used tax money to support worship services, religious instruction, or proselytization, because these activities are ‘inherently religious.’ If faith-based social-service programs are nonetheless permissible, that suggests that they must not be inherently religious. But if they aren’t, how can it be a violation of the free exercise clause not to fund them? And in any case, how does the failure to fund faith-based programs constitute a prohibition on the free exercise of religion?

All this is very puzzling, and may suggest that the administration’s position is not very clearly thought out. I make no attempt to resolve that question in this paper. I mention these contemporary issues of public policy only to indicate that, however deeply we may be attached, as a people, to the First Amendment, we may not have a clear and agreed understanding of the values it expresses. The state, we say, may not use its coercive powers to favor one religion over another, or to favor adherence to some religion over adherence to no religion at all.

...By the end of the 18th Century it had come to be accepted in most of Western Europe that every decent society must embrace some principle of religious toleration.

But as late as the 16th Century most Europeans, I think, regarded it as self-evidently false that it was desirable to tolerate significant differences of religious opinion. I want to know how this change came about and I want to know if the arguments people used to support toleration were good ones.

For most philosophers serious discussion of this topic begins with Locke's first Letter Concerning Toleration (1689). But the first substantial defense of religious toleration by a major philosopher in the Western tradition came in 1670, when Spinoza published his Tractatus theologico-politicus, as part of his broader defense of freedom of thought and expression. And the first book defending religious toleration in Western Europe was Sebastian Castellio's De haereticis, published in 1554. Readers familiar with Locke’s work on toleration will find that many of his arguments, both good and bad, were already present in Castellio.


Michael Servetus. Servetus was a Spaniard, born in 1511, who entered the service of the king's confessor, Juan de Quintana, at some time in his mid-teens. Michael Servetus for heresy prompted [Sebastian] Castellio to write his work.

Michael Servetus
'You will not be damned if you do not know whether the Spirit proceeding from the Father and the Son has one or two beginnings, but you will not escape damnation if you do not cultivate the fruits of the Spirit, which are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, long-suffering, mercy, faith, modesty, continence..... The sum of religion is peace and unanimity, (LOVE) but these can scarcely stand unless we define as little as possible, and in many things leave each one free to follow his own judgment, because there is great obscurity in many matters...'

read more at http://www.sitemaker.umich.edu/emcurley/files/castellioerasmianliberalism.doc

i gues it took a while but we finally eventually heard this and stopped going on crusades