“freedom of religion has both private and public dimensions. It is the freedom to pray, to worship, to commune with one’s fellows of like mind and heart in the private practices of faith. But it is also the freedom to… — Timothy Shah Copy Share Image
“This is what is meant by conscience: it is not a mysterious, extra-rational faculty, but the best and final judgment of our reason concerning what is true. “Conscience is a judgment of reason,” Christopher Tollefsen explains, “and an upright will acts in accordance with reason.”35 Whatever one’s conscience judges to be the truth about transcendent reality, one’s duty is to… — Timothy Shah Copy Share
“But the acts by which governments and societies repress and control the religious lives of people are mostly quotidian and unspectacular, taking place well… — Timothy Shah Copy Share Image
“Any government that presumes to direct how its people relate to ultimate truths either believes it is the only guide to those truths, or that government itself is the source of truth and its citizens must believe that nothing exists beyond the material world. To dictate human beings’ relation to the transcendent is to lower the horizons of political life… — Timothy Shah Copy Share
“It follows from this that it is those who fail to promote religious freedom for all people with the same vigor with which they promote freedom of expression, democratic elections, and the rights of women, and those who invent reasons to demote religion to a lower and optional category of rights and freedoms, who are guilty of special pleading. Such… — Timothy Shah Copy Share
“Thus individuals and communities of all faiths, or of none, enjoy two basic rights. One is the right to an autonomous social existence, free… — Timothy Shah Copy Share Image
“The fourth and final dimension of religious freedom in full is the right—both individually and as part of a larger religious community—to express religious beliefs freely in civil society and political life on a basis no less favorable than is accorded to non-religious expression. This aspect of religious freedom encompasses the right of religious individuals and groups to own and… — Timothy Shah Copy Share
“Religious freedom, then, is the freedom of human will, reason, and conscience, of human souls and spirits, to explore and embrace whatever they can discover concerning the origin and meaning of all things and of all reality. It is the freedom of who we are to embrace the ultimate truth about all that is. Whether “alone” or “in community,” whether… — Timothy Shah Copy Share
“The Hudson Institute study found that religious liberty is powerfully associated with civil and political liberty, press freedom, economic freedom, and prolonged democracy.” — Timothy Shah Copy Share Image
“Religious freedom is embedded within a much larger bundle of civil liberties. At the core of religious expression is the freedom of speech and… — Timothy Shah Copy Share Image
“First, societies lacking full religious liberty lack a critical restriction on state power. When citizens are free to have an ultimate commitment to something… — Timothy Shah Copy Share Image
“We believe that liberty of religious faith is the first and foremost freedom in human society, is a universal value in the international community,… — Timothy Shah Copy Share Image
“Religious repression is the denial of the very essence of what it means to be human.” — Timothy Shah Copy Share Image
