The closer people are to the truth, the more tolerant they are of other people’s delusions. And vice versa.
Only unbelieving people, i.e. those who do not believe in a spiritual foundation of life and think that the external devices they have adopted constitute faith, can be intolerant. They are intolerant because they do not understand that true faith does not depend on human will. That is why, from the time of the Pharisees, who had hounded Christ, up to the secular administrators of the present day, the unbelievers always had and continue to persecute the believers. That is also why it has always been and continues to be the case that these persecutions not only do not weaken, but always strengthen the faith of the believers.
God instills faith in the human heart with the help of conscience and reason. It is impossible to instill faith by force and threats: force and threats instill horror, not faith. You should not condemn and reproach the unbelievers and the deluded: they are already unhappy enough from their delusions. It follows that they should be reproached only when it can be of benefit to them, but this, on the contrary, only pushes them further away, thereby doing them harm.
— Pascal
There is an undeniable rule that we should always remember: if a good deed cannot be done without deviating from the good, then either this deed is not good or the time for this deed has not yet come.
There is nothing more unworthy of a rational being than to weep about the fact that what our fathers thought was true turned out to be false.
Would it not be better to look for new unifying foundations to replace the former ones?
— Martineau
Faith, like love, cannot be forced. That is why attempts to introduce or assert it by state interventions is risky business, for just as attempts to compel others to love you provoke hatred, so do attempts to compel people to believe provoke unbelief.
— Schopenhauer
The rejection of religion is a natural consequence of the clergy’s intolerance and lust for power.
— Warburton
Unbelievers can be just as intolerant as crude believers.
— Duclos
True faith depends neither on external support, nor violence, nor ceremonial splendor. Neither does it care about dissemination. (God has plenty of time. A thousand years is as one.) The one who wants to support his faith through violence or ceremonial devices, or to disseminate it quicker, has either little or no faith.
