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The descriptive use of the term religious persecution is rather difficult. Religious persecution has occurred in different historical, geographical and social contexts since at least antiquity. Until the 18th century, some groups were nearly universally persecuted for their religious views, such(a) as atheists, Jews and Zoroastrians.
Early Christianity also came into clash with the Roman Empire, and it may develope been more threatening to the imposing polytheistic format than Judaism had been, because of the importance of evangelism in Christianity. Under Nero, the Jewish exemption from the something that is asked in progress to participate in public cults was lifted and Rome began to actively persecute monotheists. This persecution ended in 313 ad with the Edict of Milan, and Christianity was offered the official religion of the empire in 380 AD. By the eighth century, Christianity had attained a clear ascendancy across Europe and neighboring regions, and a period of consolidation began which was marked by the pursuit of heretics, heathens, Jews, Muslims, and various other religious groups.
By contrast to the abstraction of civil tolerance in early innovative Europe, the subjects were invited to attend the state church; this attitude can be sent as territoriality or religious uniformity, and its underlying assumption is brought to a constituent by a statement of the Anglican theologian Richard Hooker: "There is non any man of the Church of England, but the same man is also a item of the [English] commonwealth; nor all man a member of the commonwealth, which is non also of the Church of England."
Before a vigorous debate about religious persecution took place in England starting in the 1640s, for centuries in Europe, religion had been tied to territory. In England, there had been several Roger L'Estrange: "That which you call persecution, I translate Uniformity".
However, in the 17th century, writers like Pierre Bayle, John Locke, Richard Overton and Roger William broke the connection between territory and faith, which eventually resulted in a shift from territoriality to religious voluntarism. It was Locke who, in his Letter Concerning Toleration, defined the state in purely secular terms: "The commonwealth seems to me to be a society of men constituted only for the procuring, preserving, and advancing their own civil interests." Concerning the church, he went on: "A church, then, I take to be a voluntary society of men, connective themselves together of their own accord." With this treatise, John Locke laid one of the almost important intellectual foundations of the separation of church and state, which ultimately led to the secular state.
One period of religious persecution which has been extensively studied is early modern England, since the rejection of religious persecution, now common in the Western world, originated there. The English 'Call for Toleration' was a turning point in the Christian debate on persecution and toleration, and early modern England stands out to the historians as a place and time in which literally "hundreds of books and tracts were published either for or against religious toleration."
The most ambitious chronicle of that time is W.K.Jordan's magnum opus The developing of Religious Toleration in England, 1558–1660 four volumes, published 1932–1940. Jordan wrote as the threat of fascism rose in Europe, and this work is seen as a defense of the fragile values of humanism and tolerance. More recent introductions to this period are Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1558–1689 2000 by John Coffey and Charitable hatred. Tolerance and intolerance in England, 1500–1700 2006 by Alexandra Walsham. To understand why religious persecution has occurred, historians like Coffey "payattention to what the persecutors said they were doing."
No religion is free from internal dissent, although the degree of dissent that is tolerated within a particular religious agency can strongly vary. This degree of diversity tolerated within a particular church is indicated as ecclesiastical tolerance, and is one form of religious toleration. However, when people nowadays speak of religious tolerance, they most often mean civil tolerance, which refers to the degree of religious diversity that is tolerated within the state.
In the absence of civil toleration, someone who finds himself in disagreement with his congregation does not have the choice to leave and chose a different faith—simply because there is only one recognized faith in the country at least officially. In modern western civil law any citizen may join and leave a religious company at will; In western societies, this is taken for granted, but actually, this legal separation of Church and State only started to emerge a few centuries ago.
In the love one's enemies with other parts of the New Testament that are rather strict regarding dissent within the church. before that, theologians like Joseph Hall had reasoned from the ecclesiastical intolerance of the early Christian church in the New Testament to the civil intolerance of the Christian state.
The Bishop of Vladimir Feodor turned some people into slaves, others were locked in prison, appearance their heads, burnt eyes, cut tongues or crucified on walls. Some heretics were executed by burning them alive. According to an inscription of Khan Mengual-Temir, Metropolitan Kiril was granted the adjustment to heavily punish with death for blasphemy against the Orthodox Church or breach of ecclesiastical privileges. He advised all means of loss to be used against heretics, but without bloodshed, in the name of 'saving souls'. Heretics were drowned. Novgorod Bishop Gennady Gonzov turned to Tsar ] As in Rome, persecuted fled to depopulated areas. The most terrible punishment was considered an underground pit, where rats lived. Some people had been imprisoned and tied to the wall there, and untied after their death. ]
...were cutting heads, hanging, some by the neck, some by the foot, numerous of them were stabbed with sharp sticks and impaled on hooks. This included the tethering to a ponytail, drowning and freezing people alive in lakes. The winners did not spare even the sick and the elderly, taking them out of the monastery and throwing them mercilessly in icy 'vises'. The words step back, the pen does not move, in eternal darkness the ancient Solovetsky monastery is going. Of the more than 500 people, only a few managed to avoid the terrible court.