religious toleration

Sculpture Für Toleranz ("for tolerance") by Volkmar Kühn, Gera, Germany (2001) "Grave with the Hands" in Roermond. Jacob van Gorcum, a Protestant (of the Reformed Church), who died in 1880 and his wife Josephina, a Catholic, who died in 1888, are buried in the Protestant and Catholic sections of the cemetery respectively, but their tombs are joined by "hands" over the wall.Religious tolerance or religious toleration may signify "no more than forbearance and the permission given by the adherents of a dominant religion for other religions to exist, even though the latter are looked on with disapproval as inferior, mistaken, or harmful". Historically, most incidents and writings pertaining to toleration involve the status of minority and dissenting viewpoints in relation to a dominant state religion. However, religion is also sociological, and the practice of toleration has always had a political aspect as well.

An overview of the history of toleration and different cultures in which toleration has been practiced, and the ways in which such a paradoxical concept has developed into a guiding one, illuminates its contemporary use as political, social, religious, and ethnic, applying to LGBT individuals and other minorities, and other connected concepts such as human rights.