Back Off a Bit, You’re Breaking My Leg
When Jefferson and Madison wrote into the law of Virginia (in 1777) freedom of as well as freedom from organized religion, they had a good many interesting and timely things to say. Not the least of them, included the admonitions (italics are mine)
that the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavoring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and through all time
that the opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction; that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy, which at once destroys…