I've noticed that generally the less power a religion has, the more liberal its adherents are. And when they are in the minority, they are much more likely to support tolerance of different faiths than when they are in the majority. This seems transparently self-serving, even if that is not a conscious effort.
I think of it less as self-serving than survival of the fittest. Any fundamentalist Jew preaching anti-Christian and anti-Government (which were pretty much the same thing, admittedly) dogma in 1200AD would not live long enough to impart his beliefs on to the next generation.
Bullet Magnet
08-22-2014 05:21 PM
Much the same way that religions that do not convert can only spread by the strength of their loins, and are thus almost always tiny.