John Locke Religious Tolerance

The two passages dealt with religious tolerance, each from a different perspective. The first passage, John Locke's "A Letter Concerning Toleration" from 1689, was written from the viewpoint of a man under a king's rule in England. The second passage, "The Blind Men and the Elephant," is a Buddhist parable. Locke's reasoning for religious tolerance is all over the place. He first explains that no man has any right to enforce his beliefs on another man, stating that faith comes from within one's self, and it is not considered faith if it be thrust upon another. He also states that the civil government shall be separate from the church. The government has no authority in the confines of the church, and the church cannot enforce its teachings in the
It states that the ignorance of man allows for him to tolerate other beliefs. The Buddha compares the quarrelling preachers and scholars to the blind men disputing what an elephant is. The preachers and scholars have only seen, or studied, their own beliefs, and therefore believe they are correct and anyone to say otherwise is wrong. This ignorance causes disputes among one another, as did the ignorance of the blind men disputing what sort of thing the elephant was. The Buddha tries to make a point by reciting a poem, and this point being that you have to look past your own beliefs to get the full picture of what is actually there. The blind men were only given a certain part of the elephant to analyze, so that's what they perceived to be an elephant. However, if they were given the chance to analyze the other parts, which the other men had studied, then they would have the whole picture of what the elephant was, thus a complete understanding. So if the preachers and scholars took time to put aside their own ignorance, and look to the beliefs of the others, then they may in fact get an entire picture, and thus a complete