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.
Sculpture Für Toleranz ("for tolerance") by Volkmar Kühn, Gera, Germany
"Tomb with 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 cemeteries respectively, but their tombs are joined by "hands" over the wall.
Minerva as a symbol of enlightened wisdom protects the believers of all religions (Daniel Chodowiecki, 1791)
Clement VI
Religious persecution in the Roman Empire
As the Roman Republic, and later the Roman Empire, expanded, it came to include people from a variety of cultures, and religions. The worship of an ever increasing number of deities was tolerated and accepted. The government, and the Romans in general, tended to be tolerant towards most religions and religious practices. Some religions were banned for political reasons rather than dogmatic zeal, and other rites which involved human sacrifice were banned.
Bust of Germanicus defaced by Christians
The Christian Martyrs' Last Prayer, by Jean-Léon Gérôme (1883)
Nero's Torches, by Henryk Siemiradzki (1876). According to Tacitus, Nero used Christians as human torches
The Victory of Faith, by Saint George Hare, depicts two Christians in the eve of their damnatio ad bestias