ABSTRACT
The quest for secular justifications of religious freedom involves identifying the reasons for the benefits and burdens of the law of the State on religion. Practical justifications for the benefit of religious freedom, advantages which the beneficiary receives under the law, are rather more conspicuous than the justifications for the burdens, for others, arising as a result of the benefit legally given. Sometimes practical reasons coincide with or are based on theoretical reasons and vice versa. Both classes of justification may be in the form of large political or moral reasons which legitimize and underlie state law on religion, or else they may take the form of legal reasons used as the basis of or causative of particular decisions and arrangements about religious autonomy and its limits. Religious justifications tend to coalesce around the notion that personal freedom and the dignity of the individual cannot be separated from duties to and communion with God.
