What does Freedom of Religion Mean in the United States?

 It basically means you can literally believe anything you want to and start a church based upon those beliefs:

UNLESS:

what you believe kills or infringes on the rights of others.

So, as a result you see people believing some pretty strange things and creating their own religions and churches around those strange things.

But, as long as you aren't harming others you are allowed to do this.

For example, I watched many many people die growing up in my church because they wouldn't go to doctors. And these people were in their 20s to 50s to 70s when they died. Kids likely died too but kids were just more expendable when I was growing up in the 1950s. I think this is because kids had ALWAYS died a lot to where sometimes 2 to 3 out of 10 kids might die so families with 5 to 10 kids were quite common in the 1950s still, especially with doctors as heads of the family where they could more easily afford to have 10 kids or more.

But, around the late 1960s and early 1970s all this began to change a lot along with everything else.

So, Freedom of religion helps some people and confuses a whole lot of kids along the way. This is what I mostly saw growing up.

But, I still feel freedom of religion is an important cornerstone of American Freedom ever since the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts in 1620.

In the 1950s in Public school in Grade school in the Los Angeles area for example, we took either a whole morning or an afternoon once a week so people could go to their own church for several hours. But, this only worked for mainstream religions like Catholic and Protestant churches nearby. So, it was like an afternoon of Sunday School tied directly into the public schools during the 1950s. Religion was a really big thing in the 1950s as long as you were some denomination of Being a Christian.

Many people are sort of like me in that they believe that their religion was both the best thing and also the worst thing that happened to them as children.

My point of view is that most governmental systems started with some religious point of view or philosophic cultural point of view so I see religion as often the beginning of culture and respect and even self respect for people and a part of their identity whether or not they believe everything they were taught or not after they grow up as adults.

Because of all this the right to Freedom of Religion is very important to the average person in America.

And people tend to respect each other's religions as much as they can because Freedom of Religion is sacrosanct (UNLESS) people try to stuff their beliefs down other people's throats who aren't their religion.

At that point almost anything can and will happen.

So, it can be dangerous when people who are in one extreme religion try to convert someone in another extreme religion. However, most people are smart enough not to do this because they like being alive too much to do this.