Factual in a sense but misleading to the point of being wrong. You quoted the History Channel as saying, "As Virginia’s governor in 1779, Thomas Jefferson drafted a bill that would guarantee the religious freedoms of Virginians of all faiths—including those with no faith—but the bill did not pass into law."

The plain interpretation of that is that the religious freedom idea failed. That's the claim, and that implicit claim is counterfactual (and note that you quoted me as saying, "If the establishment of religious intolerance was a goal, they could easily have done so." so we're clearly talking about what religious liberty meant).

But the bill passed in 1786. (https://ichoran.medium.com/aha-i-had-a-feeling-there-was-something-off-about-this-statement-f3826c6c1cfd Want more context? A bill codifying religious intolerance failed in 1785.)

Maybe you were making a different claim than I thought, but in that case, all you needed to do is clarify what your claim was. I made it plenty clear what I was arguing against, didn't I?

As far as context goes, in that discussion I tried to talk about the themes of liberty and tolerance at the time of the drafting of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, about the Second Great Awakening and the consequences for religious tolerance (i.e. diminishing tolerance), but you wouldn't talk about that context. So don't pretend that I'm unwilling to look at context! I very much am, have, and you repeatedly haven't engaged with that context in a meaningful way. If we were debating the religious hierarchy vs the "dissenters" and the liberty-minded Founding Fathers to understand what "religious liberty" meant to those people and the bounds upon liberty that they intended or accepted, then we'd be talking about context for your claim that ""religious liberty" was shorthand for "our brand of religious intolerance"".

But you won't discuss any contexts that might show that your statement is in error. You'll only talk about a scale of context wherein you seem right. Do you want to talk about the context of religious liberty over the last 1000 years in Western Europe? Noooo. Because if you have that much context, then it's clear that the Enlightenment does mark a period of considerable individual and institutional liberty. Even "Catholics can't hold office" is a spectacular increase in liberty from "affirm Christianity and the Church or die". Do you want to talk about the context of the framing the Constitution--which is where the idea of religious liberty was most widely expressed, and is what everyone refers to these days when talking about the principles on which the country was founded? No! A great deal has been written about the debates of the time (including documents from the time) and this makes it very plain that "our own brand of religious oppression" was very much on the table and was rejected at that critical juncture. If you talk about that context, then your claim isn't supportable. The only context you want to talk about is the context in which you're right, even if your original claims don't show any particular signs of being in that context.

So--one thing upon which we do agree is that childishness in argumentation provides good reason to not discuss anything substantive with the other in the future. It's a shame, because you do know a lot and you have good reasons for much of what you believe. But the interactions are very rarely productive, and I can't figure out how to make them so. So, never mind!

People who read your articles will generally end up better-informed than before, and even if they end up misled about some things, I estimate that on balance an improvement in most cases. Even if I'm occasionally "triggered".