What does "I have a right to my belief" mean?

What does the "right to believe something" amount to? Does it simply means that some powerful people, like the government for example, or the Spanish Inquisition if it were still around, have an obligation not to use force to make me believe something? I am not sure much of anybody is in the business of taking that kind of a right away, anyway, so to say that sort of thing almost seem trivial.




If it means more than that, then what does it mean? Does it implicitly involve a refusal to reason, and to consider the views of one's opponents seriously? If I think you are making a serious mistake, (and if belief or unbelief in God is a mistake, it's a serious mistake), don;t I have the right to try to convince you of the error of your ways, at least until you tell me to go away?



Is the attempt to provide reasons for rejecting a belief you currently have an example of trying to shove your beliefs down someone's throat? Perhaps what "I have a right to my belief" means is that we have an obligation to desist from debating a subject if we are asked to desist. Perhaps the "right to believe what I believe" is an article of conversational decorum.



What does not follow is that no belief is more justified than any other. It does not mean that there aren't well-supported and defensible beliefs and poorly supported and indefensible beliefs.