If you were to be consistent, then the fact that someone else somewhere thinks you're sinning should be sufficient to ban your own behavior, whatever it is. Whether you're religious or not has nothing to do with it. Since you believe in limiting someone's liberty, you should believe that the most radical form of religion should limit yours.

In such a society, in practice, anything can be forced or banned. And it is. If someone dislikes you, any word you speak can be taken as an insult to religion or an insult to the government, and is punishable. Moreover, such a society might force you to take a drug, or decide to euthanize your disabled family member. Sure, it is "understandable" that a totalitarian government makes sinning illegal, but it's hard to think of anything more odious.

Once such a system is in place, your freedom to "question the values of society" or form your own personal opinion would cease to exist. Your view is only possible in a free society that prizes liberty, although it is essentially dangerous to the survival of the society you're lucky enough to live in.

The only way to avoid a totalitarian outcome is to tolerate other people having the freedom to make what are in your opinion mistakes. Which includes saying things you don't like. And not only to tolerate it, but to elevate it above all other frameworks.

The paradigm of "my opinion / our opinion should be the law" is what leads to totalitarianism.

Define sin first. Killing yourself results in death. Religious fanatics stretch definition of sin to whatever they don’t like.

Gays? Sin? Woman without hijab? Sin. Abortion? Sin.

> In my view it's the same: You are limiting someone else's liberty; forcing them not to do something you consider a grave mistake.

No, it’s totally not the same. And it’s not necessarily about mistake. Allowing people to commit unrestricted suicide would set a dangerous precedent. And on top of that a lot of inconvenience for people around.

When I say 'personal opinion', I don't care where it arises from: Be it religion or heresy, or what your government has taught you or what your ancient culture dictates, that's just your opinion. Somewhere, someone believes otherwise.

Democracies which function well seek to strike a balance between those, not to obliterate the minority.

Minorities win in America, in every sense. Immigrant cultures and subculture and counterculture lead to innovation, to the extent they're allowed to thrive. The law recognizes this and, in large over a long time, adjusts to accommodate. Integration in the US is in many ways tolerance.

Hong Kong was a highly successful democracy until its freedom was taken. Taiwan is a democracy which respects minority opinion. Both are/were tolerant of protests which could never take place in mainland China. Who is even to say that China's government has anything to do with protecting culture or majority belief? A majority in China may well believe that their government is illegitimate, but simply cannot say so because "bodily survival takes precedence", exactly because the current order does interfere in threatening says. Although certainly, even this suppression of the majority pales in comparison to the horrific treatment of minorities there.

Of course our values are influenced by the society we grow up in. If people weren't influenced by those surrounding them, I believe our society would significantly worse off.

(In my country the government does not have direct enough control over education to dictate the culture being taught. It's the teachers, or more general, the society as a whole, which teaches its values to young people.)

But I don't think it's reasonable to discredit someone's believes as their own, just because they were influenced by others. People who grow up within the same society do still often have opinions which differ greatly. So while people certainly are influenced by their society, they still shape their opinions themselves.