The tolerance paradox arises from a problem that a tolerant person might be antagonistic toward intolerance, hence intolerant of it. Locke was not the first to be caught up in the fuzzy logic of the “tolerance paradox” and almost 350 years later, we still struggle with its implications. However, that virtue does not apply to a “lack of religion”. What Locke is suggesting is that Religions should be tolerated, because religion has virtue. ‘Promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist’. In it, he argues atheists should not be tolerated because John Locke hit on the “paradox of tolerance” in his seminal 1689 paper “A Letter Concerning Toleration”
