What people think of as religious freedom is really just the separation of church and state. In reality, the 1st-amendment protects our right to discriminate against religious people. If we choose, as employers, we can refuse to hire religious people and we can fire religious people simply for being religious. Congress is prohibited from creating any anti-discrimination law involving religion. On the other side, congress can create anti-discrimination laws for the non-religious. The 1st-amendment says nothing about prohibiting congress from respecting non-religious entities.

Yes, it's very different from what religious people, through their skewed view, choose to believe. The truth is, the founders despised religion (in particular, Christianity). They separated the church from the state, thus severing the main power-line of the church, and they additionally gave the people all the tools necessary to expose and destroy religion. There are few places religion can be more damaged, than in the work-place. The other main places are government (to which all religiousness is by constitutional decree, essentially outlawed), and school (in all public schools, religion is forbidden).

Yes, the 1st-amendment is quite a clever piece of legislation. Most people think 'escaping religious persecution' means being able to choose any religion you want, but really what it means, is to not be persecuted by any religion, which means, every religion must be destroyed. The religious are all oppressed, only they don't consider themselves oppressed, because in their minds, the oppressions are choices. Yes, they 'serve' their religion willingly, by living under its oppression. So because they consider it a choice, they don't consider it oppression.

Religion is a tricky bastard, and that's why it enslaves so many weak-minded. We have reached the age though, where religion is dying out in mass-quantities. Once this last generation of old-people is dead, religion will be decimated. Young people of today are exponentially less religious than their predecessors. That trend is moderately unique to our time. In the old days, young people were as religious, if not more religious than their parents. So when you see religious people, wearing their symbols of slavery around their necks, you can feel sorry for them, and also know, their kind is almost gone.