> No matter what your standard of "real harm," free speech has examples where it risks causing real harm.
I think you must have either a very broad interpretation of what counts as "speech" or a very loose concept of causality. My standard of "real harm", which I do not consider particularly idiosyncratic, essentially comes down to bodily injury or property damage. (How other people think about you—reputation—is not included; neither does IP count as actual property.) Speech is purely the communication of information (of any sort) from one person to another, which by its nature causes neither bodily injury nor property damage. Speech may influence listeners may go on to inflict bodily injury or property damage, but to say that the speech caused the harm ignores the agency of those responsible for acting on it. Mere influence does not nullify choice or personal responsibility.
Freedom of religion falls under a similar category; your beliefs are your own and you ought not be persecuted (or prosecuted) for them, but that doesn't mean you get a free pass if you act on those beliefs in a way that harms others. Theft is still theft, and punishable as such, even if your religion disavows private property. Murder is still murder even if your religion calls for human sacrifice. Etc.
In both cases you have to start with the much more fundamental right to do anything which does not directly harm other people or their property in order to answer the question of which particular forms of expression (of speech or religious sentiment) are actually protected. Speech and religious expression are subsets of the set of things you already have every right to do specifically because they do not harm others, and only really make sense in that context. The key point of the dual freedoms of speech and religion is to emphasize that actions you would otherwise be free to take do not suddenly become out-of-bounds based on the information content or religious affiliation.