Comment by LeifCarrotson
5 years ago
As an atheist apostate who was raised in a fundamentalist, Baptist, Christian church in the Great Lakes region, it hits pretty close to home.
I was last in church a couple weeks ago for a funeral; it was a little weird hearing about the ways people from various highly-similar churches talked about Grandma's spiritual history as she was enlightened from her Christian Reformed early childhood to know a living and true God. Did she know the theological differences at age 10? We talked about the effect she had as the matriarch of our extended family bringing everyone together for decades by sponsoring an annual summer trip to a nearby Bible conference ground, and about how she justifiably ended that when the Bible conference lost their way and endorsed some speakers with relatively minor theological differences.
It's not "conflict" in the sense of the Spanish Inquisition - no one, as far as I know, would genuinely push someone off a bridge for being in a different sect - but around here they'd pray for the person to accept the truth, call for church discipline/excommunication/speaking bans if in a position of power, or they'd leave the church and find a slightly different sect that didn't make the wrong call on whatever issue was brought up by the council of 1912.
There's a paradox of intolerance at play: A group that aims to be universally tolerant cannot actually tolerate intolerance, and fundamentalist Christianity advocates a singular, accurately understood, unique truth at its core. You can and tolerate love those who hold different theologies all you want, but if you believe in one absolute universal truth as a lot of Christian culture does, then anyone who believes even a little bit differently is not right, which is to say, by definition, they're wrong.
Karl Popper was a moron. You can tolerate intolerance just fine by assuming there will be someone equally intolerant of such intolerance.
I wish people would stop quoting that denthead. It’s as silly as people claiming the Qu’ran has passages specifically commanding them to blow people up.
Your conclusion is definitionally the same as Popper's? Intolerance of intolerance is the solution. It is only a "paradox" in that unlimited tolerance leads to this seemingly backwards outcome of the triumph of intolerance.
The difference is that Popper thinks you yourself must be the intolerant one. I'm saying that if intolerance exists, then someone else will take care of it because they too must surely exist.
Taken to its logical conclusion, nothing can be tolerated but tolerance itself.
Kind of an inversion of Chesterton's 'Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.'