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» Friday, February 9, 2007

Religious tolerance explained

By those people at Pandagon who are way, way more likely to meet Jesus' approval than Bill Donohue would be after a lifetime of confession:

Here are a few basic ground rules for religious tolerance. Not everybody believes what you believe. This includes the existence of an afterlife, the existence of a soul, the existence of any gods at all much less one all-encompassing one. A person's failure to believe what you believe does not constitute disrespect for your beliefs. Failure to be obsequious in the face of your religion's central story does not constitute disrespect for believers in your religion. One can respect Christians as human beings and still opine aloud that the New Testament is a bunch of nonsense, just as one can respect traditional Hopi culture without writing in your Pleistocene paleontology paper that the ancestors of the Hopi emerged into this world from a sipapu in the Grand Canyon.

It's clear to most thinking people that Opus Donohue and his like aren't interested in tolerance at all, but in theocratic subjugation. What's apparently less clear to some? That subjugation rests on the assumption that everyone secretly believes in a Christianist god and heaven despite their pagan or atheist or pantheist poses. A tolerant ecumenicism, these people seem to think, consists of granting the possibility that the All-Powerful One God in an afterlife heaven might go by more than one first name. A little-considered fact about even the most strident atheists: they spend most of their public lives not challenging people's false assumptions about what they believe. Small wonder! A solecism about Christ's birth far tamer than some I heard emerge from the mouths of Jesuit priests can apparently derail a career, while grinding a grieving unbeliever's heart beneath your heel in the name of compassion is considered a consummate act of Christian charity.

Some tolerance.

Amen, brother Chris.

# - Posted to Something larger than ourselves, The argument for power on 2/9/07; 1:06:09 AM - Discuss -

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