The Intolerance of Tolerance

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a b Zagorin, Perez (2003). How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-09270-6. OCLC 50982270. Thirdly, it became profoundly foundational. That is, it sought certain foundations on which to build, foundations which were judged to be self-evident. That is, axiomatic. He set himself to doubt things until he could doubt no more, and his foundation was cogito ergo sum, but in many disciplines that sort of approach had already been established.

To return to Lessing’s parable of the ring, Lessing himself wanted people to be tolerant because (according to him) we cannot be sure which ring is the magic one, but he didn’t deny there is a magic ring. The new postmodern approach to tolerance, especially with respect to spirituality, argues that all the rings are equally magic.

How can intolerance be countered?

a b c d van Doorn, Marjoka (2014). "The nature of tolerance and the social circumstances in which it emerges". Current Sociology. 62 (6): 905–927. Our results suggest that only an appreciation of difference has the potential to reduce prejudice, but we do not know how tolerance is related to other individual-level or societal-level outcomes. Thus, we do not argue that individuals and societies should strive to appreciate all forms of difference. Future research should examine the extent to which these aspects of tolerance affect behavior—political and mundane. Research should also study the societal-level consequences of different aspects of tolerance. Fifthly, that meant you were pursuing truth that partook of ahistorical universality. That is to say, truth that is true everywhere, in every time … ahistorical, transcultural universality. It’s easiest to see in the domain of the hard sciences, partly because the international scientific community has common language. You know, to boldly go where no one’s ever gone before and, thus, define the truth. Despite the splint infinitive, there’s a certain kind of modernist interest in exploring the truth. Program after program in the Voyager series was really quite different. It was designed to show that all cultures are all right; it just depends on your point of view.

a b Walzer, Michael (1997). On Toleration. The Castle lectures in ethics, politics, and economics. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 0300070195. OCLC 47008086. As Gaede puts it in his very useful book, When Tolerance is No Virtue, he writes, “In the past political correctness generally centered on issues that were quite substantive. The Victorians were prudish about sex because they were enthusiastic about bourgeois morality. In the fifties, many Americans were intolerant of any notion that seemed remotely “pink” (socialistic) because they assumed communism to be a major threat to their economic and political freedom. They don’t want to consider themselves postmoderns anymore, but when you try to probe to find out what their epistemology is, as far as I can see, it’s merely subjective eclecticism. There’s a bit of this and a bit of that. Thus, there is no etiology that is controlling the flow. It’s astonishingly pragmatic and eclectic. Moreover, vast numbers of citizens who could not define epistemology if their lives depended on it inevitably adopt some epistemology or other or mix of epistemologies coherent or otherwise. There is, of course, also rising secularization. That needs to be understood. This does not necessarily mean there are fewer people who go around calling themselves Christians. It just means it doesn’t matter. Secularization, as understood by sociologists, is not the process by which we abandon religion; it’s the process by which we squeeze religion to the periphery of life. Hanson, Charles P. (1998). Necessary Virtue: The Pragmatic Origins of Religious Liberty in New England. University Press of Virginia. ISBN 978-0-8139-1794-8.Contemporary commentators have highlighted situations in which toleration conflicts with widely held moral standards, national law, the principles of national identity, or other strongly held goals. Michael Walzer notes that the British in India tolerated the Hindu practice of suttee (ritual burning of a widow) until 1829. On the other hand, the United States declined to tolerate the Mormon practice of polygamy. [16] The French head scarf controversy represents a conflict between religious practice and the French secular ideal. [17] Toleration of or intolerance toward the Romani people in European countries is a continuing issue. [18] Modern definition [ edit ]

That is, if God knows it all then the question is how God, who knows it all, shares some bits of it with us. Call that revelation. Whether it is through Scripture or by the Spirit or in science (what was then called natural philosophy) or by whatever means, by providential steering of things … whatever … all of this is revelation, which then teaches finite beings to know some small part of what God knows. This has been the sketchiest of outlines. Its bearing on the question of tolerance is nevertheless immediately obvious. We could not have moved as a culture to substantive adoption of the new tolerance if we had not undergone a fundamental shift in epistemology, a shift that will quite possibly prove as epochal as the dawning of the Enlightenment, although in my view it won’t last nearly as long. Sullivan et al. ( 1979) introduce the “least-liked” approach in part to avoid contaminating the measurement of tolerance with respondents’ attitudes towards specific groups. As they put it: “If we had merely asked all respondents whether communists should be allowed to hold public office, their responses would depend not only on their levels of tolerance, but also on their feelings toward communists” (p. 785). To establish initial dislike, Sullivan et al. ( 1979) measure respondents’ attitudes about various groups in society. After identifying a disliked, or least liked, group, the respondents report preferences regarding these group members’ participation in political and civic activities. Adopting the same strategy, Rapp ( 2017) first examines respondents’ attitudes towards groups that are ethnically, religiously, or culturally diverse from them. Anti-immigrant attitudes constitute the rejection component. She then restricts her sample only to those respondents who are prejudiced, because theoretically, they are the only ones who can be tolerant. by which I mean, epistemology that dominates in the High Middle Ages through the end of the Reformation. That is, through the Renaissance and the Reformation, up to the beginning of the Enlightenment, which marks the beginning of the modern period.Moreover, there were three or four movements in Western culture that came together and contributed to this shift. People have been thinking about these things for a long time. Immanuel Kant was no postmodernist, but on the other hand, he made the distinction between the noumenal and the phenomenal.