There’s one word that can stop you in your track. That word is “tolerance.”
Let’s take a look at the confusing and mistaken ways tolerance is used in our culture today.
Using the modern definition of tolerance, you will see that no one is tolerant, or ever can be. It’s what my friend Frank Beckwith calls the “passive aggressive tolerance trick.” Let’s start with a real life example.
I had the privilege of speaking to seniors at a Christian high school in Des Moines. I wanted to alert them to this “tolerance trick,” but I also wanted to learn how much they had already been taken in by it. I began by writing two sentences on the board
"All views have equal merit and none should be considered better than another."
“Jesus is the Messiah and Judaism is wrong for rejecting that.”
They all nodded in agreement as I wrote the first sentence. As soon as I finished writing the second, though, hands flew up. “You can’t say that,” a coed challenged, clearly annoyed. “That’s disrespectful. How would you like it if someone said you were wrong?”
“In fact, that happens to me all the time,” I pointed out, “including right now with you. But why should it bother me that someone thinks I’m wrong?”
“It’s intolerant,” she said, noting that the second statement violated the first statement. What she didn’t see was that the first statement also violated itself.
I pointed to the first statement and asked, “Is this a view, the idea that all views have equal merit and none should be considered better than another?” They agreed.
Then I pointed to the second statement—the “intolerant” one—and asked the same question: “Is this a view?” They studied the sentence for a moment. Slowly my point began to dawn on them. They’d been taken in by the tolerance trick.
If all views have equal merit, then the view that Christians have a better view on Jesus than Jews is just as true as the idea that Jews have a better view on Jesus than Christians. But this is hopelessly contradictory. If the first statement is what tolerance amounts to, then no one can be tolerant because “tolerance” turns out to be gibberish.
Read the rest here.
2 comments:
And he's just blown any justfication for moral relativism. But try telling that to those that stick to and tell you "But that's exactly the point. It is contradictory. There's truth in contradiction."
Don't ask me to explain that.
Yeah, when folks argue that contradictions are fine and that it's okay to have contradictions in your beliefs, there's not much you can do except to clarify what they mean by contradiction and what you mean by contradiction. It can be very frustrating. Especially since self-contradiction seems almost fashionable on university campuses these days, some kind of badge of open-mindedness or rebellion or something.
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