Intolerance in the Name of Tolerance

By now we all know that “tolerance” is one of the most abused, misused and bankrupt words going. It is of course used by the militant activist groups to shut down all debate and censor out all contrasting points of view. In the name of tolerance these groups are the most intolerant groups around.

Indeed, there is nothing tolerant about the secular left. As Mark Steyn puts it, “The Left does not want to win the debate, it wants to shut down the debate.” We see this happening every day. Just one recent case in point comes from the American state of North Carolina.

Because the government there dared to seek to protect children by not allowing adults into children’s bathrooms, the “tolerance” brigade is hyperventilating and foaming at the mouth. One leftist group after another has come out demonising the state and threatening it with any and every reprisal – all in the name of tolerance of course.

PayPal for example said it will pull all business from the state. Um, never mind that it has plenty of business dealings in countries where homosexuals are routinely being tortured and killed. Hypocrites much? And aging rocker Bruce Springsteen has cancelled a concert there because of this new ‘bathroom law’.

Moreover, the head of the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority has effectively banned agency employees from traveling to Charlotte, N.C., for a conference. And RINO presidential candidate John Kasich said he would not have signed the law if it were up to him.

Hmm, that sure is a whole lot of tolerance going on. I would hate to see what these guys are like when in intolerance mode. The double standards from these folks are utterly amazing to behold. As they hate on anyone who takes a different stance on issues, they insist we all be just like them – oh so tolerant. Yeah right.

Many have warned about the tolerance fascists that we face today. But some voices were writing about this long before we saw the full outbreak of ugly tolerance in action. For example Bishop Fulton J. Sheen (1895-1979) was a staunch defender of conservative values, and he often took on the reigning cultural and religious liberalism of his day.

sheen 2In 1931 he penned a volume entitled Old Errors and New Labels. In it is a chapter called “A Plea for Intolerance”. It is a ripper, and one of the earliest pieces warning about both moral relativism and tolerance wrongly conceived. It is well worth quoting from at length. It begins:

America, it is said, is suffering from intolerance. It is not. It is suffering from tolerance: tolerance of right and wrong, truth and error, virtue and evil, Christ and chaos. Our country is not nearly so much overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded. The man who can make up his mind in an orderly way, as a man might make up his bed, is called a bigot; but a man who cannot make up his mind, any more than he can make up for lost time, is called tolerant and broadminded. A bigoted man is one who refuses to accept a reason for anything; a broadminded man is one who will accept anything for a reason – providing it is not a good reason. It is true that there is a demand for precision, exactness, and definiteness, but it is only for precision in scientific measurement, not in logic. The breakdown that has produced this unnatural broadmindedness is mental, not moral. The evidence for this statement is threefold: the tendency to settle issues not by arguments but by words, the unqualified willingness to accept the authority of anyone on the subject of religion, and, lastly, the love of novelty.
Voltaire boasted that if he could find but ten wicked words a day he could crush the “infamy” of Christianity. He found the ten words daily, and even a daily dozen, but he never found an argument, and so the words went the way of all words and the thing, Christianity, survived. Today, no one advances even a poor argument to prove that there is no God, but they are legion who think they have sealed up the heavens when they used the word “anthropomorphism.” This word is just a sample of the catalogue of names which serve as the excuse for those who are too lazy to think. One moment’s reflection would tell them that one can no more get rid of God by calling Him “anthropomorphic” than he can get rid of a sore throat by calling it “streptococci.”

He continues:

Another evidence of the breakdown of reason that has produced this weird fungus of broadmindedness is the passion for novelty, as opposed to the love of truth. Truth is sacrificed for an epigram, and the Divinity of Christ for a headline in the Monday morning newspaper. Many a modern preacher is far less concerned with preaching Christ and Him crucified than he is his popularity with his congregation. A want of intellectual backbone makes him straddled the ox of truth and the ass of nonsense, paying compliments to Catholics because of their great organization? and to sexologists because of their honest challenge to the youth of this generation. Bending the knee to the mob and pleasing men rather than God would probably make them scruple at ever playing the role of a John the Baptist before a modern Herod. No accusing finger would be leveled at a divorce or one living in adultery; no voice would be thundered in the ears of the rich, saying with something of the intolerance of Divinity: It is not lawful for you to live with your brother’s wife.” Rather would we hear: Friend, times are changing! The acids of modernity are eating away the fossils of orthodoxy. If your noble sex urge to self?expression finds its proper stimulus and response in no one but Herodias, then in the name of Freud and Russell accept her as your lawful wife to have and to hold until sex do ye part.
Belief in the existence of God, in the Divinity of Christ, and in the moral law are considered passing fashions. The latest thing in this new tolerance is considered the true thing, as if truth were a fashion, like the hat, instead of an institution, like a head. At the present moment, in psychology the fashion runs towards Behaviorism, as in philosophy it runs towards Temporalism. And that it is not objective validity which dictates the success of a modern philosophical theory, is borne out by the statement a celebrated space-time philosopher of England made to the writer a few years ago, when he was asked where he got his system. From my imagination, he answered. Upon being challenged that the imagination was not the proper faculty for a philosopher to use, he retorted: It is, if the success of your philosophical system depends not on the truth that is in it, but on its novelty.
In that statement is the final argument for modern broadmindedness: truth is novelty, and hence truth changes with the passing fancies of the moment. Like the chameleon who changes his colors to suit the vesture on which he is placed, so truth is supposed to change to suit the foibles and obliquities of the age, as if the foundations of thinking might be true for the preAdamites and false for the Adamites. Truth does grow, but it grows homogeneously, like an acorn into an oak; it does not swing in the breeze, like a weathercock. The leopard does not change his spots nor the Ethiopian his skin, though the leopard be put in bars or the Ethiopian in pink tights. The nature of certain things is fixed, and none more so than the nature of truth. Truth may be contradicted a thousand times, but that only proves that it is strong enough to survive a thousand assaults. But for anyone to say, Some say this, some say that, therefore there is no truth, is about as logical as it would have been for Columbus, who heard some say, The earth is round, and other say, The earth is flat, to conclude: Therefore there is no earth at all.
It is this kind of thinking that cannot distinguish between a sheep and his second coat of wool, between Napoleon and his three-cornered hat, between the substance and the accident, the kind that has begotten minds so flattened with broadness that they have lost all their depth. Like a carpenter who might throw away his rule and use each beam as a measuring?rod, so, too, those who have thrown away the standard of objective truth have nothing left with which to measure but the mental fashion of the moment.
The giggling giddiness of novelty, the sentimental restlessness of a mind unhinged, and the unnatural fear of a good dose of hard thinking, all conjoin to produce a group of sophomoric latitudinarians who think there is no difference between God as Cause and God as a mental projection; who equate Christ and Buddha, St. Paul and John Dewey, and then enlarge their broadmindedness into a sweeping synthesis that says not only that one Christian sect is just as good as another, but even that one world religion is just as good as another. The great god Progress is then enthroned on the altars of fashion, and as the hectic worshipers are asked, Progress towards what? The tolerant answer comes back, More progress. All the while sane men are wondering how there can be progress without direction and how there can be direction without a fixed point. And because they speak of a fixed point, they are said to be behind the times, when really they are beyond the times mentally and spiritually.
In the face of this false broadmindedness, what the world needs is intolerance. The mass of people have kept up hard and fast distinctions between dollars and cents, battleships and cruisers, You owe me and I owe you, but they seem to have lost entirely the faculty of distinguishing between the good and the bad, the right and the wrong. The best indication of this is the frequent misuse of the terms tolerance and intolerance. There are some minds that believe that intolerance is always wrong, because they make intolerance mean hate, narrowmindedness, and bigotry. These same minds believe that tolerance is always right because, for them, it means charity, broadmindedness, American good nature….
What is tolerance? Tolerance is an attitude of reasoned patience towards evil, and a forbearance that restrains us from showing anger or inflicting punishment. But what is more important than the definition is the field of its application. The important point here is this: Tolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons. Tolerance applies to the erring; intolerance to the error. What has just been said here will clarify that which was said at the beginning of this chapter, namely, that America is suffering not so much from intolerance, which is bigotry, as it is from tolerance, which is indifference to truth and error, and a philosophical nonchalance that has been interpreted as broadmindedness. Greater tolerance, of course, is desirable, for there can never be too much charity shown to persons who differ with us. Our Blessed Lord Himself asked that we love those who calumniate for us, for they are always persons, but He never told us to love the calumny.

He concludes:

Right is right if nobody is right, and wrong is wrong if everybody is wrong. And in this day and age we need, as Mr. Chesterton tells us, not a Church that is right when the world is right, but a Church that is right when the world is wrong. The attitude of the Church in relation to the modern world on this important question may be brought home by the story of the two women in the courtroom of Solomon. Both of them claimed a child. The lawful mother insisted on having the whole child or nothing, for a child is like truth — it cannot be divided without ruin. The unlawful mother, on the contrary, agreed to compromise. She was willing to divide the babe, and the babe would have died of broadmindedness.

You can read the entire chapter here: http://www.northamericanmartyrs.org/pdf/Plea-for-Intolerance.pdf

[2067 words]

6 Replies to “Intolerance in the Name of Tolerance”

  1. The liberal hegemony that we see in action today demonstrates a masterclass in bullying. No matter what or who is right or wrong, with the attitude of “intolerance of intolerance”, the playground bullies have decided to have their own way which is not the way Jeshua told us. Without truth there can be no justice – Alexander Solzhenitsyn told us that – and he should know, but what do the bullies care? The end justifies the means in their view, might is right. Social Darwinism’s selfishness and self-determination replaces Christ’s message of selflessness and walking the narrow path. The Prince of Darkness stalks the earth. We find ourselves descending into barbarism when we choose the wrong Master.

  2. Laws that Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron and President Obama have created in the name of pluralism and relativistic tolerance, equality, diversity, non discrimination, inclusion, non judgementalism and multiculturalism, overruling the laws of God, have resulted in the oppression and persecution of Christians, the further disintegration of marriage, the family, the role and authority of parents in the upbringing of their children, the emasculation of fathers and breakdown in social cohesion that we witnessed on the streets of London and other parts of Britain in 2011.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rv9iu-3k-kQ

    But it would be crime nowadays to point out a direct link between the way we think and the way we live. The greatest crime is to claim there is cause and effect, abolute truth and certainties. To claim that adding 2 plus 2 will result in 4, or multiplying 2 times 3 times will result in 6 is condemned as bigotry. This to the extreme, militant and radical pluralists, the liberals, is an absolute crime.

    Judges increasingly judge law breakers as those who have accidently upset the smooth running of a meaningless and godless game of chance, called “life in the 21st century” unlucky victims falling foul of society’s forever changing complex and increasingly contradictory rules, not guilty human creatures who have broken universal moral absolutes, transcending what is merely expedient for the smooth running of society.
    In such a world where the law is no longer absolute and objective, forever changing according to the political flavour of the month, both the police and the public, no longer certain of where the boundaries are, become paralised, not daring to go any where near the edge and make judgmental statements lest they fall foul of political correctness and be accused of bigotry. No longer using their own common sense or moral compass, calibrated against the Bible, they become incapable of thinking and acting as free, responsible individuals, but move with the consensus of opinion and become totally dependent, on what the state decrees which in the meantime is manipulating the lower criminal elements to claim victimhood and their human rights to absolute freedom, allowing them to advance their passions, lusts and ambitions, in a morality free, nihilistic and anarchistic world.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHAwdv0sPcU
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKsLcxJ2shU
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-12416863

    This will eventually make it all the easier for the future man of lawlessness, the World ruler, to step in and bring order out of chaos.

    David Skinner UK

  3. Rapier wit, Bill eg. “The latest thing in this new tolerance is considered the true thing, as if truth were a fashion, like the hat, instead of an institution, like a head”. Thanks.

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