TOLERANT INTOLERANCE

TOLERANT INTOLERANCE

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Canadian Tolerance Restrains Intolerance

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Muslim parents demanded the abolition of pork in all the school canteens of a Montreal suburb.  The mayor refused, and sent a note to all parents. 
"Muslims must understand that they have to adapt to Canada and Quebec, its customs, its traditions, and its way of life, because that's where they chose to immigrate.  “ Muslims must understand that they have to integrate and learn to live in Quebec. "They must understand that it is for them to change their lifestyle, not the Canadians who, so generously, welcomed them.”

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An inclusive multi-cultural united system, which respects the rights of everyone within the system, cannot tolerate the intolerant aspects of any of its sub-systems.  Unrestrained, an active intolerant minority can impose its intolerance on a tolerant system.  At this time, the USA is an inclusively united governmental system that must tolerate sub-systems including a number of religious systems.  Most religions contain intolerant aspects that if imposed on the overall union, threaten the freedom of the multi-cultural unit.  Therefore, the United States government must tolerate sub-systems, even though they historically contain intolerant features, without permitting those intolerant aspects to limit the tolerance of other members of the union.

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. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, statistician, former trader, and risk analyst, whose work focuses on problems of randomness, probability, and uncertainty, believes that a tolerant governmental system cannot restrain the intolerant aspects of actively committed religious minorities.  In an article called, The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority, he says, “that we need to be more than intolerant with some intolerant minorities.”  He goes on to say, “It is not permissible to use ‘American values’ or ‘Western principles’ in treating intolerant Salafism (which denies other peoples’ right to have their own religion).”  With this assessment he then declares, “The West is currently in the process of committing suicide.”  I must agree with him, but only if we cannot restrain the intolerant aspects inherent in most religions. 

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Pew Research Center’s latest data shows that, “Islam is currently the world’s second-largest religion (after Christianity), it is the fastest-growing major religion.  Indeed, if current demographic trends continue, the number of Muslims is expected to exceed the number of Christians by the end of this century.” 

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Pew’s demographic projections estimate that Muslims will make up 2.1% of the U.S. population by the year 2050.  That is a very same minority.  However, as Nassim Nicholas Taleb explainsHe describes this as the minority ruling by a principle he identifies as the “Asymmetry Rule of Renormalization.”  To appreciate the threat, I recommend reading his article.

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According to a minority activist during the Czechoslovakian uprising,  Valclav Havel,  it only takes an active minority united in a common cause to change a society and its culture.  His essay, “Power of the Powerless” written in 1978, became the manifesto for the Czechoslovakian, Polish and other uprising against communistic regimes.  In it, he described a defense method against totalitarian systems, in which, “every individual is trapped within a dense network of the state's governing instruments” of ideology, which in that case was a “secularized religion.”  He said that the authority of such systems relies on a, “labyrinth of influence, repression, fear and self-censorship which swallows up everyone within it, at the very least by rendering them silent, stultified and marked by some undesirable prejudices of the powerful."

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Totalitarian authority systems are not restricted to secular religious systems only, but characterize all systems that impose religious mandates on a population, whether secular or spiritual.  Living within a politically governed religious system, like communism or in my view America Christian coalitions, Havel says, “Individuals must live a lie, to hide that which he truly believes and desires, and to do that which he must do to be left in peace and to survive.”
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 The goal Havel sought was, “a newfound inner relationship to other people and to the human community.”  He said his vision was to, "provide hope of a moral reconstitution of society, which means a radical renewal of the relationship of human beings to what I have called the 'human order,' which no political order can replace.”
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Our goal, in the United States, should not be a religiously neutral political system, but a religiously tolerant system that restrain the intolerant aspects of any of its religious sub-groups, including Christianity.
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However, I recognize that governing the intolerant aspects of religion, while necessary, is not enough to secure peace and unity with in our multi-diverse nation.  Our population needs to relate to each other in a less authoritative, prescriptive, and intolerant manor.  Havel acknowledges that power is relational.  In agreement, I submit that if we promote the more tolerant, empathetic, and benevolent aspects, found in all our religions, lifting tolerance to a position of our nation’s highest goal that tolerance will not permit intolerance.  Otherwise, I see nothing but more disharmony, strife, and separation ahead.  It would please me, and if I understand God, it would please Him as well, if Christian tolerance took the lead in just such a sociocultural revolution.  That process could start today. 
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Havel wrote, "living in truth meant rejecting the notion that power is something to be grasped or abolished.”  I accept the notion but restate his axiom saying the power of Godly love is not to be grasped or abolished, but released and employed.  Love, including love for our enemies, is the most powerful force a human can release and employ in activating tolerance that restrains intolerance.  Christianity does not need government authority to influence our nation’s sociocultural character.  A tolerant loving Christianity could become the group Nassim Taleb identifies as, “a widely distributed intransigent minority dictates the norms of a society.”   It is up to you and me.

AMERICAN FOG

AMERICAN FOG

Not Where We Thought

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Fog-masked Glorietta Bay hid any landmarks that night as I brought the 25-foot Catalina under the San Diego Bridge.  The family, who charted the sunset-sail, fell silent as the claustrophobic atmosphere closed in on all sides. 

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“No worries.” I assured them, “I sail in and out of this bay sometimes two and three times a day.  We will sail 200 yards past the bridge, and then turn ninety degrees to starboard.  There will be a lighted buoy a mile ahead, where we turn again and the lights from Coronado will guide us the rest of the way in.”     

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If they had chartered a 27-footer, there would have been a compass mounted on the binnacle, but not on the 25-footer.  However, I did not need to take my handheld compass from my sail bag.  Instead, I posted the family on watch for the buoy and/or hazards ahead, and I concentrated on avoid the Navy Seals Training Base to port and the golf course to starboard.  Within thirty minutes, I knew we had a problem, because I caught a glimpse of trees on the portside, where the treeless training base should have been.  

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Focused on the fuzzy blackness on either side of the boat, I had strayed off course, and then the faint glow of the bridge over our bow proved I had turned completely around.  No longer, the self-assured master of the elements, I brought the vessel about.  Then with flashlight and compass in hand, I guided us safely to the lit buoy and on to the dock. 

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Somewhere, in our human certainty, as Oswald Chambers warns, we will reach a place where God must say,

“Don’t be blind on this point anymore; you are not where you thought you were.  Up to the present I have not been able to reveal it to you, but I reveal it now.”

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I believe his caution has more than a personally spiritual application.  We, United States citizens, have reached a point of self-confidence, politically, where we have mistaken shadows for reality, and falsely believed we would never wreck our own boat.  However, every indication is that we strayed off course while focused on the blackness on both sides.  Now is the time for the nation to refocus on its more noble goals.  Our national goal finds its simplest expression in two documents, the Preamble to the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

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“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

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Our Declaration of Independence gives the rationale behind concentrating on these goals.

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“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”  (The bold type was added to emphasize that goal.) 

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Those documents describe a free people, all with rights protected by a government deriving its power from the consent of the governed.  The unique goal of Christian Americans is love of God and others, whether in a majority or not.  Christians need to conceder how to express Christ’s love in the furtherance of our national goal.  Honestly, our self-confidence has deceived us, and we are not where we thought we were.  It is time to come about, pick up the compass, and turn on the light.