Recent internet dialogues have produced the inevitable crop of anti-religionists professing that they would die for my right to believe in what they consider a dangerous and irrational superstition. This has led me to conclude that people who say "everyone's entitled to their opinion" are likely to either
(a) not really care much about anyone else's opinion, because they can't see that mere opinions actually make any difference to anything,
(b) are wanting to avoid the unpleasantness of serious discussion, in case they find their own opinions challenged : it's the 'get-out clause', or
(c) despise other people's opinions, but don't want to sound bigoted or intolerant.
Sometimes, a mixture of all three.
The truth, however, (whether religious or secular) is not handed down to us on a plate. It has to be negotiated the hard way, every inch of the way. Toleration simply means that we don't win arguments by using coercion; it doesn't mean you have to respect the beliefs of someone who has not earned that respect through serious engagement.
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2 comments:
But sometimes surely it is alright to differ? There is not necessarily a Universal Truth about everything!
I think I mean that to differ is normal (so normal that I'm always rather suspicious when people claim 'we're all one big happy family'), and that tolerance is about differing creatively, not avoiding issues or suppressing difference violently.
Postmodernist thought certainly seems to suggest that there is no such thing as Universal Truth - that's pretty much our current culture, and one reason why the monotheistic religions get a bashing. But though I can accept that certain sorts of truth only seem to be able to be expressed as a pair of contradictory statements (e.g. "an electron behaves like a particle" and "an electron has no location") I can't accept 'difference' as being ultimate. Somewhere, some time, there will be an account and an experience in which the unity at the heart of all things (which was there in the beginning) is revealed, and difference is revealed as having been an 'outer layer' experience.
I guess I'm saying that the postmodernist culture has become a cop-out; an excuse for lack of real engagement and effort to work for real unity.
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