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from Ethical Issues
The New Tolerance
Once, tolerance was defined as recognizing and respecting
others' beliefs and practices even without sharing them. Tolerance
would often necessarily entail enduring, or putting up with, someone
or something not especially liked.
But today's definition of tolerance is very different. Now,
a "tolerant" person views all values, beliefs, lifestyles, and
truth claims as equal. This language shift is eloquently described
in Josh McDowell and Bob Hostetler's 1998 book, The New Tolerance.
Where this new tolerance reigns, there can be no heirarchy
of truth, and no standard by which to discern between competing
truth claims. Every man's position must be praised and considered
equally valid. This is because the new tolerance considers all truth
claims to be mere opinions--not absolutes that are true across time
and cultures, but culturally created and culturally conditioned ideas.
By this new standard, any system of belief which claims to be
transcendent and absolute--making truth claims that are
not qualified as relative according to time, place, and person--is considered
to be "intolerant." In a society which scorns absolutes and denies
the existence of any natural law written on the heart, or any
intrinsic human nature, there can be only one universal
virtue--tolerance--and that virtue must be enforced with almost religious fervor.
The authors say this state of affairs in ominously reminiscent
of the language of "Newspeak" from George Orwell's novel
1984. Among the Orwellian tactics now in use, they say, is the labelling of
any disagreement or objection phobic...as in "homophobic."
Updated: 8 February 2008
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