May I challenge the assertion, widely held, that intolerance is bad?
As an adult, I encounter conflicts I had until now avoided, because I am beginning to recognize real limits. I have become increasingly aware of my mortality and of the limits of my own mind, and of how these limits affect my willingness to do certain things. Traditionally, religion counteracts this disintegration, allowing defeated souls a strategy and/or mechanism for being productive and feeling happy. In a sense, to have faith is to be intolerant of views that conflict with your belief: I have faith, so in principle I do not not have faith.
Intolerance is necessary to happiness. Religion exists for a reason. What compels me, and many of you, to reject it? Why, when offered a shed full of hammers and vices and anvils and work gloves, would one pound a nail with one's skull? Surely a hammer is just as real as a skull, just as craving truth is just as real as craving happiness.
Someone parse intolerance for me. Distinguish between religious intolerance and, for example, racial or gender-related intolerance. Explain the difference between a tool and a mechanism.
The best thing someone ever told me was, "So all these really smart people deduced all these true things that coincidentally make you very depressed and anxious - now what?"
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
2 comments:
Comment #1: In which Ricky steals a perfect metaphor and runs like the thieving flaming devil that he is:
"Intolerance is necessary to happiness. Religion exists for a reason. What compels me, and many of you, to reject it? Why, when offered a shed full of hammers and vices and anvils and work gloves, would one pound a nail with one's skull? Surely a hammer is just as real as a skull, just as craving truth is just as real as craving happiness."
Intolerance is definitely necessary for the construction of whatever the heck religion is ostensibly trying to build (Heaven? Armageddon? Hard Truth?). Whatever religion's goals are, they don't necessarily include happiness. (Please don't be fooled into thinking that that the ecstatic suffering of martyrdom on a cross has ever made anybody happy. Badass? Yes. Happy? No.)
So if you reject religion's tools and methods, (breathtaking misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia, sacrifice of innocents, um, cultivated anti-intellectualism, blind faith, empty pride, etc...), then yeah, you're left to build their Kingdom of Heaven using only your bare hands and skull. Which hurts.
But maybe it should hurt, and the pain gives us reason to pause reexamine what we're trying to help them build in the first place. Sometimes fence-sitters will feel skeptical of the idea of a personal God and his accompanying mythology, but they still have a reverence for the beautiful moral code that their priest says is only accessible through the Bible. ZOMG personal crisis of faith.
But it's possible to reject both the shitty methods AND shitty goals of religion. Then you're free to leave the horrible blacksmith shed you described, and just hang out with your buddies: the gays and the women and the jews and the happy sane people.
what I mean to say is, "COME HANG OUT!"
Post a Comment