Quote:
Originally Posted by killer_carlson
But at the same time Im also tired of the holier-than-thou agnostics or athiests who go out of their way to sensationalize every religious scandal to talk about how smart they are that they dont practice.
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Serious question - do you consider yourself more enlightened than non-Catholics? And by enlightened, I don't necessarily mean superior, but in the sense that you have beliefs that are true while others have mistaken beliefs that you might respect but nevertheless feel are false?
The current fashion for pretending that everyone's beliefs are equally valid bumps up against reality - if you REALLY believe you are right, people that disagree with you aren't "differently right", they are wrong. This is a fundamental hypocrisy of our society that is akin to the hypocrisies we decry in older societies, such as the dichotomy between proclaiming equality of men while keeping slaves in 18th century American society, or Victorian repression of female sexuality in the upper classes while overlooking rampant prostitution in the poor.
This is why evangelicals, who are much more forthright about being "right" where everyone else is, to varying degrees, "wrong", continually ignore the proprieties and rail against homosexuality and other (from their viewpoint) immoralities in defiance of the consensus that says another person's beliefs are worthy of respect - their viewpoint is that right is right, and wrong is wrong, and if society says differently, society needs to be changed. In doing so, they've exposed the weakness of the consensus, which cannot be a long-term solution if major portions of the community won't abide by the rules. To a lesser extent, radical Muslims have also shown that tolerance for differing beliefs is difficult to sustain when some believers discard that tolerance as error.
To get to the ultimate point - there are two sustainable models of tolerance for belief. In one, beliefs are subordinated to common practice, and beliefs outside that practice are suppressed - for example, the Romans incorporated local gods into their own pantheon, and you were free to worship as you would, as long as you acknowledge the primacy of the Roman gods and especially the emperor as regent of ALL gods on earth - which is where the Jews opted out, and eventually were repressed for their trouble. This is also how most Western societies functioned up until the middle of last century - you could be non-Christian, but you were marginalized and were forced to conform to some degree to Christian ideals.
In the second model, all belief is acknowledged to be equally invalid, and none of them is given serious consideration as a source of legitimacy. This is the model I, and I suspect almost all, atheists prefer. Should we be ashamed to reject the unsustainable "tolerance" model for one that not only doesn't relegate us to becoming fringe citizens, but destroys the power of mutually incompatible beliefs to use society as a platform for conflict?