Count Me In! Tolerant That Is

It’s now a crime to put a Koran in a toilet. In America. New York City to be exact. Don’t we have the right to free speech? Don’t we have a right to think whatever we want? Don’t we have a constitution? We’ll have nothing but sharia if CAIR get’s its way.

Last night on Hannity and Colmes, Alan Colmes actually seemed to think that putting a Koran in a toilet should not be a hate crime. Will wonders never cease? Alas, though, poor Alan could not shake his fear of losing his status as an intellectual. He had to make his offering to the PC gods by harping on the intolerance of the person who flushed the Koran. He presented intolerance as if it were Satan incarnate (Alan probably doesn’t believe in Satan, but you get the idea).

According to Merriam-Webster, tolerate means “to allow to be or to be done without hindrance”. So by definition, if we are to never be intolerant then we must allow everything. We must allow murder, rape, and theft. We must allow wife beating and pedophilia. We must allow violence and intimidation. If we try to hinder such things we are intolerant.

The idea that we must tolerate everything stems from the idea that there is no absolute truth. If there are no absolutes, everything has to be tolerated because there is no reason not to tolerate it. Western society continues to give up its Judea-Christian foundation. As that foundation erodes, so does any belief in absolute truth. The secularists will say that is as it should be.

Secularists will argue that strongly held religious beliefs breed hatred of those who are different. That is total nonsense. The issue is not whether people believe in absolutes. The issue is what those absolutes are. Religions are not all created equal. Does the Christian ideal of loving one’s enemies produce the same kind of world that is produced by the Islamic ideal of subduing the infidels?

The refusal to acknowledge the existence of absolute truth is nothing but intellectual laziness. If everyone tolerates everything, there is no need to think about what is really right and wrong. There is no need to take the risk of coming up with the wrong answer. This worship of tolerance is no different from the Islamic worship of intolerance. Anything un-Islamic must be irradicated. No thinking is required or desired. These are two sides of the same coin and the coin is totally counterfeit.

Intolerance in and of itself is not wrong. Western culture cannot survive unless we muster up the moral courage to believe in absolutes. What we don’t tolerate does matter. Giving up our constitutional rights in order to tolerate Islamic sharia will doom us to nothing but death and slavery.