Qualities: TOLERANCE

Ants and savages put strangers to death.
––Bertrand Russell, 1950

Prejudices die very slowly and you can never be sure if they are really gone.
––Jules Romains

Many of us think we’re thinking, but we’re actually just reshuffling a pack of prejudices, whether about people’s skin color or religion, sexual orientation or politics. Mistaking conviction for truth, we are easily tipped into dangerous positions. We should always use the balancing pole of doubt to help us keep our footing on the tightrope of truth.
––Bruno Gideon, www,brunogideon.com (1 Minute eMail)

I have learned, and not very well, to tolerate so much foolishness, ignorance and arrogance in my life that people who are merely different are a joy to know. Now, every person of a different religion or nationality or color or philosophy is a new book for my library of revelations, knowledge and friendship. So, yes, my tolerance is selective and therefore imperfect, but I think it ought to have some promotion of quality attached to it. Love what is good, but don't encourage what is obviously bad. Just be very careful of your judgments as you do so. It's OK to be forgiving, but there is no responsibility to make the world worse.
––John Roberts

We have seen this week a great deal of self-righteous criticism of the intent of conservative religious courts in Afghanistan to try and execute a man for converting from Islam to Christianity. The Koran preaches tolerance and does not call for this practice. A religion that must force its members by threat of death to remain outwardly faithful has a problem and will lose more than it gains. Those countries who have expended lives and money to create a modern Afghanistan have a right to complain about this reversion to the undeveloped traditions of old desert and mountain cultures. Before we protest too much, let us recall that the continent of Christianity once burned heretics at the stake and turned its back on millions of Jews sent from among them to death camps. There are fresh mass graves of Muslims in the Balkans and Africa.

Religions grow modern and more tolerant as they are assimilated by their changing, civilizing cultures. Islam has suffered from colonialism and its insecure failure to adjust to the free and prosperous world growing all around it. It's greatest hope, an inevitability, is that hundreds of millions of Muslims all over the world, even those under awakening Islamic governments, are becoming part of that world. There is no way the Islamist terrorists, or even backward-looking conservative clerics, can resist that rising sea of progress and tolerance. As they learn, the children of Islam will thirst for it just like all the rest of the world now does.

I have read the history, and stood in so many of the beautiful and moving sites of Islam, from the gardens of Grenada to the cavernous mosques of Istanbul, from the steps of the Dome of the Rock to the teeming streets of Cairo and the Casbah. When you walk by the quiet waters and gentle home of the Alhambra, you can only hope Islam will find its way again. We can only say hurry, we can't wait for you, but we will light the path.