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The Truth About the Tolerance

In this postmodern, relativistic, and pluralistic society we live in, it is not unusual for those who believe in absolute truth to be accused of being intolerant and narrow minded. Are those charges and accusations true? Well, let’s consider them more closely:

(1) On the charge of being narrow-minded, there may actually be some truth to that, not because those who believe in absolute truth are narrow-minded themselves but because truth is narrow by definition. For example, if one person states that France is in Asia while another states the France is in South America, is the person who rejects those statements as being false because he happens to know that France is in Europe, intolerant? If somebody who knows that 5 + 5 = 10 rejects somebody else’s statement who says that 5 + 5 = 7, because he has never studied any math, does that make him intolerant? That is nothing more than political correctness run amuck. Truth is narrow by definition because it says that if something is true, then its opposite must be false.

(2) Hypocrisy reigns among those who argue that absolute truth is too narrow. Why? Because the one’s making those claims are as guilty of being narrow-minded as the people they accuse of being narrow-minded, since their claim is made by using absolute truth statements. I am intolerant and narrow-minded when I say that absolute truth exists (an absolute truth statement), but they are not intolerant and narrow-minded when they say truth is relative and there is no such thing as absolute truth (two absolute truth statements). Once again, a self-refuting, circular, and hypocritical argument is being used.

(3) Just because people, particularly Christians, disagree with worldviews or philosophies about truth other people hold, doesn’t mean they are intolerant. By accusing people of intolerance, they prove they don’t understand what intolerance means. Intolerance has nothing to do with truth itself; instead it has to do with the attitude in which one holds truth. Their accusation confuses what is held (truth) with how it is held (attitude).[19] Truth be told, the only way anybody is going to avoid being accused of being intolerant, is to agree with those making the accusations, to accept their claims. Is that not intolerance? When I disagree with their point of view I am intolerant, yet when they disagree with my point of view they are not. Do you see the hypocrisy? If I am intolerant, then they are just as guilty of intolerance as well!

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