Tolerance As a Religious Virtue

Jon M. Sweeney
Posted: 11/08/2013 2:33 pm

If you are an atheist hovering around the HuffPo religion pages, it sometimes seems you're hitting the comment button before I'm even done typing. If I say something positive about religion, you scream: the religions of the world are awful, violent, and full of bigots and crooks who want nothing more than to fool you into believing nonsense and giving them your money! Oh, and they are intolerant as hell.

Fair enough. That's part of our collective past. But religious traditions are also full of beauty and wisdom. If you've been hurt by one, I am sorry; so have I. But there is too much light in the texts, traditions, and practices of our religions to leave them behind, which is why so many of us don't.

But I'll grant you, tolerance is a relatively new virtue in the religious panoply. Wars, pogroms, inquisitions, and other terrible things have - and still happen - in the name of God. This is why many progressives often promote tolerance as the supreme virtue of religion today.

It was that way fifteen years ago when I was starting SkyLight Paths Publishing with friends in Vermont. I remember attending dozens of interfaith gatherings in the late 1990s where the keynote speakers were Baha'i or Unitarian Universalists. They would often stand and say something like, "You should be like us. We are the ones who are truly tolerant because we embrace all of the religious traditions at once." The message was that if you remained committed to a single tradition your religious life was by definition intolerant.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jon-m-sweeney/tolerance-as-a-religious-_b_4235653.html