What I said to him was, “Look, there are some things to work through, but your first step of homework, which I hereby cheerfully assign, is to go home and look up every single passage in the Bible, write it out, where it says ‘that you may know [a proposition].’ Not so we know God, but know a proposition. Oberdiek, Hans (2001). Tolerance: Between Forbearance and Acceptance. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. p.vi. ISBN 978-0-8476-8785-5. OCLC 45604024.

In that sense, there are quite a few people … popularizers like Tom Oden, but also more serious analyses like that of Netland and a number of others as well … who are convinced that postmodernism is not really a useful label. It’s really modernism gone to seed. There’s some truth to that. Thirdly, it became profoundly foundational. That is, it sought certain foundations on which to build, foundations which were judged to be self-evident. That is, axiomatic. He set himself to doubt things until he could doubt no more, and his foundation was cogito ergo sum, but in many disciplines that sort of approach had already been established. I shall argue that although a few things can be said in its favor, the notion of tolerance has changed, and the contemporary tolerance is intrinsically intolerant and is blind to its own shortcomings because it erroneously thinks it holds the moral high ground. It does not. Worse, this tolerance is, perhaps, socially dangerous and is certainly intellectually debilitating. There are better structures of thought for achieving the desired ends.Walsham, Alexandra (12 October 2017). "Toleration, Pluralism, and Coexistence: The Ambivalent Legacies of the Reformation". Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte - Archive for Reformation History. 108 (1): 181–190. doi: 10.14315/arg-2017-0121. ISSN 2198-0489. S2CID 148602448. In The End of Faith, Sam Harris asserts that society should be unwilling to tolerate unjustified religious beliefs about morality, spirituality, politics, and the origin of humanity, especially beliefs that promote violence. Today, the vast majority of papers begin by saying, “I’m approaching this now from the perspective of the new literary criticism. I’m not saying anything about history. I’m not saying anything …” Somebody else comes along and says, “I’m looking at this from the point of view of feminist theology. I’m not saying anything about the new literary criticism. I’m not saying anything about source theory.” Everybody comes in with a separate set of tools. Of course, the Indian has his greeting ritual, and the Japanese is bowing. So many complicated rules! How far down you go. It all depends on age and education and seniority and who’s up and who’s down and who’s president and who’s not. You sort of aim to bow in roughly the right measure. It’s complicated.

One version of this older view of tolerance … one might call it the secular libertarian version… has another wrinkle to it. In his famous text, On Liberty, John Stuart Mill opts for a secularist basis to tolerance. “In the domain of religion,” Mill argues, “there are insufficient rational grounds for verifying the truth claims of any religion. The only reasonable stance toward religion is, therefore, public agnosticism and private benign tolerance.” I was giving the Staley Lectures in a conservative Christian college, which shall remain nameless to protect the guilty, not too long ago. One of the students came to me after some long discussions on some of these matters and said, “I see the Bible does say things like ‘these are written that you may know, dear old Theophilus, the certainty of the things …’ I see the Bible says that, but I’ve got to tell you, everytime I read that stuff I get really embarrassed. I don’t know what to do with it. I don’t like it. It makes me feel uncomfortable.” The new view of tolerance is quite different. Under the impact of postmodern epistemology, about which I’ll say more in a moment, people are more likely to be thought tolerant if they do not hold strong views. The reason for this is many thinkers in our world are pretty certain the notion of objective truth is incoherent. If there is no objective truth to which all people owe allegiance, precisely because it is intrinsically objective, then strong opinions are no more than strong preferences for a particular version of what we call truth. Bobo, L., & Licari, F. C. (1989). Education a Toleration has been described as undermining itself via moral relativism: "either the claim self-referentially undermines itself or it provides us with no compelling reason to believe it. If we are skeptical about knowledge, then we have no way of knowing that toleration is good." [24]First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our infallibility. Secondly, though the silenced opinion is an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied. Thirdly, even if the received opinion is not only true but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds. Not only this, but, fourthly, the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost, or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the character and conduct: the dogma becoming a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground, and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason or personal experience. [13] : 95 Renan [ edit ] Renan In America, the drive came much more through the social sciences: cultural anthropology, sociology, psychology, and so forth. I’ve long told students in this country the most dangerous departments for their faith in current Western universities are not science departments. Science departments have far, far more Christians in them than the arts departments.

Curry, Thomas J. (1989). Church and State in America to the Passage of the First Amendment. Oxford University Press; Reprint edition. ISBN 978-0-19-505181-0. Both these concepts contain the idea of alterity—the state of otherness. [3] Additional choices of how to respond to the "other," beyond toleration, exist. Therefore, in some instances, toleration has been seen as "a flawed virtue" because it concerns acceptance of things that were better overcome. [3] Toleration cannot, therefore, be defined as a universal good, and many of its applications and uses remain contested. [3] :2 Once you’ve moved to “I” being the beginning point, then it’s no longer quite so sure how you get there. You’re no longer appealing to revelation. There was equal certainty that in fact human beings can know the truth, can know it truly, and thus, the pursuit of truth is still held up as a desideratum, as a summum bonum.… It’s something to pursue. Truth is both desirable and attainable. For Mill, people should be tolerant in the domain of religion not because this is the best way to uncover the truth, but precisely because whatever the truth there are insufficient means for uncovering it.For example, in biblical studies, let’s take study of the gospel of John. Up until 25 years ago in Society of Biblical Literature or something like that, the vast majority of papers were either doing exegesis or they were doing recreation of the Johannine community or they were doing source criticism or they were comparing the theological emphases of this book with that book, or something like that.