Tag Archives: Intolerance

News

Women becoming less committed to Christian orthodoxy

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From the Christian Post, survey findings from George Barna.

Excerpt:

Pollster and researcher George Barna released a report on religious changes in America this week revealing some surprising results. Barna concludes that women have experienced a significant spiritual change in the past two decades.

Women today are attending church and Sunday school less, reading the Bible less, and consider their faith less important in their lives, according to the new survey.

The Barna report also shows that over the last two decades women have become less likely to hold traditional views of God as the all-knowing creator and ruler of the universe. Women today are less likely to see the devil as a real person, considering him more a “symbol of evil.”

“Women used to put men to shame in terms of their orthodoxy of belief and the breadth and consistency of their religious behavior. No more; the religious gender gap has substantially closed,” said George Barna in his report.

“We can posit that while tens of millions of Americans seem to be wrestling with their faith – what to believe and how to experience and express it – women have been more radically redefining their faith than men in the past two decades.”

Does anyone have a hypothesis to explain this? Is it because Christianity is no longer viewed by the majority of people as “nice”? Are women dropping out because of the social pressure to not make truth claims or moral judgments?

Commentary

Does loving your neighbor require that you agree with them?

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From apologist Jonathan Morrow.

Excerpt:

We live in an interesting, ever-changing, and challenging day. As Christians, learning to navigate such a reality can be very confusing and intimidating. In one of Jesus’ central teachings, he commands us to love our neighbor (cf. Mark 12:31). And while we can and should often do this by meeting physical needs, there is another vital, but often overlooked, application of this passage. We need to stand up for the possibility of truth. We need to protect the endangered species of honest disagreement concerning the nature of reality. Today a not so subtle battle is raging from newspapers columns to college classrooms concerning the nature of tolerance. There are 2 competing definitions:

  • False Tolerance: We can make no judgments at all about the truth of others’ beliefs.
  • True Tolerance: We allow others the freedom to hold beliefs which we judge to be false.

If we cannot tell our neighbors or ourselves the truth about reality, then we cannot really love them. Because love involves seeking another’s highest good, and goodness is anchored in reality (after all, the truth sets us free). We must fight the false tolerance that seeks to intellectually bully our culture into agreeing that every viewpoint (especially when it comes to religion and morality) is equally valid. We must speak up in love for the possibility of truth. Loving our neighbor requires this.

Loving someone doesn’t mean telling them lies to make them feel good so that they will like you and you will feel good. That’s not love, that’s selfishness.

News

Republican lawmaker introduces bill to protect questioners of Darwinism

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From the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

Excerpt:

An Arlington lawmaker has filed a bill aimed at protecting Texas college professors and students from discrimination because they question evolution.

The measure from Republican state Rep. Bill Zedler would block higher education institutions from discriminating against or penalizing teachers or students based on their research into intelligent design or other theories that disagree with evolution.

Zedler said he filed the bill because of cases in which colleges had been hostile to those who believe that certain features of life-forms are so complex that they must have originated from a higher power.

“We can have the academic freedom to have all kinds of ideas and philosophies but, lo and behold, even mention intelligent design and there are people that want to run you out of town on a rail,” Zedler said.

Zedler said fear of workplace discrimination is preventing evolution critics in colleges from speaking their minds.

“I do believe there are people that want to say something but … they’re afraid to because there are people around the country that have been discriminated against,” Zedler said.

Secular leftists place a great premium on getting “consensus” for whatever ideas provide maximum autonomy from moral obligations, whether the ideas are true or not. They don’t care whether the consensus is true, just that everyone agrees on it and that it produces good feelings. They just don’t handle differing points of view well… it confuses them and makes them anxious and frustrated. They are uncomfortable with concepts like being judged, or being punished. The don’t want anyone to disagree with their religion of materialism, which allows them to pursue pleasure apart from any objective moral obligations. Since the religion of materialism, which is so popular on the left, does away with morality, we have to be very careful to enshrine into the law protections for those who would dissent from this denial of objective morality. Otherwise you end up with cases like the Guillermo Gonzalez case or the Richard Sternberg case. There are no limits to what a materialist will do in order to keep up the illusion that no one is there to hold them accountable. They’ll believe anything. They’ll do anything. There isn’t anything in their materialism to stop them from committing atrocities. That’s why we need laws to contain their abuse of power.

A quotation from Martin Luther King, Jr. illustrates the point:

“It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important.”

Until the time where those on the secular left learn to accept dissent, and allow debate, without resorting to insults and personal attacks, laws that protect dissenters will be necessary.