Tag Archives: Tolerance

News

Gay activist who vandalized Chick-Fil-A restaurant will not be charged

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From the radically left-wing Los Angeles Times.

Excerpt:

A West Hollywood artist who allegedly painted the words “Tastes like hate” on the side of a Chick-fil-A restaurant because of the company president’s stand against gay marraige won’t be criminally charged by the L.A. County district attorney’s office.

Prosecutors announced Wednesday they were declining to press charges after Torrance police submitted a case.

[…]The graffiti — accompanied by a representation of a cow holding a paint brush — appeared during a week of demonstrations at Chick-fil-A restaurants nationwide sparked by company President Dan Cathy’s public denunciation of same-sex marriage.

Discovered about 6:40 a.m. Friday at the Hawthorne Boulevard restaurant, the vandalism coincided with “National Same-Sex Kiss Day,” when gay rights supporters asked couples to take photos of themselves kissing at Chick-fil-A locations.

Castro took credit for the graffiti in an interview with the Huffington Post.

“Everybody is entitled to free speech, but it seems like for the gay tribe, this is more of an issue of equal rights — human rights,” he said. “I’m against what these people stand for, what this company stands for. They’re trying to take away what little rights we already have.”

A day before he was taken into custody, Castro made another statement to the Huffington Post, telling his critics the act was “meant to further a discussion about tolerance and acceptance.”

“I didn’t use violence. I used paint. Artists for centuries have expressed their opinions through this medium and I am no different,” he said. “I am happy to pay for the costs of repainting the wall, but I am not — nor will I ever be — happy to sit quietly at the back of the bus.”

The left-wing media thinks that a crime can only be a hate crime when the right kind of people are victimized. Oh, oh, and Christians aren’t being persecuted for their faith in places like the Sudan, China or North Korea, either. Only secular leftist people can be victims, don’t you know? And if you disagree with this double standard then you’re a racist bigot, so there.

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Polemics

How to respond to postmodernism, relativism, subjectivism, pluralism and skepticism

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Four articles from Paul Copan over at the UK site “BeThinking”. Each article responds to a different slogan that you might hear if you’re dealing with non-Christians on the street.

“That’s just your interpretation!”

Some of his possible responses:

  • Gently ask, ‘Do you mean that your interpretation should be preferred over mine? If so, I’d like to know why you have chosen your interpretation over mine. You must have a good reason.’
  • Remind your friend that you are willing to give reasons for your position and that you are not simply taking a particular viewpoint arbitrarily.
  • Try to discern if people toss out this slogan because they don’t like your interpretation. Remind them that there are many truths we have to accept even if we don’t like them.
  • ‘There are no facts, only interpretations’ is a statement that is presented as a fact. If it is just an interpretation, then there is no reason to take it seriously.

More responses are here.

“You Christians are intolerant!”

Some of his possible responses:

  • If you say that the Christian view is bad because it is exclusive, then you are also at that exact moment doing the very thing that you are saying is bad. You have to be exclusive to say that something is bad, since you exclude it from being good by calling it bad.
  • There is a difference, a clear difference between tolerance and truth. They are often confused. We should hold to what we believe with integrity but also support the rights of others to disagree with our viewpoint.
  • Sincerely believing something doesn’t make it true. You can be sincere, but sincerely wrong. If I get onto a plane and sincerely believe that it won’t crash then it does, then my sincerity is quite hopeless. It won’t change the facts. Our beliefs, regardless of how deeply they are held, have no effect on reality.

More responses are here.

“That’s true for you, but not for me!”

Some of his possible responses:

  • If my belief is only true for me, then why isn’t your belief only true for you? Aren’t you saying you want me to believe the same thing you do?
  • You say that no belief is true for everyone, but you want everyone to believe what you do.
  • You’re making universal claims that relativism is true and absolutism is false. You can’t in the same breath say, ‘Nothing is universally true’ and ‘My view is universally true.’ Relativism falsifies itself. It claims there is one position that is true – relativism!

More responses are here.

“If you were born in India, you’d be a Hindu!”

Some of his possible responses:

  • Just because there are many different religious answers and systems doesn’t automatically mean pluralism is correct.
  • If we are culturally conditioned regarding our religious beliefs, then why should the religious pluralist think his view is less arbitrary or conditioned than the exclusivist’s?
  • If the Christian needs to justify Christianity’s claims, the pluralist’s views need just as much substantiation.

More responses are here.

And a bonus: “How do you know you’re not wrong?“.

Being a Christian is fun because you get to think about things at the same deep level that you think about anything else in life. Christianity isn’t about rituals, community and feelings. It’s about truth.

In case you want to see this in action with yours truly, check this out.

News

Chick-Fil-A appreciation day sets sales record

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Chick-Fil-A Appreciation Day sets sales record
Chick-Fil-A Appreciation Day sets sales record

From the Los Angeles Times.

Excerpt:

Chick-fil-A appears to have set a company record in sales on Wednesday, a day on which Americans were encouraged to show their support for the fast-food restaurant whose leadership has drawn both criticism and praise in recent weeks for its opposition to same-sex marriage.

The privately held company declined to give specific sales figures but released a statement to the Los Angeles Times confirming that frenzied sales of chicken sandwiches and cross-cut waffle fries had made for a record-setting day.

“We are very grateful and humbled by the incredible turnout of loyal Chick-fil-A customers on August 1 at Chick-fil-A restaurants around the country,” said Steve Robinson, executive vice president of marketing, in the statement. “While we don’t release exact sales numbers, we can confirm reports that it was a record-setting day.”

[…]Robinson said the Atlanta-based company was “grateful and humbled by the incredible turnout of loyal Chick-fil-A customers” who showed up at outlets in droves coast-to-coast. Customers often waited in long lines, many weathering the blistering summer sun, just to get in the front door.

Such images — as well as those of crowded Chick-fil-A counters and long lines of cars snaking through the drive-thru lanes — created a social media frenzy on Wednesday as they were shared and reshared on a variety of platforms, including Twitter.

The images suggested that sales were indeed going gangbusters, and confirmation of those suspicions arrived when Orange County Pastor Rick Warren tweeted a snippet of a conversation he’d had with Dan Cathy, president of the popular fast-food chain:

@DanCathy just called me. #ChickFilA has already set a world record today, with 7 more hrs to go in the West. #OutOfChicken”

The company, which proudly abides by Bible-based principles and closes its doors to sales on Sundays, stressed in its statement that Chick-fil-A did not promote Wednesday’s turnout.

It also stressed that its employees abide by a service tradition to “treat every person with honor, dignity and respect — regardless of their belief, race, creed, sexual orientation or gender.”

But not everyone is happy about the protests. Here is an example taken from Sooper Mexican:

This sort of thing happens often, actually.

Why is it that everyone is so angry with people who express a pro-marriage point of view? I think the problem is that militant secularists are very focused on hedonism in this life. They cannot ground objective morality, including human rights such as the right to free speech. They have no notion of an after-life, so they are trying pack in as much happiness as they can. Their purpose in life is not to form their own character in this life, so they can be rightly related to God. They want to be selfish and they want to be celebrated by others for it.

Often, militant atheists know nothing at all about Christianity and why Christians hold to their positions. This makes them even more intolerant of Christians who act like Christians in public and who participate in politics, like the abolitionists or pro-life activists. These people have never sat through a formal academic debate, and they have never heard the arguments for God’s existence and Christianity in particular. They don’t want to listen, they just want to shame Christians and smash the windows of their businesses and put them into prisons until there is no one left to call their selfishness into question.

People who supported Chick-Fil-A were protesting this coercion and censorship by the secular left. They were saying, “you can’t use the law and the government to take away my freedom to speak out in protest of things like slavery, abortion and redefining marriage”. It’s ironic that everyone is always accusing Christians of hypocrisy, and yet when we are authentic in public, they try to coerce us into acting like non-Christians!

I noticed that Gay Patriot, a well-known gay Republican and supporter of gay marriage, was out with his partner to Chick-Fil-A. He got some Chick-Fil-A food, and spent some time talking to the pro-marriage Chick-Fil-A customers. And everyone was nice to him. He is not a militant secularist – he thinks that everyone should be able to participate in defining policy and not be discriminated against for their views. No one who went to Chick-Fil-A was protesting Gay Patriot’s freedom to do what he pleases in his own life. We were protesting the government’s use of force to silence and coerce those who don’t want to have marriage redefined for the whole society. And we can defend our view using a variety of secular reasons, too, if anyone is interested.