We should tolerate religion?

[karnadi]

I always get this kind of statement, sadly not just from the theists, but even from the atheists too. So, what is religious tolerance?. And how far should we tolerate religion?.

One time I put one Mohammed caricature (the denmark version) and some other caricature & comic strips in my atheist group's posted photos. Some atheist member says to me, its offending the theists, and we shouldn't deliberately provoke their anger. We should support religious tolerance. Is he right?. Is it wrong to make fun of religion?. Is it wrong to criticize religion through pictures?.

[Sophus]

We should tolerate religious belief but not all of the absurd actions they usually produce.

[Arthur Dent]

Religious tolerance should extend no further than respecting one's right to ignorance.

[Kevin]

Is it wrong to make fun of religion?.

I do it all the damn time. Me and my friend, who is Christian and knows my beliefs, we will together mock Christianity and sing "Jesus loves me this I know, because the Bible tells me so!" during 3rd hour. It's not wrong to make fun of it. People make fun of worse things.

But there is a limit. I wouldn't want someone calling me a stupid Atheist (My friends think I am) that will burn in Hell, so I won't call someone a stupid ass blind Christian who is wasting their life believing in a fairy tale.

[Sophus]

Is it wrong to make fun of religion?

Not religion in general. But to personally attack a meek religious individual, yes.

[BadPoison]

From The End of Faith
by Sam Harris

People of faith fall on a continuum: some draw solace and inspiration from a specific spiritual tradition, and yet remain fully committed to tolerance and diversity, while others would burn the earth to cinders if it would put an end to heresy. There are, in other words, religious moderates and religious extremists, and their various passions and projects should not be confused. However, religious moderates are themselves the bearers of a terrible dogma: they imagine that the path to peace will be paved once each of us has learned to respect the unjustified beliefs of others. I hope to show that the very ideal of religious tolerance-born of the notion that every human being should be free to believe whatever he wants about God-is one of the principal forces driving us toward the abyss.
We have been slow to recognize the degree to which religious faith perpetuates man's inhumanity to man. This is not surprising, since many of us still believe that faith is an essential component of human life. Two myths now keep faith beyond the fray of rational criticism, and they seem to foster religious extremism and religious moderation equally: (i) most of us believe that there are good things that people get from religious faith (e.g., strong communities, ethical behavior, spiritual experience) that cannot be had elsewhere; (2) many of us also believe that the terrible things that are sometimes done in the name of religion are the products not of faith per se but of our baser natures-forces like greed, hatred, and fear-for which religious beliefs are themselves the best (or even the only) remedy. Taken together, these myths seem to have granted us perfect immunity to outbreaks of reasonableness in our public discourse.

Many religious moderates have taken the apparent high road of pluralism, asserting the equal validity of all faiths, but in doing so they neglect to notice the irredeemably sectarian truth claims of each. As long as a Christian believes that only his baptized brethren will be saved on the Day of judgment, he cannot possibly "respect" the beliefs of others, for he knows that the flames of hell have been stoked by these very ideas and await their adherents even now. Muslims and Jews generally take the same arrogant view of their own enterprises and have spent millennia passionately reiterating the errors of other faiths. It should go without saying that these rival belief systems are all equally uncontaminated by evidence.

...While moderation in religion may seem a reasonable position to stake out, in light of all that we have (and have not) learned about the universe, it offers no bulwark against religious extremism and religious violence. The problem that religious moderation poses for all of us is that it does not permit anything very critical to be said about religious literalism. We cannot say that fundamentalists are crazy, because they are merely practicing their freedom of belief; we cannot even say that they are mistaken in religious terms, because their knowledge of scripture is generally unrivaled. All we can say, as religious moderates, is that we don't like the personal and social costs that a full embrace of scripture imposes on us. This is not a new form of faith, or even a new species of scriptural exegesis; it is simply a capitulation to a variety of all-too-human interests that have nothing, in principle, to do with God.

Unless the core dogmas of faith are called into question-i.e., that we know there is a God, and that we know what he wants from us-religious moderation will do nothing to lead us out of the wilderness.

The benignity of most religious moderates does not suggest that religious faith is anything more sublime than a desperate marriage of hope and ignorance, nor does it guarantee that there is not a terrible price to be paid for limiting the scope of reason in our dealings with other human beings. Religious moderation, insofar as it represents an attempt to hold on to what is still serviceable in orthodox religion, closes the door to more sophisticated approaches to spirituality, ethics, and the building of strong communities.

Religious moderates seem to believe that what we need is not radical insight and innovation in these areas but a mere dilution of Iron Age philosophy. Rather than bring the full force of our creativity and rationality to bear on the problems of ethics, social cohesion, and even spiritual experience, moderates merely ask that we relax our standards of adherence to ancient superstitions and taboos, while otherwise maintaining a belief system that was passed down to us from men and women whose lives were simply ravaged by their basic ignorance about the world. In what other sphere of life is such subservience to tradition acceptable? Medicine? Engineering? Not even politics suffers the anachronism that still dominates our thinking about ethical values and spiritual experience.

Imagine that we could revive a well-educated Christian of the fourteenth century. The man would prove to be a total ignoramus, except on matters of faith. His beliefs about geography, astronomy, and medicine would embarrass even a child, but he would know more or less everything there is to know about God. Though he would be considered a fool to think that the earth is flat, or that trepanning constitutes a wise medical intervention, his religious ideas would still be beyond reproach. There are two explanations for this: either we perfected our religious understanding of the world a millennium ago-while our knowledge on all other fronts was still hopelessly inchoate-or religion, being the mere maintenance of dogma, is one area of discourse that does not admit of progress. We will see that there is much to recommend the latter view.

With each passing year, do our religious beliefs conserve more and more of the data of human experience? If religion addresses a genuine sphere of understanding and human necessity, then it should be susceptible to progress; its doctrines should become more useful, rather than less. Progress in religion, as in other fields, would have to be a matter of present inquiry, not the mere reiteration of past doctrine. Whatever is true now should be discoverable now, and describable in terms that are not an outright affront to the rest of what we know about the world. By this measure, the entire project of religion seems perfectly backward. It cannot survive the changes that have come over us-culturally, technologically, and even ethically. Otherwise, there are few reasons to believe that we will survive it.

Moderates do not want to kill anyone in the name of God, but they want us to keep using the word "God" as though we knew what we were talking about. And they do not want anything too critical said about people who really believe in the God of their fathers, because tolerance, perhaps above all else, is sacred. To speak plainly and truthfully about the state of our world-to say, for instance, that the Bible and the Koran both contain mountains of life-destroying gibberish-is antithetical to tolerance as moderates currently conceive it. But we can no longer afford the luxury of such political correctness. We must finally recognize the price we are paying to maintain the iconography of our ignorance.

I'm sure many of you have already read the above, and many may disagree with Sam Harris' conclusions. I for one think he's dead on.

[Arthur Dent]

Augh, I feel like giving up. Everyone around me; no one is interested in the reality of things. No need to uncover the true nature of things. No need for skepticism. Everything is simply as it appears to be, our incredulity has never failed us.

People simply aren't interested in reality...

[SSY]

People can beleive whatever the hell they want to beleive, as long as they dont try and inflict thier beliefs on me or anyone else. as long as they believe in the privacy of their own home or church I could tolerate them all day long.

I think its shambolic that so much policy is decided in the states based on the lobbying of the religous right. If you dont want gay marriage or abortions, dont marry gay people or abort babies, but your fairy tales have nothing to do with my life choices. Not to mention the wholesale indoctrination of peoples children into a world of makebelieve, probably the most shameful example of religous intolerance.

[Arthur Dent]

The indoctrination of young children is definitely an issue with the "within the privacy of your own home" philosophy. As a victim of indoctrination, and still struggling to rebuild my identity and conscience, I can say that I feel I was wrongfully taken advantage of and religious tolerance had failed me on that level.

[BadPoison]

Religious tolerance permits hateful books like the bible, and the koran to have both moderate and extremist believers.

[wheels5894]

Yes, I can't see a problem with people believing what they like and worshipping what they like as long as it is their private affair. However this means there ought to be to intrusion into public life so that rules out evangelizing either on street corners, door steps and so on. if a religion wants to intrude into the public sphere then it seems to me we can stop some of the tolerance and exvengelise on our own case as well.

[chuff]

if a religion wants to intrude into the public sphere then it seems to me we can stop some of the tolerance and exvengelise on our own case as well.

Well, yes, but we're a lot more considerate about that kind of thing than they are. Inevitably they will, because their teacher tells them to (Matthew xxviii, 19-20). It's like a forced-sharing kind of thing.
Plus, we don't have some mystery award for converting the most sheeple.

[BadPoison]

We should tolerate religion?

No!
Not in an age with weapons of mass destruction.