Let's not be tolerant of intolerance
January 24, 2011
WE HAVE HEARD too many religious lunatics these days accusing people who don’t agree with them of being “secular fundamentalists”. A “secular fundamentalist” is someone who refuses to bow down in obeisance when faced with the hide-bound, medieval, morally degenerate intolerance of many modern Christian churches.
This is the sort of baseless paradox that the Pope is fond of repeating, with his line about the “tyranny of secularism” preventing all those poor, oppressed Catholic firebrands from exercising their inalienable human right to smite sodomites, adulterers and heretics – a tyranny that prevents them from being tyrannical, no less.
Does tolerance imply that we should be tolerant of intolerance? No it doesn’t and it is puerile sophistry to argue otherwise. We should never, ever lose sight of the fact that even though the churches have now sought to adopt the happy-clappy, touchy-feely twentieth-century vocabulary of sociology, with all its talk about respecting the rights of “faith communities” and promoting “inclusion” and “dialogue”, when they had power they were the first to burn people at the stake. And if they can believe that their God violated all observable physical laws in order to manufacture, murder and resurrect a son who was in fact also God, then they can just as easily believe that someone who disagrees with them has been infected by the devil and needs to be eliminated.
The thing about Britain, perhaps one of the few great things about Britain, is that it can occasionally elect a progressive government that although disappointing in most respects, is still capable of robust liberal policy that actually leads the way on issues like capital punishment, divorce, abortion, homosexual rights and tolerance in general. And this has led to genuine changes in public opinion, particularly in areas like racism.
But there are still a lot of bigots, many of whom cite religion as their reason. They borrow the spanking new language of human rights and tolerance in order to accuse everyone else in the country of the failing to respect their vicious, stupid, irrational beliefs: the “tyranny of secularism” indeed. Being part of a community that has been believing the same old things for a couple of thousand years seems to make them think they can get away with any fetid old diatribe or superstition. Tradition protects a multitude of sins.
Phrases like “secular fundamentalist” and “militant atheist” rankle because they create a misleading moral equivalence between, on the one hand, Osama Bin Laden, and on the other, Richard Dawkins. Were Dawkins to don fatigues and carry sticks of dynamite in his teeth while trying to blow up innocent tourists at Westminster Abbey, the phrasing might be justified. In fact, you never hear Dawkins arguing for the censorship, repression or imprisonment of dissenters, and to suggest otherwise is to descend into the sort of “tyranny of secularism” convolutions that the Pope has recently taken refuge in.
Saying that your religious beliefs entitle you to be intolerant – as those infamous Pentacostal guesthouse owners argued – is tantamount to the Marquis de Sade saying that his inalienable right to “freedom” entitles him to sodomize and brutally murder small children. You have absolutely no right to satisfy every whim that occurs to you, whether it is inspired by the most violent or intolerant parts of the Old Testament or the latest version of Grand Theft Auto. You claim you are seeking equal treatment but in fact you are seeking special treatment – the recognition that your truth is the absolute truth and is therefore absolved from normal morality and manners of discourse. When it comes down to it, therefore, it is actually about power, and your desire to inflict your power on everyone else.
