Christianity and tolerance revisited

Posted by stari_momak on May 08, 2005, 06:56 PM | #

Had bombers been available to him, I’ve no doubt Cromwell would have used them on the Irish.

As for the Jews, there is a strong streak of philosemitism in Protestant theology, esp. fundamentalist theology. (See Gorski, The Mosaic Moment) . The same nutcases that went around chisling faces off of sculpture in Westminster saw themselves as the new Israelites. Maybe they felt they needed some of the old Israelites around to serve as role models.

In a sense, Cromwell was the precursor to all Christian Zionists everywhere.

Posted by John S Bolton on May 08, 2005, 09:25 PM | #

From these comparisons, one can determine that what is meant by tolerance in such an instance would have to be the one way tolerance of Marcuse’s essay entitled Repressive Tolerance. This is where equivocation does its dirty work; the honest will suppose that tolerance is meant honestly, without equivocation. Actually, though, what would have to be meant is a tolerance for the left, or for an increase in aggression, only. In any case, tolerance is not a value such as can be treated as an absolute universal; it has many limits. Tolerance of aggression is a vice, not any sort of virtue. This is a danger in emphasizing hypocrisies on the other side; one can affirn false values

Posted by Andrew Bartlett on May 08, 2005, 10:33 PM | #

“The basic point I am making is once again the perennial conservative warning about the complexity of human affairs.  Simple generalizations (such as “secularism leads to tolerance”) just will not do.”

Isn’t this statement incompatible with:

“Like all Leftists, they are would-be dictators and they support authoritarian and control-freak policies with great regularity.”?

Posted by Guessedworker on May 09, 2005, 05:12 AM | #

Andrew,

Motive and causality are not the same and do not draw from the same well.  A man may have complex motives but it is much more likely that they are quite restricted in number and type.  Human affairs, on the other hand, operate under the Law of Accident.  There are altogether too many sudden changes and unseen outcomes to admit of a simple explanation.

Fundamentally, the left (and the libertarian right) has no philosophy of consciousness and, therefore, does not understand the very notions of freedom and sovereign individualism in which is deals.  Out of ignorance emerges a certain rashness about what is possible and what is not - and that is where, psychologically, Conservatism and liberalism part.

All liberalism’s spasmodic idealisms end in unintended disaster.  The logical consequence of liberalism, as John S.Bolton so often averrs, is mass murder.

Posted by JSBolton on May 09, 2005, 12:36 PM | #

If liberalism means wanting more freedom for more aggression, and such that this aggression is made an ultimate value, then that liberalism will idealize and move towards mass murder. The point of talking about this tendency, even when it is rather impolite or even impertinent to do so, is that no other response is sufficient to answer the smearing that the left uses. It doesn’t mean that Blair or Kerry will use a victory to move immediately into a Khmer rouge pattern. When the other side is completely ruthless and dishonest in the use of ad hominem and other fallacious propaganda methods, there is no virtue in understatement. One can observe that those who bring up racial provocations in the leftist manner, will drop their issues and run, as soon as one raises the question of whether the left does not set up massacres as ultimate value. This indicates to the observant, that the real issue is whether the left is qualified to exert moral leadership, not so much the instant subjects of race, class gender and so on. The right must never, even momentarily, fail to keep this in mind, when disputing with anyone to their left.

Posted by ben tillman on May 09, 2005, 06:26 PM | #

Isn’t monotheism, as opposed to henotheism, inherently intolerant?  And why should anyone take “intolerant” as an insult?

The compromising and tolerant “religion of civility” discussed in John Murray Cuddihy’s “No Ofeense:  Civil Religion and Protestant Taste” has been a disaster for the United States.  But it is essentially secular and thus is inconsistent with your argument.

Posted by ben tillman on May 09, 2005, 06:52 PM | #

No group could be a bigger challenge to Cromwell’s theology than the Jews.

The Jewish community was the source of Cromwell’s theology.

Posted by ben tillman on May 09, 2005, 06:53 PM | #

Here’s one link relevant to the above:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C03E2DE1139F937A1575AC0A9629C8B63