I'm well aware people feel disrespected when I tolerate faith they are intolerant of. We are all free to feel offended by others beliefs. But since there are no known objective truths we all have to live together in the end. Offended or not.
Sorry for the delay in responding here. I've had a bit of medical excitement here (it isn't every day you get a cancer diagnosis), and I had to pick which of two threads I'd get to first.
I don't think you understand what I mean about an implicit disrespect in an approach which tolerates everything. I'm not talking about beliefs (in the sense of established dogma, anyway). Nor am I talking about religious affiliations (and the assorted disputed between them). I'm not even talking about tolerance as in getting along with each other. It is, after all , entirely possible to think someone is entirely wrong about something and get along with them.
I'm talking about the willingness to put spiritual ideas on the stand and pronounce some of them wrong.
Let me try to give you a hypothetical story to illustrate what I mean. Bear with me -- its long, but I can't think of how to shorten it without losing some of the point I'm trying to show.
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Lets take a child - we'll call her "Ada". Ada is born and raised a member of the -- for hypothetical purposes -- "betaist" faith. As a child she learned the myths and took them to heart, believing every word and following what she learned in Wednesday school to the letter. Faithfully she would recite every day the Betaist's Oath: "I pledge myself to the nameless beyond, and I pledge myself to its servant, the Guardian Gamma, who came as a gazelle to save the people of the delta..."
Beginning around ten, though, she began to notice something. The myths contradicted each other in places, and in other places, the Great Guardian Gamma didn't seem either great, or good. Finally, when talking with the Temple chief, she burst forth with all of her doubts. He gently explained that the stories were not meant to be taken at their word, but were instead told to teach a moral. In talking with her the temple chief was so impressed with her sharpness, that he loaned her one of his theology books.
Ada devoured the book, which seemed to have every answer for every one of her questions. She resolved to become a betaist theologian. For the next twenty years Ada immersed herself in theology, learning how to find meaning in the language of the myths. Eventually Ada earned a Ph.D. in Betaist hermeneutics, and was offered a teaching position at the leading Betaist seminary.
But even as she began a long-desired career as a theologian, she faced another wave of doubt. She could find meaning, as in exegesis, in the words of the myths, but it was a dead meaning, an intellectual exercise that left her no more fulfilled than an exegesis of the words on the back of her breakfast box of corn flakes. Was there anything, really, at all, to Betaism?
After a few years she left her position at the seminary and and took up teaching English at a local high school. She still considered herself a Betaist, "for cultural reasons", she'd explain, but she no longer attended Wednesday services, and even began drinking mint tea, something prohibited to Betaists. Then one day, as she prepared yet another lesson plan, it was as if a bolt of lightning struck her: it was not the words on the paper that ought to have been interpreted with more words on more paper: it was the message written in the heart which was to be interpreted with one's life.
She began to attend Betaist services again. After a number of years, she joined a small Betaist religious order which emphasized simpicity, prayer, and meditation. Ada spent her remaining years as a member of the order, eventually becoming its Lead Mother. It was said that her last words were the words of the Betaist Oath: "I pledge myself to the nameless beyond, and I pledge myself to its servant, the Guardian Gamma, who came as a gazelle to save the people of the delta..."
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From the beginning to the end of this hypothetical story, our heroine is one single denomination, so there is no question of this being an argument about affiliation. And if at any point if this hypothetical story you had interrupted Ada and asked what did she believe, she would have recited back at you the Betaist's Oath (albiet with a cynical twist during one period of her life). So, this is not about belief-as-in-doctrine.
But if at any point in her life past the age of ten you had asked her whether her ideas about the spiritual had been correct ten years previously, she would have laughed and said no, of course not. Sometimes she would have pointed to something minor, things she hadn't yet studied in school that changed her views on a matter. Sometimes she would have pointed to something enormous, an error whose correction affected the entire course of her life. She, in most instances, would not have hesitated to say that she had been
wrong.
When a person takes the position that anyone else's spiritual ideas are right, no matter what, they deny outright their potential for change and growth. They say it doesn't matter to them. They say the most sublime spiritual moment and the crudest sort of "rah rah my God is bigger than yours" narrow literalism are equal in their eyes. They're saying that, even if another person comes to see his or her own ideas were wrong, they never will, which is a very patronizing thing to do to someone.
I wrote Ada's story to take her through the great stages of spiritual development, from literalism through intellectualism to mysticism, with a touch of doubt, backsliding, and cynicism. You don't have to change your doctrine to come to some radically different understandings of it.
What's more, if you look at the great branches of spiritual thought, for all their differences, they have commonalities. They have the literalists and ritualists, as Ada was as a child. They have their intellectuals. And they have their mystics. Nearly all agree that it is the mystics who have the deepest grasp of the faith. And when you look at what their mystics say, it is stunningly similar, one from another. There is something there, there. Some substance that lets us say that the ones who think their God -- and they always do seem to make God (or Dharma) their personal possession -- told them to go hate everyone else are
wrong. That the ones who see spirituality as an intellectual exercise alone are missing the point, and their conclusions are sometimes flat-out
wrong. That persons who treat their professed spirituality with cynicism have more to learn. Indeed, there is much that professes to be mysticism that is very much mistaken. We can see this not by opposing one path to the next but by looking at them in unison and seeing their commonality.
Ultimately, tolerance for the sake of tolerance is a fearful position. It's afraid to take a position, sometimes because its advocates have been taught its not polite to have an opinion, sometimes because its advocates are afraid they don't really know how to recognize what's wrong or right.
