By Bill Randles
A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast: but the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel. (Proverbs 12:10; bold added)
Currently, there is an alternative to the Judeo-Christian concept of love for our fellow-man, which is called tolerance. It looks like love, and perhaps more importantly to many it actually feels like love, but it’s not love at all.
In fact, though it’s called tolerance, it’s not even tolerance in the traditional sense of the word. A better expression would perhaps be fawning accommodation; but tolerance is what they are calling it these days.
In this post-Christian era, the highest ideal is that the majority bend over backwards to be tolerant of every deviance from society.
It used to mean that we are to be tolerant and accepting of foreigners and their customs, of other religions, cultures and practices. Of course credit is never given to the fact that the most tolerant place on the planet has always been the Christian west. But today, one by one, every deviant and abnormal behavior is being added to the accommodations list. Freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and freedom to life on your own terms have been the hallmark of places like America, Canada, and Britain. But that definition of tolerance has recently been upgraded.
The new tolerance doesn’t simply mean that you must allow for differences among people or society without castigation or persecution. We are now required by the Orwellian definition of tolerance to positively promote such lifestyles, customs, and deviance (moral or otherwise), almost to the point of the denigration of the majority culture.
We should be tolerant of differences; indeed, we should ever be hospitable to the stranger, allow for religious differences, celebrate the fact that there is freedom of speech and of thought , traces of the formerly Christian culture. This comes from Moses and of course, Jesus and the prophets, and seeped its way into western society.
But the new tolerance goes beyond that and is actually quite cruel.
For example, take the new toleration of Islam. When there is something toxic about a culture, an inherent flaw in it, to “tolerate it” to the point of admiringly upholding it almost as a model “religion of peace” does no service to the people in it. Our own government practiced this after 9-11-2001.
The Muslim people desperately need to be confronted as human beings with the serious flaws of their own false religion, and 9-11 was an ideal “teachable moment,” but the new tolerance made it impossible to do so on a large-scale. I believe this new non-judgmental tolerance is cruel because it is both artificial and patronizing, and in the long run hurts everyone.
Muslims are human beings too, and in spite of the teachings of Mohammed, they still have a conscience and know very well that what happened on 9-11 was an act of criminal barbarity. As human beings none of them would want that to happen to them or any people they know. But the new tolerance “runs interference” on any real soul-searching.
The rush to justify Islam, and to appease the “hurt feelings” of Muslims in America and elsewhere actually hurts Muslims, because it denies them full responsibility as moral agents. Islam and its adherents have committed 16,000 acts of terror since 9-11, but in the new tolerance, they are mere victims to be pitied—an accommodation that places them on a less-than-human scale, perhaps through fear that is we don’t appease them, they will do us even greater violence.
I have been seeing the destruction caused by this cruel, new tolerance in the area of homosexuality as well. Those who try to point out that homosexuality is a destructive, literally damning way to live, are shut down by the new tolerance as “Haters,” of the homosexual. (I am trying to break the habit of calling them “Gay.” I don’t accept the premise—they aren’t “gay” when they are really miserable; and drug, alcohol, and suicide statistics bear this out.)
But who really “hates” the homosexual, and who truly “loves ” them? Those who practice the new tolerance actually hate the homosexual by condemning them to this “lifestyle,” affirming them in that which is sterile, deadly, filthy, and which debases and kills the conscience. This kind of “acceptance” is deadly.
Those who truly love the homosexuals are the ones who tell them in the name of the Lord that God has something better for them and that they are responsible beings who must give account for this distortion of God’s prophetic institution of marriage, and that change is entirely possible and so is forgiveness.
This new toxic tolerance has even seeped into the evangelical Christian church. There are those who have been embarrassed by the teachings of Jesus and the apostles and prophets of the Bible against Sodomy. They would gain cheap points with the world for being “compassionate” as opposed to those “judgmental religious hypocrites” who dare to speak the truth in love to this generation.
This is how Christians are consistently betraying one another and their Lord by posing as the “tolerant loving Christians,” in contrast to the faithful witnesses to truth in our time.
We must fervently call this heresy out for what it is, a perversion of the biblical teaching of love, which is based on truth and a revelation of the Holy God who created us in His image. Real love isn’t humanistic “tolerance;” it is Holy and upholds the truth of God. Love hates evil and rejoices in the truth.
The ironic thing about the new tolerance is that it only runs one way. Be aware that those who plead for “tolerance” for homosexuals, Islam, atheism, abortion, and pornography will prove to be so intolerable of Christians whom they will one day soon persecute without mercy.
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