The word 'tolerance' once meant we all have the right to argue rationally for our deepest convictions in the public arena. Now it means those convictions are not even subject to rational debate.
Interpretation
Tolerance has shifted from allowing rational debate to silencing differing opinions.
Nancy Pearcey highlights the changing definition of tolerance, suggesting that it has evolved from an encouragement of rational discourse about differing beliefs to a state where opposing convictions are no longer open for debate. This perspective invites us to reflect on the implications of this change for public discourse and societal engagement with differing views.
In practice
This quote could be used in a debate about freedom of speech at a university event.
The gospel is like a caged lion,' said the great baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon. 'It does not need to be defended, it simply needs to be let out of it's cage' Today, the cage is our accommodation to the secular/sacred split that reduces Christianity to a matter of personal belief. To unlock the cage, we need to become utterly convinced that, as Francis Schaeffer said, Christianity is not merely religious truth, it is total truth- truth about the whole of reality.
I am the descendant of slaves, of people that were born from a slave and a slave master.
If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility!
Order and reason, beauty and benevolence, are characteristics and conceptions which we find solely associated with the mind of man.
If a conservative order is indeed to return, we ought to know the tradition which is attached to it, so that we may rebuild society; if it is not to be restored, still we ought to understand conservative ideas so that we may rake from the ashes what scorched fragments of civilizations escape the conflagration of unchecked will and appetite.
Free speech not only lives, it rocks!
Conservatism, however, is too often a welcome excuse for lazy minds, loath to adapt themselves to fast changing conditions.
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