Post 38--Secular Pseudo Tolerance

Hi, I’m back! Took a trip south of our border and was pressed for time in expanding my website,  < www.SocialTheology.com >, specifically the “Boeriana” page.  Check it out sometimes.

Continuing from the last post, many Muslims are surprised when their religion is considered intolerant of other religions and worldviews.  Look at history, they will argue, and you will see that when Westerners, usually equated with Christians, persecuted Jews in past centuries, Muslims gave them space to flourish, especially in Andalusia, the name for Muslim Spain of some centuries ago.

Christians react to this Muslim claim of toleration with equal surprise. Don’t they know their own history?  Where are the Christian communities that thrived in the past in countries now majority Muslim?  What happened to them and why?  Abraham Kuyper’s explanation in the previous post may not be the complete answer, but it certainly represents one of the major factors. 

So, now we have two surprised parties, Christians and Muslims.  But there is a third: the Secular community that currently is the reigning worldview in the West. While much of the Christian community accuses Secularism of intolerance, its adherents are dumbfounded about that charge. Why, Secularism represents the apex of freedom and human rights. It is the solution to every form of discrimination in this world, including that of Christianity and Islam.  Having observed and experienced this attitude for some decades now as a Christian, I am not surprised about this anymore, but certainly amazed, no matter how many years I have observed and experienced them.

Amazed about what? At the blindness of Secularists at their own intolerance, very much parallel to Muslim intolerance! I have friends among them whom I love very much, but my amazement remains in tact. Not only do they disagree with me, but they simply do not understand my arguments about their intolerance—as I have said above: just like Muslims. 

An example is Michael Den Tandt, a Vancouver Sun columnist for whom I have considerable respect and whom I generally enjoy reading (Jan 9/2015, B7). He described both “Orthodox Wahabism with its sharia law, stoning, female genital mutilation and chopping off of hands and heads” as “a barbaric facet of Islam.”  Christianity came under the same condemnation for its Spanish Inquisition. So far, so good. As a born-again Christian, I agree. He then asserted that “the two are alike, fundamentally the same, if freedom of thought and respect for the human spirit are the standards of comparison.” 

But I am amazed—not surprised—that he does not put secularism in this line up as equally barbaric and “fundamentally the same.”  Do I need to spell it out for you?  Why, abortion, of course. If that is not barbaric, I don’t know what it is.  The killing of the living unborn for the sake of female and  parental freedom and convenience. Millions and millions of them every year.  Earlier in the article he describes secularism, referred to as “the pluralistic way of life,” as “a good way of life.” Killing the absolutely vulnerable “a good way of life”?!  Millions?!

Den Tandt continues:

“…so too must civilized people today ‘insult’ the conventions of any belief system that tries to impose universal limits on free expression. Either we use the gifts of free thought and speech or we lose them.”  “It is not possible, in one web-linked world, for critical expression not to offend someone, somewhere. The choice is therefore to impose censorship, by self or others, or to accept that all human beings are free to think and speak independently, to criticize, to mock or needle, without fear of anything harsher than a rebuttal, and to gently but firmly insist that adherents of all belief systems get over it, and to never relent.

I’m almost done for the day. Den Tandt ends his article with this exhortation: “So, Islam, like Christianity, Judaism and the rest, just has to grow up. The more people speak, the easier that will get.”  I agree with that sentiment, provided “the rest” includes secularism, the reigning world view in the West. But you try to publicly critique homosexualism and you’ll have the entire secular community, the more educated section of it at least, on your neck not only, but you’ll find yourself in a human rights “court” in no time flat.

I adduce Den Tandt’s article only because it is the latest to come to my attention, but this issue deserves a ten-volume series afloat with the innumerable concrete examples that are out there waiting for exposure. I wonder why Den Tandt left out the secularists for their barbarism and intolerance? I think I know: His secular world view has blinded him to these perspectives and facts.  Michael, open your eyes and get over it!