Opinion

Love is the peace-broker greater than tolerance

Tolerance has become a bit of a buzzword.

In all these great nations with not-so-great histories of discrimination, violence and oppression, tolerance has been peddled as the peace-broker, the social moderator.

Headlines consistently hang out Australia's shameful laundry, from the Hey Hey It's Saturday stunt last week to the attacks on Indian students in Melbourne earlier this year.

And then there's that delicate situation with Australia's indigenous communities and a Government still scratching its head as to a resolution.

The sunburnt country does have an underbelly of discrimination, whether it presents as polite observations or blatant sledging. Probably, it's unavoidable in large communities.

And the solution? You guessed it - tolerance.

The Bible speaks of salt as an illustration for the way we can influence society. We are called to season the world with the example of Christ's love.

Read about it in Matthew 5:13; "Let me tell you why you are here. You're here to be salt-seasoning that brings out the God-flavours of this earth. If you lose your saltiness, how will people taste godliness? You've lost your usefulness and will end up in the garbage" (The Message).

READ THE FULL VERSION OF CLAIRE'S COLUMN EVERY MONDAY IN THE EXAMINER

Posted By: Claire van Ryn on 19/10/2009 5:16:00 PM | Comments (4)

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Tolerance is much more than a 'buzzword". Such a trivialistion a bit scary. Rather, tolerance is what humanity has learnt from centuries of bloodletting by groups who each insist that they, and they alone, possessed the truth of how of other people must live their lives. Fundamentalists and fanatics hate tolerance because tolerance implies that their belief is only one among many. In this age of Taliban and Bush-style sanctimonious miltitarism tolerance needs to be defended, not trivialised or demonised.

Posted by Hal, 20/10/2009 11:26:23 AM, on The Examiner

Hal - I'm not sure if you had the opportunity to read my full column in Monday's paper, but the gist was that love and not merely tolerance is what is needed to overcome issues of discrimination. Tolerance is little more than a head decision, where love cuts deeper, and allows us to love the person without necessarily loving the thing/s they do. In some instances, there are behaviours that should not be tolerated, but love can be applied in EVERY situation.

Posted by Claire van Ryn, 21/10/2009 2:20:47 PM, on The Examiner

Your column is most interesting, and was only discovered by me recently. Love alone cannot solve all. Love and intelligence = WISDOM. Jesus' promise (and not Matthews) was that "By your faith you have been made whole". And, as I do believe, Jesus wrote St Johns Gospel, then we needs must "know that you are gods". And with this in mind, the only path, the only TRUE religious path is the one of TRUTH. For "As a man thinketh, so he is." So Tolerance also becomes a heart and head decision, based in and of WISDOM.

Posted by Roberta, 28/10/2009 12:39:54 PM, on The Examiner

Liberals like to say that the path to peace and freedom is to be more tolerant of other cultures - including those that seek to overturn our own way of life. If we only took the time to understand them and have them understand us we could achieve a united prosperity based on the our shared common interests. Nice ideal...but in reality all we are doing are enabling the enemies of freedom and democracy to spread their message, attract new recruits and strengthen themselves by using our own goodwill against us. It's time we woke up to the fact that by tolerating evil we are in effect accepting its existence. By reacting to their malevolence with indifference we are by default sanctioning it. And by allowing movements whose goal is to destroy us to operate on our soil we are hastening our own demise. Read on for more...

Posted by ronmossad, 23/11/2009 8:26:16 AM, on The Examiner

Claire van Ryn's column KEEPING THE FAITH appears in The Examiner every Monday. You can blog with Claire from 10am every Tuesday