New Atheists and Extreme Religious Fundamentalists Reject American Tradition of Tolerance

Introduction: Intolerance is Back in Vogue

It's probably safe to say that no value better is more important to both modern secular and modern religious thinkers than the value of tolerance. Here's one dictionary definition of Tolerance: Acceptance of different views: the acceptance of the differing views of other people, e.g. in religious or political matters, and fairness toward the people who hold these different views. Religious tolerance, including the right to choose no religion, is included in the very definition of tolerance.

Rabbi Heschel famously said that an attack on one religion is an attack on all. This was a hard-won truth that was apparent to most thinking people in the dark shadow of the Holocaust. It was not religion which led to the mass murder of millions of European Jews (and other unpopular groups including leftists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and homosexuals)--rather it was hateful intolerance of the Other. Before the death camps came the ghettos, which served to isolate one group from another.

After that tragedy, thinking people (whether religious or not) came to a sort of consensus: Intolerance itself was the only personal belief which could not be tolerated. Sadly, that consensus seems to be breaking down.

Both extremist religious fundamentalists and a vocal group of New Atheists reject religious freedom and tolerance as a cultural and political value. Was the Holocaust really so long ago that they could have already forgotten its lessons? I would have thought them burned into the very bones of human history--but human memory is short and advances for books that strike provocative "new arguments" are very large.

(Series to be continued)...