Spirituality for Living

You don’t have to see someone’s point to allow them the freedom to make it. You don’t have to view what you personally don’t accept, but you are not practicing tolerance if you make your views a moral agenda for society itself. Any person or group has its place and is worthy of respect. Any person, no matter how seemingly confused, can be your teacher. This realization is what is meant by tolerance.

You have to be active in the face of intolerance. Individual choice is the essence of tolerance.

“When you find peace within yourself, you become the kind of person who can live at peace with others.” Peace Pilgrim (American Teacher and Spiritual leader and Peace Prophet, 1908-1981)

“The test of courage comes when we are in the minority. The test of tolerance comes when we are in the majority.” Ralph W. Sockman

“In the practice of tolerance, one’s enemy is the best teacher.” Dalai Lama (Head of the Dge-lugs-pa order of Tibetan Buddhists, 1989 Nobel Peace Prize, b.1935)

Recognition Of Common Ground

Tolerance is a hot button topic, and my track record with those is touch and go, so I apologize in advance if I offend. Tolerance to my view is not some touchy, feely, love everybody practice. I think that’s why, despite all the popular rhetoric about tolerance, we actually have very little of it. Of course, there is also the counter camp (as there always is), who bemoan the insistence on political correctness. These two parties fuel each other’s fire to the point that most reasonable people don’t want to have a part in either philosophy, and then feel guilty… Seek More

God's Grace

We are all equally present in this reality. Accepting this is tolerance. The opposite of tolerance is delusion. The idea that you can exclude something because you don’t like it, or the idea that you can ridicule someone because they seem to have a deficit you do not. All of us are to some degree “retarded”. No one has time or energy enough in their life to learn everything, or to develop every skill equally. Neither is anyone evenly equipped to handle every issue they might encounter. All who could be judged will be found wanting, or as the Bible… Seek More

Tolerating

To feel intolerance is always to feel stress. That must be an indicator that it’s not the natural way for us. Exactly. Intolerance always creates stress. Is the joke really all that funny, if you know it’s controversial? If you don’t firmly believe in the controversial view, is it worth sharing with others? Or keeping for yourself, for that matter? Tolerance is both tolerating things as they are and tolerating change, which means having opposition to a formerly popular point of view. Do you know what they call tolerance of conflict? Diplomacy. Diplomacy is knowing that someone may have a… Seek More

Wiser Choice

I used to work with a woman. She talked about going to discos and not wanting to get too close to anyone, just have fun. I dismissed her as a party girl and didn’t have much to do with her, and then one day she told me that she had been engaged and her fiancé had gone swimming with friends and had drowned, and his parents blamed her for it because she wasn’t there. I was very friendly to her after that. I just had no clue before about the whole story. Morality, as far as it’s considered “common sense”… Seek More

Embrace Tolerance

Friends, what is tolerance? Polite respect for someone else, even if you don’t understand them. Excellent, and the odds are there will be plenty of people in life you don’t understand, because they come from a different culture than you, speak a different language, or just have to deal with a noticeably different living situation than you. Allowing. Perhaps allowing for? You raise a good point with seeing tolerance as allowing. People often feel like they have to give allowance to theirs, but who do you have to allow to do anything? Do you control whatever it is you are… Seek More

Tolerate Your Failings

Can you tolerate your own weaknesses, friends? Your own failings? If not, why not? That can be the biggest trial, but it leads to tolerance of others. It goes back to tending to the moat in your eye, not the splinter in your neighbours. Indeed, it does. If attending to yourself, you will have little time and energy to “fix” anyone else. An example in my case lead to a great deal of self-doubt and emotional distress. In my teens, I was attacked for an imagined homosexuality. My genetic condition and the resultant seizures lead to what was called in… Seek More

Individual Choice

Don’t empathy and compassion often lead you to do things for others that hurt yourself? True compassion will allow for forbearance. True compassion will lead to the realization that the worlds burdens are not your personal burdens, and your values are not the world’s solution. The idea that the world needs saving, and the individual should be the one to save it, leads to intolerance. What if you value tolerance and the world’s values? If you value tolerance, then you will value your own weaknesses, your own limitations, and the world’s values are not homogenous, at least not between human… Seek More

Tolerance Is The Step

I will admit I do knowingly and with wilful intent practice ignorance. I practice ignorance, because I accept that I have time and feeling for only a limited number of issues. I have an inherently limited sphere of concern, but I do not make of my own ignorance a moral crusade. I would not impose my choice of items that I ignore on another human being. We should exemplify tolerance in order to spread it. I agree that we should embrace in our living those values we espouse, but it’s not through an effort to proselytize, to convert. To insist… Seek More