Josh McDowell and his son Sean have a new book, "The Beauty of Intolerance: Setting a Generation Free to Know Truth and Love"
Josh says that the number one virtue in most cultures around the world today is tolerance. He personally thinks that the new tolerance is evil. He would never choose to teach his children to be tolerant.
When you say tolerance most people think of one thing, but the word has gone through a total shift in the concept.
When you hear the word tolerance now in a religious environment, economic, political, cultural, educationally it means something different.
Tolerance now means that all values, all lifestyles, all claims to truth, all beliefs are equal.
If you say there is a belief, a value, a claim to truth that is greater or lesser than another, or a lifestyle than you are labelled being a bigot and intolerant. Things have totally changed.
When you tell someone you need to be tolerant of an individual, what it means in the majority of culture is that you need to say that their beliefs, values, lifestyle, their claim to truth is equal to your own and you must rejoice in that or you are intolerant. Marginalized immediately.
A professor told Josh years ago that the way we are going to defeat Christianity is we are going to marginalize it through tolerance.
When his son was 15, he asked him if there was anything they taught him at school that was an absolute. That was true for everyone, no question about it. He said tolerance.
He was being taught to tolerate the tolerable and given the freedom to be intolerant to the intolerant.
When he asked his daughter what was the biggest fear she had when it came to a name somebody would call her. She said to be intolerant.
People are afraid to be labelled that they don't agree with everyone. That all beliefs, values, truths, lifestyles are equal to everything else.
Intolerance is a Beautiful Idea
Isn't it wonderful that Nelson Mandela was intolerant of apartheid?
Martin Luther King Jr. was intolerant of racism
Mother Teresa was intolerant of poverty
Bono is intolerant of AIDS
This book was birthed 30 years ago when researching truth. History went from truth residing in a personal Creator God to where truth resided in man. As he started raising his own children he realized he needed to help parents.
So give your servant a discerning heart to govern your people and to distinguish between right and wrong. 1 Kings 3:9
Tolerance blurs that line. We need to raise our children to discern good from evil.
There are 2 kinds of tolerance
Traditional Tolerance
Cultural Tolerance
Traditional Tolerance is more positive; I admire you, I appreciate you, you're of great value but I disagree with what you believe.
We always separated the person from the act. Now we believe your actions are who you are. So now when we love you but we hate the sin to the culture around that is evil. We cannot now separate the individual from the act.
If you raise any question of opposition or justification for how someone is acting you are intolerant and a bigot.
In raising his kids Josh says he taught them the difference between love and intolerance. He refused to raise his children with tolerance. When you tolerate someone you diminish their value. When you love someone you augment their value. As created in the image of God with infinite value, dignity, and worth.
Another word that has a new meaning in today's culture is respect. When you use that word today the connotation means that I hold in the same esteem your values, beliefs, lifestyle, your claims to truth as much as I do my own. If we do not do that we are being disrespectful and intolerant.
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