Tolerance: Religious, Ideological, And Practical
By Zakaria Ibrahim

What is tolerance? Looking at the thesaurus, tolerance can have multiple meanings. Tolerance can mean broadmindedness, open-mindedness, lenience, acceptance, forbearance, patience, easiness, and charity. Accordingly, tolerance has a good, positive but fuzzy definition. Let us put it in a different prospective by positioning “tolerance” on the love scale (in the human sense). It is to be noted here that LOVE with capital letters is GOD and is absolute as well as infinite. The love scale in a descending order can approximately be projected as follows: ( Absolute LOVE,….followed by very gigantic gap then…, shadow love, companionship, friendship, trusting, candidness, kindness, likeness, reciprocally rewarding love, acceptable, conciliator, tolerable, NEUTRAL, boring, coarse, avoidable, stubborn, intolerable, quarrelsome, objectionable, dishonorable, distasteful, disliked, provocative, arrogant, intimidator, angry, quarrelsome, vulgar, obnoxious, repugnant, malicious, repulsive, despicable, deviate, satanic,…..). Obviously, “tolerance” is positive but very feeble on the love scale. It reflects the lack of acknowledging the existence of the individual being tolerated, as well as the insignificance of the feedback of such individual on the tolerant person.

A comparison between “absolute LOVE” (such as the Lord’s love for all humanity and His instruction to us to love your enemy) and that of “tolerance” indicates to what extent the influence level the secular society did on lowering the Christian moral values. Compassion became politically incorrect. It is labeled as libertarian, socialist or communist, but no one dare to say the truth, it is Orthodox Christianity. On the opposite side one finds the rigid Pharisee style philosophy with superficial big propaganda, no substance conservatism. Therefore labeling people or an individual is also (like it or not) a form of intolerance.

The humanity is lost through corrupt satanic ideologies that does not accept others. They only accept those who have adopted their ideologies as the way of thinking because they deeply believe that they are the righteous and everyone else is profoundly wrong. In fact, these ideologues are so absorbed in superficial self righteous and do not exhibit any tolerance. They are imposing their ideologies by shutting off others and using deceitful tactics of negative propaganda and smearing schemes to who dare to critique them. The ideological attitude of self righteous reaches a high level of intolerance that lead the individual or persons to commit criminal aggressions even murder in the name of defending the ideology doctrines.

The question here should be, to what extent tolerance is to be practiced?--From individual to individual and/or to an ideological group. Tolerance is the least love that can be presented by human to another human. However, in the case of ideological groups, their ideology charter should be examined intensively before tolerating their doctrines. If they are cult groups, they are already in treaty with the devil, and there is no mix between Christ’s sons and daughters and devil. All what can be done is to pray for them that GOD help them get released from this form of the devil’s grip.

To identify cult groups or cultists, is to examine their doctrines, and observe their application and interpretation of the doctrines on their behavior. If it includes murder under any different name, form, or justification as well as spreads hatred to any other group, then this ideological group is cultists followers of the devil. In addition these cultists exhibit superiority complexes rejecting the others and consider others as inferior, dispensable and to some extent less human. Therefore, pray for them but never tolerate or be politically correct about their behavior, because there is no mix between light and darkness. When you join hands with them or adopt their doctrines, you are indirectly rejecting Christ.

Therefore, Christ’s sons and daughters should not be brain washed by any ideological doctrines and become their loud speakers, puppets, or slaves, to whatever the apparent elegant cause they proclaimed to be. In fact, this is theologically a masked form of idolatry. Christ’s sons and daughters are one in Christ being dressed like Him by Putting On Christ and became Christ like, and shall not be fooled by any fancy named ideological group.

There is also the pragmatic tolerance, in other words, there is no other choice for an individual but to tolerate. This is a masked form of hypocrisy. Classical examples of this type of tolerance in real life are plenty. An employee may tolerate his superior’s debasing jokes, a husband may tolerate his wife’s nagging to maintain home peace, a wife may tolerate her husband’s abuse and beatings for sake of the kids or because of financial dependence, or a salesman tolerates a customer’s unreasonable critiques.

Accordingly, tolerance practice is encouraged, but there is an enormous responsibility added to you when you execute it. First toward yourself, society, and most importantly to GOD. Do not allow yourself to enslave to any type of masked idolatry under the umbrella of tolerance because God loves you.