After I came down from Cambridge a friend of my father recommended that I subject myself to some pyschometric tests. And so it was that I found myself in a big old house on Crooms Hill in Greenwich holding a piece of paper which, amongst other things, informed me of my tendency towards intolerance.
These days whenever I feel that the steaming magma of intolerance is starting to ooze out of my ears and nose I pick up my copy of André Comte-Sponville's A Short Treatise on the Great Virtues and turn to chapter 13, Tolerance.
The proper objects of this virtue, he advises, are things that it is within our power to prevent, and it has particular value when exercised against our own interests.
"To philosophise is to think without the benefit of proof...when a truth is known with certainty, tolerance is irrelevant because it has no object."
Believers that cannot prove they are right should recognise that their position is essentially the same as their adversaries, just as convinced and just as incapable of convincing others that their truth is the real one. That is the basis of tolerance. Importantly however, it does not require you to acknowledge their right to a different opinion, as that would be "to lapse into subjectivism, relativism and skepticism".
The morally wrong or an intolerant group that threatens the very basis of tolerance should not be tolerated. I do tend to agree with Paul Berman's position on the Saudis.
"Peace and safety may not be compatible, in the end, with the existence of a fanatical, obscurantist, intolerant, anti-Semitic, obsessively patriarchal, polygamous, terror-minded, theocratic, supremely wealthy petro-monarchy that insists on spreading its missionary message to the world."
In the past I have observed that I would really rather that the monotheistically-minded found another planet to live on, but reluctantly, I have to accept that religiosity is a natural phenomenon, and that there are surely sequences of DNA in our genome which encode for a pyschological bias towards Faith, which then operates within a fairly well-defined cognitive niche in the human mind. And a great pity it is. Unfortunately, all previous attempts by rationalists to either eradicate or replace traditional belief have demonstrated conclusively the folly of such ventures.
As fellow atheist Comte-Sponville puts it, "There can be no intelligence without the freedom to come to one's own judgment...intolerance makes people stupid just as stupidity makes people intolerant. "
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