Sunday, March 27, 2011

Tolerance ≠ Diversity

You know, while we're clearing things up and getting down to the facts on which to base our discussions:
Senator Durbin has said anti-Islamic sentiment in America is on the rise and that, "It is important for our generation to renew our founding charter's commitment to religious diversity ...
Our founders were not "comitted to religious diversity".   That is a politically correct distortion.  What our founders were committed to was religious tolerance.

If anything, most of them tried to encourage Christianity. But it was religious tolerance that they encoded in our Constitution and laws. Not some sort of prime directive to have as many religions as possible under our shingle.

2 comments:

Cylarz said...

Besides that, the Islamic faith is alien (and I might add, hostile) to the religious culture that existed in the young United States at that time.

Then again, the idea of killing, persecuting, or repressing everyone who believes differently from you was one of the very reasons that our ancestors fled Europe to start with. So, maybe not. I don't know.

I always found it a bit interesting that the American Revolution was necessary in the first place. According to my understanding, the Plymouth Rock colony of 1620 was founded by Separatists who wanted no part of the Church of England or any of the Crown's political directives.

Yet, a few generations later, there the Pilgrims' descendants were, doing everything the Redcoats' way as their forbears had done in England...thus necessitating a war of independence.

It always got me wondering - between 1620 and 1776, didn't anyone bother to ask, "Hey! Who invited the Crown and its men over here? Didn't we come here to America to get away from these people?"

Cylarz said...

And yes, I know there was a Crown-funded colony at Jamestown which predated the one at Plymouth Rock, but still...