Tolerance
is a good
cornerstone on which to build human relationships. When one views the
slaughter and suffering caused by religious intolerance down all the
history of Man and into modern times, one can see that intolerance is a
very non-survival activity.
Religious tolerance does not
mean one cannot
express his own beliefs. It does mean that seeking to undermine or
attack the religious faith and beliefs of another has always been the
short road to trouble.
Philosophers since the
times of ancient
Greece have disputed with one another about the nature of God, Man and
the universe. The opinions of authorities ebb and flow: just now the
philosophies of "materialism" - dating back as far as Ancient Egypt and
Greece - are the fad: they seek to assert that all is matter and
overlook that, neat as their explanations of evolution may be, they
still do not rule out additional
factors that might be at work, that might be merely using such things
as evolution. They are today the "official" philosophies and even
taught in schools. They have their own zealots who attack the beliefs
and religions of others: the result can be intolerance and contention.
If all the brightest minds
since the fifth
century B.C. or before have never been able to agree on the subject of
religion or anti-religion, it is an area of combat between people that
one would do well to stay out of.
In this sea of contention,
one bright
principle has emerged: the right to believe as one chooses.
"Faith" and
"belief" do not
necessarily surrender to logic: they cannot even be declared to be
illogical. They can be things quite apart.
Any advice one
might give another on
this subject is safest when it simply asserts the right to believe as
one chooses. One is at liberty to hold up his own beliefs for
acceptance. One is at risk when he seeks to assault the beliefs of
others, much more so when he attacks and seeks to harm them because of
their religious convictions.
Man, since the
dawn of the species,
has taken great consolation and joy in his religions. Even the
"mechanist" and the "materialist" of today sound much like the priests
of old as they spread their dogma.
Men without faith
are a pretty sorry
lot. They can even be given something to have faith in. But when they
have religious beliefs, respect them.
The
way to happiness can become contentious when one fails to respect the
religious beliefs of others.
L.
Ron Hubbard
mechanism:
the view
that all life is only matter in motion and can be totally explained by
physical laws. Advanced by Leucippus and Democritus (460 B.C. to 370
B.C.) who may have gotten it from Egyptian mythology.
materialism:
any one of a family of metaphysical theories which view the universe as
consisting of hard objects such as stones, big or very small. The
theories seeks to explain away such things as minds by saying
they can be reduced to physical things or their motions. Materialism is
a very ancient idea. There are other ideas.
