IN DEFENSE OF INTOLERANCE
Recently, a woman on my Facebook page posted an article about a man in a Middle East who bludgeoned his wife to death because she gave birth to a female child. Naturally, I sat stupefied and tried to imagine how such brutality could happen, but a few moments later another women responded and reminded us that a 1000 years earlier, the same murder might have been tolerated in western society.
(courtesy: Iranian Politics Club)
I’m sure her remark was a well-intended plea for tolerance but I found the defense appalling. In this or any century could it ever be rationalized that a woman should be bludgeoned to death for giving birth to a female child? Worse, this is 21 Century, a time when information travels electronically across cultures at near the speed of light. Even the Taliban hidden in the remotest caves between Afghanistan and Pakistan have access to the world’s information through hand held devices. If any man truly is ignorant of the fact that the male sperm determines a child’s sex and not the female ovum, then he does so with the encouragement of a society that has spawned such inequality between the sexes that a man may murder his wife merely to express his displeasure. Any society and any religion which denies humanity and equal justice for all is unworthy of my tolerance.
(courtesy: Iranian Politics Club)
The danger of too much tolerance is that it creates a vacuum where intolerance is allowed to flourish.
“Superstition, the mother of those hideous twins, Fear and Faith, from her throne of skulls, still rules the world and will until the mind of woman ceases to be the property of priests.” (Quoted from “Man and His Gods” by Homer Smith in “Man Made God” by Barbara Walker)