Tolerance and convictions

That unfortunate, controversial invitation to President Obama to be the commencement speaker, and then to be given an honorary degree by the Notre Dame University last May brought to the surface the ticklish issue of how to blend the requirements of tolerance and convictions, values that can compete with each other at some point in the life of a person and an institution.

The camp of Obama and the university officials said they just wanted to have openness and an appeal to dialogue and respect over a highly divisive issue of abortion and the like.

Those who criticized the idea of inviting and honoring Obama in a Catholic university, mainly bishops and prominent leaders, however thought that there was no question about openness, dialogue and respect. These can always be upheld in many other ways.

It was that, in its bare bones, the invite and the honor already meant a Catholic school was showing approval of an immoral policy. It was giving the wrong signals to the world, especially to the young.

I tend to agree with the critics. My reading of the whole affair includes an increasing suspicion that tolerance, otherwise a very desirable value given our social nature and the pluralistic society we are getting into, is understood as having nothing to do with convictions.

When I heard Obama’s views on religion sometime ago in YouTube, I was deeply disturbed. He articulated an attitude, sadly getting common these days, that relegated religious belief as a strictly personal concern and an individual affair, if not one that tends to cause social division.

What those views amount to is not to take religion seriously, not to have deep convictions of one’s faith, so that we can avoid division. It’s just a short step shy of considering religion is non-important, irrelevant and destructive to our life.

I feel that Obama and the Notre Dame University officials were looking at things from a restricted point of view. It’s a valid view, except that it fails to give due consideration to other aspects.

By all means, we have to have tolerance in our dealings with one another. And over the years, this ideal has been defined and described even by high institutions like the UN. In spite of some dark spots, the world now tries to live that value as best as it could.

But tolerance should not be pursued from a void. It has to come from a clear foundation of well-defined convictions. Otherwise, the tolerance we get would be false and empty. It has no other way but to fall into chaos that can come in many possible forms. And these forms can include hatred and violence.

We have to be wary of this deceptive brand of tolerance that acknowledges no source of absolute values, but just floats on an ocean of ever-changing values, imprisoning itself in a world of pure relativism.

Our problem is that many of us believe we can manage to have peace and harmony, order and integrity without having to go to God. We think that just by ourselves, exclusively relying on our own powers, we can have unity. This is utopian—desirable, ideal but impracticable!

What we are seeing in the world today is us, at least a big part of us, quite contented with our own selves and feeling self-sufficient. We can manage to project an appearance of civility, but inside us are all sorts of tension, fear and anxiety. Without God, we are left only with a façade, but not the substance.

Some holy men have described this phenomenon as the empire of the devil in the world. We need to realize this sad fact. But alas, it requires a certain faith. Only those with faith can see this. They can see the false tolerance that’s actually a sweet poison.

Christian convictions do not hinder tolerance, but rather enhance it and put it in the right context and in the right direction. Christ himself was compassionate and merciful with everyone, even up to death. And he commands his followers to follow him even to that extreme point.

Tolerance should not be an anything-goes policy, whose supreme and absolute but false goal is to have an appearance of peace and unity. It has to endlessly move toward the attainment of the absolute truth and good, God himself. Not a man-made god, but the true, living God!

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