In this brief essay, poet and translator H. Hix argues that it is the act of believing, more than the thing believed, that relates more directly to intolerance. Those responsible for creating this forum are right to ask after the relationship between belief and intolerance.
Distinguishing between belief t and belief a draws attention to a crucial fact about that relationship: Intolerance derives not from belief t but from belief a. Explicitly stating that fact is important, because it would be easy to assume and many persons do assume the opposite.
Because belief t is the primary sense, the one likely to be given as the first definition in a dictionary entry, the natural assumption would be that what relates to intolerance is belief t.
My thesis here, though, is that, contrary to that natural assumption, it is actually belief a that relates more directly to intolerance. Intolerance enforces unjust and injurious inequalities and exclusions, and so does tolerance. Belief t refers to what one believes; belief a refers to how one believes. Intolerance has to do less with what one believes than with how one believes.
The problem is not that it is hard to explain yourself to someone who believes that gardening is healthful or to someone who holds any particular belief t : that Jesus rose from the dead, that the invisible hand of the free market distributes goods with perfect efficiency, whatever.
The problem is that it is hard to explain yourself to someone who, whatever the person believes, believes it in a certain way, namely faithfully.
Certainly, what one believes can contribute to intolerance. My emphasis here, though, is on the much greater contribution to intolerance of how the agent of intolerance believes.
Bettering belief a how one believes is at least as complex a project as bettering belief t what one believes. Belief t -bettering is widely recognized as a project , and people very often deliberately choose a strategy or strategies for managing the complexity of belief t -bettering.
Science, for example, purports to be methodical in its selection of better belief t and its rejection of worse beliefs t.
Constitutional governments and certain religious communities claim to have authoritative texts that guide selection of sound belief t in preference to unsound.
People are often deliberate in choosing a strategy for belief t -bettering, but seldom as deliberate in pursuit of belief a -bettering. Six years later, the political winds having shifted, Krylenko was executed as an enemy of the people.
It is not enough to have gay marriage for gays. Everything must be gayed. There must be shock brigades of gay duck-hunters honking out the party line deep in the backwoods of the proletariat.
Leonard Bernstein stuck his tongue in my mouth long story. Such a pansified culture is going nowhere. Maybe we should ban her just to be on the safe side. Charles C. Brittany Bernstein. The Editors. The U. Yet a strain of intolerance has always existed too: bigotry rooted in historical conflict and a rotating cycle of the subjugation and supremacy of competing religious traditions. These tensions were enforced by colonisation and then by Partition; divisions encouraged to cement power.
Occasional outbursts of horrific communal violence have punctuated the Subcontinent since it was carved up at the end of the British Empire. Indeed, India and Pakistan were born amidst bloody Hindu-Muslim riots in that left an estimated 1 million people dead. Today, this thread of intolerance — not geographically defined but woven throughout society — is allowed to fester and grow, by governments in all three countries, either through deliberate choice or a failure to take decisive action.
The authorities in India, Pakistan or Bangladesh do not create this intolerance or violence, but they allow it to exist, occasionally cultivating it for their own ends, or tacitly encouraging it by being too afraid to stand up and say: no more. On the 68th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, David Baresch's powerful account of visiting the sites shows that the past is not forgotten.
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