by Zina Leone

Created on: September 09, 2009   Last Updated: September 10, 2009

We're living in an age where we're supposed to be tolerant, not only of other faiths, but of everyone and everything. Yet, if you look around, all you seem to see is a lot of fighting and protesting. If someone says or does something that goes against someone else's point of view there's always trouble. Where's the tolerance? The problem is, everyone seems to expect everyone else to be tolerant of their values and beliefs, but they don't think they have to be tolerant back. Maybe this is because when you truly believe in something, it's a little hard to accept anything that goes against that belief.

This sounds perfectly logical to me. When you believe in something, you stand up for it. There are always going to be people who disagree. All tolerance seems to be doing is making people afraid to stand up for anything for fear of offending someone. This is not right. If we have to be that careful not to offend anyone pretty soon we're all going to have to start keeping our opinions and beliefs to ourselves because, the fact is, with so many different faiths and beliefs someone's always going to be offended.

There was a time when people could get into healthy discussions, express their own opinions, and even disagree without anyone getting themselves into an uproar. Disagreeing was never that big of a deal because everyone accepted the fact that people have a right to their own opinions and beliefs. This is called respect. There's a huge difference between respect and tolerance. Respect means allowing another person the right to be who they are and believe what they want without interfering or condemning. Tolerance means not only showing sympathy for other beliefs, but indulging them, even if they conflict with your own.

Mirriam-Webster Dictionary:

"Respect:" To refrain from interfering with <please respect their privacy>

"Tolerance:" Sympathy or indulgence for beliefs or practices differing from or conflicting with one's own.

It seems to me the only way for tolerance to work is for everyone to compromise what they believe in. This creates a big problem because when you do that there's no way you can stand up for your own beliefs. How can you stand up for what you believe in while accepting what everyone else believes in too? This is exactly what's happening in our society today. While trying to be tolerant, people are still trying to hold onto their own beliefs, not realizing it's impossible.

Why is it that in the pursuit of change we toss out things that have worked in the past like just having respect for one another? Somehow, we seem to have been led to believe it's possible to be tolerant of everything and still get along. All we have to do is look around us and we can see this is not so. No one should ever have to compromise their faith, no matter what it is. Everyone has the right to stand up for what they believe and if that means not tolerating what someone else believes, so be it. As long as we respect each other's rights to our own opinions and beliefs, it's far more likely we'll all get along.

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