Is This What They Call “Tolerance?”

In today’s secularized culture, we often hear people (particularly leftist humanists) demand what they call “tolerance.” Christians are often accused by these humanists of being “intolerant.” I have heard the accusation of “intolerance” against AiG and what we teach many times over the years.  However, what I have found is that usually those who call for what they call “tolerance” are extremely intolerant of the absolutes of Christianity. What they mean by “tolerance” is often a tolerance of all views that agree with theirs, but an intolerance of views that disagree with theirs.

Two interesting news items I read this week seem to illustrate this. It is also a sign of our increasingly secularized culture, with its growing anti-Christian sentiment.

The first item comes from the United Kingdom.

Homosexual couples have besieged a Christian-run guesthouse with demands for double rooms, seemingly in a bid to destroy the business.

It follows last week’s high profile court ruling ordering Peter and Hazelmary Bull to pay £3,600 in damages to a homosexual couple who sued because double rooms were restricted to married couples.

Mrs Bull, 66, has also received abusive and menacing phone calls, but she cannot ignore the phone because her 71-year-old husband has been critically ill in hospital. . . .

Even the hospital has had to deal with nuisance phone calls, leading staff to operate a password system for friends and family to enquire after Mr Bull’s health. . . .

“I’m not a prude, but I’ve been shocked and hurt by the language used. One told me I was an abomination and would go straight to hell.

“I couldn’t even switch the phone off in case the hospital needed me. I had one man call, saying he and his gay partner wanted a room.

“I explained we were closed until Easter and got a load of bad language before he hung up. While he was ranting and raving, I just wanted to ring the hospital.

You can read the entire article at this link.

The second item comes from the USA.

Jerry Coyne is a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago. He is an ardent atheist and known for his intolerance of not just biblical creationists, but anyone who believes there is an intelligence behind life. Here is a news item about this anti-God intolerant atheist.

Prominent evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne recently has made this remarkable assertion:

... adherence to ID (which, after all, claims to be a nonreligious theory) should be absolute grounds for not hiring a science professor.

Notwithstanding Coyne's absolute assertion that scientists who "adhere" to ID are unemployable, Coyne actually claims that his professional exclusion of scientists who endorse ID is not anti-religious bigotry:

... I abhor discrimination against hiring simply because of someone's religion ...

Yet Coyne has called for the resignation of Dr. Francis Collins, an esteemed scientist who is the director of the National Institutes of Health and who is an opponent of ID. Coyne demands Collins' resignation merely because Collins has publicly expressed his Christian views.

Coyne:

Collins gets away with this kind of stuff [i.e. speaking publicly about the compatibility between science and his belief in God] only because, in America, Christianity is a socially sanctioned superstition. He's the chief government scientist, but he won't stop conflating science and faith. He had his chance, and he blew it. He should step down.

What "chance" did Collins "blow"? Collins blew his chance to pass the atheist litmus test by keeping his mouth shut about his belief in God. Coyne's religious discrimination is explicit and undeniable.

And Coyne goes further. He asserts that mere adherence to ID, whether held by a scientist with religious views or by a scientist with no religious views, absolutely precludes employment in science. Note that Coyne's blacklist extends to all areas of science, not just to evolutionary biology or even to biology. Coynes' blacklist would apply to oceanographers and chemists and meteorologists as well. Coyne proposes a blacklist of ID scientists from all employment in science.

By the way, Collins is a theistic evolutionist.  Coyne is even intolerant of those who believe in God and evolution—he just won’t tolerate anyone who believes an intelligence (regardless of “who” the intelligence is) of any sort that has something to do with life.

You can read the rest of this article at this link.

Thanks for stopping by and thanks for praying,

Ken