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Exclusivity vs Intolerance?

shunyadragon

shunyadragon
Premium Member
Modern liberal democracy is itself, in a sense, "exclusivist". Liberal democrats believe, with deep conviction that constitutional democracies with limited governments and recognition of human rights, are superior to authoritarian regimes. Yet it is paradoxically the most tolerant political philosophy that humankind has so far conceived, despite believing in its own fundamental moral supremacy.

This would be the view of an unrealistic anarchist, and it is a misuse of the concept of "exclusivism"

Liberal democracy by its definition and nature is not "exclusivist."
Would you prefer the authoritarian regime over a liberal democracy that allows and encourages a diversity of competitive views?

There is also the problem with New Testament views that the secular world, and other religious beliefs were in control of Satan and evil influence, which results in the tribalism of us, "exclusivism," versus ALL of them that remained in control of Satan and demonic influence until in one way or another the return of Christ cleanses the world of those that are under the Demonic .influence, and restores the true Kingdom of God and saves the faithful. It can be easily interpreted that this was supposed to take place in one generation of the death of Jesus.

There is also the tribal view of strong opposition to 'other' religions and cultures in the Old Testament calling them pagan, and idol worshipers. This view continued in one way or another through our history up until today in Christianity.
 
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wellwisher

Well-Known Member
Exclusivity versus tolerance comes down to practical objectivity versus appeasing feelings.

As an example, say a child believes the moon was made of cheese and was insistent on this claim. I might point out NASA data, that has been collected, and how cheese is made, to show how this cannot be the case. It may appear to him like I am being pig headed and an establishment exclusive.

He thinks I am being a prude in favor of majority thinking. I can read his heart and realize he is just learning to be an independent thinker, so in spite of the facts in my favor, I try to tolerate his belief and encourage him to develop his ideas. I am helping his heart, but not his mind, since his heart is dominating his mind, to where his reason is cut off.

Belief in an objective fact, does not need tolerance, since neither tolerance or intolerance will change the fact one way or the other. Whether you tolerate the fact that fire will burn your hand does no change the fact. Tolerance is only needed for subjectivity. Tolerance is about appeasing feelings and has little to do with objective fact and logic.

What this all comes down to his how memory is written in the human brain and how we induce our memory. Different results can appear depending on the memory induction sequence..

When memory is written to the cerebral matter emotional tags are added to sensory input. Our memory is composed of sensory content and emotional tags. Our strongest memories have the strongest emotional tagging; marriage, birth of a child, graduation, tragedy, etc.,

This natural schema is useful to the animal since when a stimulus triggers previous memory, the animal can react to the feeling tag, without having to having to think it through. If he sees a food object that tasted good before, his memory will induce the same nice feeling, and he will eat without having to think.

Since memory is composed of sensory content and feeling, we can induce our memory from either side; thinking about content or thinking about the feeling. Each path will trigger a different memory grid.

For example, say I asked you to list your favorite foods. The way you do that is think about the feeling of yummy mouth watering food and see that memories are triggered. The grid will be fill with food items with all the same feelings. There are not a lot of feelings, so the same feelings are recycled and used many times.

On the other hand, say I asked you to think of heathy foods in the sense of what science defines as food that is good for the human body, whether it tastes good or not. This request is not based on feeling first but content before feeling. A new memory list will appear that has a variety of feeling tags. Some are yucky, some are tolerable, and some are yummy.

If you were asked to reason out a good meal, from each of the two data grids, since the data set is different for each, the conclusions will be different. The latter will lead to a more objective conclusion since it started without emotions and ends with a spectrum of emotions. The former will be more subjective, since the data is based on a single emotion.

In my example of the moon made of cheese, the young man may be using a feeling induction connected to hunger, to help drive him in terms of the development of his thesis. His memory is induced a certain way. So even if his logic is consistent for that data set, the data base was biased by the emotion first. I may tolerate his emotion first data, so he can learn. He shows a skillful use of reason with data.

Science is about not using emotions, first. This allows neural data to appear that will still have emotional tags, but the feelings will be all over the place; balanced. There is less need to appease this, since not all the feelings will require pandering. If you use only one or two feelings you may need pandering; tolerance.

Donald Trump and the left is a good example of singular feelings inducing a feeling based memory grid. The grid is induced by hate. Since the hate tag is recycled for many things, the hate first induction results in hate for Trump as well as the data grid being occupied by every memory with a hate tag, even if these do not being to Trump. He is now Hilter, the KKK, a racist and anything else with a hate tag. This irrationality requires too much pandering, which fake news accommodates.

Pandering and tolerance for emotional thinking should only be done if there is hope of objectivity in the future. If this is not the case, pandering can be harmful to the emotional thinker.
 
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David T

Well-Known Member
Premium Member
I think you’ve done a very job of exploring the differences between exclusivity and intolerance with reference to history. While I agree with the distinction I think there is still some correlation between the two concepts. I personally find it easy to relate to people of different Faiths knowing what we share in common. If I believed their beliefs were fundamentally in error then it would be much more difficult.
Yes well put.
We are really talking about how group perceptions can change. We can hold an exclusive view and be tollerant, but our little pea brains over time seem to want to shift that to being intollerant. The inverse we can be inclusive, and over time that too can become intollerant. Right now american politics is splitting out like that.

Dylan hits that in "its alright ma" where "we are told to not hate but hatred." kind of points to the absurdity. I included a larger swath of lyrics since i really like this song!

"As some warn victory, some downfall
Private reasons great or small
Can be seen in the eyes of those that call
To make all that should be killed to crawl
While others say don't hate nothing at all
Except hatred

Disillusioned words like bullets bark
As human gods aim for their mark
Made everything from toy guns that spark
To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark
It's easy to see without looking too far
That not much is really sacred
 

GoodbyeDave

Well-Known Member
… But they actually weren't very tolerant at all of people who didn't want to threaten the rights of believers in the Roman state creed to sacrifice animals and worship the Divine Caesar but who personally voiced their "unbelief" in the traditional gods. In the 3rd century, the Neoplatonist philosopher Porphyry wrote about this: How can people not be in every way impious and atheistic who have apostatized from the customs of our ancestors through which every nation and city is sustained? ...
The Romans did not persecute the Jews, or require them to sacrifice. The point the Porphyry was making was that the Christians had rejected the gods of their ancestors, but the Jews had not. If the Christians wanted to worship the god of the Jews, then they should have become Jews.

The greatest mistake that a tolerant society can make is to tolerate the intolerant. If the German government had crushed the Nazis in the 1920s, what a world of suffering would have been prevented! The Romans were only too right in perceiving the threat posed by the Christians, and much wiser than the Weimar government.
 

Vouthon

Dominus Deus tuus ignis consumens est
Staff member
Premium Member
The Romans did not persecute the Jews

Untrue.

In the very early days of the empire, circa early first century, Jews by birth were a distrusted minority but deemed an "ancestral religion". (That's how highly the ancient Greeks and Romans valued adherence to inherited norms.) As the scholar Frend notes, Jews were not persecuted to the same degree as Christians: "because they followed their own Jewish ceremonial law, and their religion was legitimized by its ancestral nature".

Even back then, Sejanus - who ruled the empire on behalf of Tiberius later in his reign and controlled the Praetorian Guard - was vociferously anti-Jewish:


Sejanus - Wikipedia


Lucius Aelius Sejanus - alternatively spelled Seianus - (June 3, 20 BC – October 18, AD 31), commonly known as Sejanus(/sɪˈdʒeɪnəs/),[1] was an ambitious soldier, friend and confidant of the Roman Emperor Tiberius.

When Tiberius withdrew to Capri in AD 26, Sejanus was left in control of the administration of the empire. For a time the most influential and feared citizen of Rome...


On his anti-Jewish policies, Philo claimed that Sejanus planned to annihilate the Jewish people and implemented an explicitly anti-Judaic environment:


Philo, Legatio 24, 159-161

"Matters in Italy became troublesome when Sejanus was organizing his onslaughts. For Tiberius knew the truth, he knew at once after Sejanus' death that the accusations made against the Jewish inhabitants of Rome were false slanders, invented by him because he wished to make away with the nation, knowing that it would take the sole or the principal part in opposing his unholy plots and actions, and would defend the emperor when in danger of becoming the victim of treachery.

Eusebius, almost quoting Philo and writing in the 4th century, concurred:


Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History ii, V.

"...Sejanus, who was then in great favor with Tiberius, had made every effort to destroy the whole nation of the Jews from the foundation, and that in Pontius Pilate under whom the crimes were committed against our Savior, having attempted everything contrary to what was lawful among the Jews respecting the Temple at Jerusalem, which was then yet standing, excited them to the greatest tumults."

He appointed Pilate as prefect of Judea, the only Jewish province in the Empire, to orchestrate the same anti-Jewish agenda:


Pontius Pilate | Biography, Facts, & Death


Pontius Pilate was appointed prefect of Judaea through the intervention of Sejanus, a favourite of the Roman emperor Tiberius. (That his title was prefect is confirmed by an inscription from Caesarea in ancient Palestine.)

Protected by Sejanus, Pilate incurred the enmity of Jews in Roman-occupied Palestine by insulting their religious sensibilities, as when he hung worship images of the emperor throughout Jerusalem and had coins bearing pagan religious symbols minted. After Sejanus’s fall (31 CE), Pilate was exposed to sharper criticism from certain Jews, who may have capitalized on his vulnerability to obtain a legal death sentence on Jesus (John 19:12)

Christians were predominantly native-born pagan Romans renouncing their ancestral faith and gods, as we both agree.

However, the Roman senate even executed one of its leading consuls (and nephew of the emperor Vespasian) under Domitian's reign, one Titus Flavius Clemens in 95 CE, for converting to Judaism and thereby denying the gods of the Roman pantheon and persecuted many others for the same "crime". As the Roman historian Cassius Dio explains in his Roman History (211-233):

Cassius Dio — Epitome of Book 67


And the same year Domitian slew, along with many others, Flavius Clemens the consul, although he was a cousin and had to wife Flavia Domitilla, who was also a relative of the emperor's. The charge brought against them both was that of atheism, a charge on which many others who drifted into Jewish ways were condemned. Some of these were put to death, and the rest were at least deprived of their property. Domitilla was merely banished to Pandateria. But Glabrio, who had been Trajan's colleague in the consulship, was put to death, having been accused of the same crimes as most of the others.


And by the second century, ancestral Jews were also starting to get quite severely persecuted as relations soured, especially under Hadrian:


Bar Kokhba revolt - Wikipedia


The consul Titus Flavius Clemens was condemned to death by the Roman Senate in 95 CE for, according to the Talmud, circumcising himself and converting to Judaism. The emperor Hadrian (117-138) forbade circumcision.[16] Overall, the rite of circumcision was especially execrable in Classical civilization,[16][21] also because it was the custom to spend an hour a day or so exercising nude in the gymnasium and in Roman baths, therefore Jewish men did not want to be seen in public deprived of their foreskins.[16][21]

As for the anti-circumcision law passed by Hadrian, it is considered by many to be, together with his decision to build a Roman temple upon the ruins of the Second Temple and dedicate it to Jupiter, one of the main causes of the Bar Kokhba revolt (132-135 CE), which was brutally crushed;[22] according to Cassius Dio, 580,000 Jews were killed, and 50 fortified towns and 985 villages razed.[22][23]

Hadrian's policy after the rebellion reflected an attempt to root out Judaism: he enacted a ban on circumcision,[24] all Jews were forbidden to enter Jerusalem upon pain of death, and the city was renamed Aelia Capitolina, while Judea was renamed Syria Palaestina.
Also see:

Anti-Judaism - Wikipedia

In Ancient Rome, religion was an integral part of the civil government (see Religion in ancient Rome). Beginning with the Roman Senate's declaration of the divinity of Julius Caesar on 1 January 42 BC, some Emperors were proclaimed gods on Earth, and demanded to be worshiped accordingly[2] throughout the Roman Empire. This created religious difficulties for monotheistic Jews and worshipers of Mithras, Sabazius and Early Christians.[3] Jews were prohibited by their biblical commandments from worshiping any other god than that of the Torah (see Shema, God in Judaism, Idolatry in Judaism).

The Crisis under Caligula (37-41) has been proposed as the "first open break between Rome and the Jews", even though problems were already evident during the Census of Quirinius in 6 and under Sejanus (before 31).[a]
 
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Would you accept that pagan Roman empire was significantly more tolerant than the Christian kingdoms that came after, or even its direct Christian successor state- the Byzantine Empire?

It depends how you think of tolerance.

With the Romans orthopraxy was what was important, which is easier to comply with and maintain your own system of belief. As long as you honoured their gods, you could have your own too.

With orthodoxy however, belief is what is important. You couldn't just give a quick nod of the head to Jesus and get back to your own beliefs.

At times, both were very intolerant, it was just that with orthopraxy, a more diverse range of beliefs are able to be in compliance. So orthodoxy + intolerance is a worse combination than orthopraxy + intolerance.

Also while Roman pagan culture was more amenable to a wider range of religious practice, it was a shockingly intolerant society based around fundamental inequality which justified mass slavery and saw the 'inferior' groups of society as having no intrinsic value.

With Christianity you began to get an idea that all people, or at least all Christians, had value by virtue of God's creation. With this you saw a significant decline in slavery, and a change to viewing remaining slaves as people rather than objects. Over time slavery was largely replaced by a sort of feudal type system (as Feudal systems would arise in Western Christendom also).

If you look very narrowly at acceptable "religious diversity" then the pagan systems were more tolerant. Viewing specific aspects of a society in isolation can be misleading though.

It's quite common for people to think of 'tolerant' pagans and intolerant Christians, particularly when they want to criticise Christianity. This is only possible by isolating a single variable though which hides a great deal of the reality of Roman society.
 
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