4.2 (In)tolerance

Prior to this lesson, I always thought that tolerance just meant the permissiveness or acceptance of ideas/things/people even if you disagree with them, and intolerance meant you didn’t accept these different ideas. However, this distinction between acceptance and tolerance is very important, especially in the context of religion. I had not really thought of it until reading Jakobsen and Pellegrini’s argument about tolerance not allowing freedom or equality. They made a great observation that tolerance creates an “us-them relation” in which one group of people is just tolerated by another group, perpetuating discrimination or even segregation in society. This leads to a divide between people that furthers the inequality that “tolerated” groups struggle with. While it is better than hatred, tolerance isn’t sufficient enough to combat discrimination and so acceptance as an “us” relation rather than an “us-them relation” should be the goal to allow for true equality.