Tolerance

Everyone can have his or her own opinions, beliefs, and preferences. God allows this through free will. That does not mean that all opinions, beliefs, or preferences are True. He allows everyone to “take their own journey” to the path of Truth and freedom, but not everyone is following the right path (Christians and non-Christians alike).

The world speaks of tolerance and preaches acceptance of whatever new ideas, views, beliefs, attitudes, or actions come up. They talk about “my choice”, “my decision”, or “my business” – like truth is relative and we need to tolerate and even support bad decisions. We cannot tolerate them and we should not support them. This is just another heresy that is prosperous in the “developed world”.

Tolerance leads to uncontrolled immorality. When people feel “accepted”, they are more likely to start, continue, or even worsen the behavior. We accepted teenagers having sex by passing out condoms at school and now seventy percent of nineteen year-olds¹ have engaged in this behavior. We accepted sex before marriage and now 79% percent of all teenage births are to unmarried women compared to only 13% in 1950². The sad thing is the article where I found this statistic has the secular and distorted view of them. The writer considered it a good trend that the teen birthrate has fallen from 82% in 1950 to 49% today but did not add in the correlation about the unwed mothers. The reason the birthrate has fallen in teens is because very few teens marry today and those that do usually do not have children right away and because contraceptive use and abortion has skyrocketed when compared to 1950 (when the pill had not been created and abortion was still illegal). The whole world is devaluing marriage. People have also accepted homosexuality beginning in the 1970s and now they have even gone so far as to support and protect their right to marry! We now tolerate divorce, which has only lead to frivolous marriage – I will talk more about this in a series this summer.

The world supported and even fought for “birth control” – and I will talk about where that led in my coming series. They also supported and fought for women leaving the home so they could feel free to be a wage slave.

The world thinks that tolerance is progressive. They think we are more civilized now that we tolerate everyone than when the Catholic missionaries went out preaching the good news to evangelize the world. But all this tolerance has only led us down the path to where we are today – a world full of problems. The only way to get back is to stop tolerating immortality. As Chesterton said, "Tolerance is the virtue of a man without convictions."



¹ Facts on American Teens’ Sexual and Reproductive Health
² Teen Pregnancy: Trends and Lessons Learned