Unfaithful Words: Tolerance

Abstract

Anyone translating religious or philosophical texts of far-away cultures is painfully aware of the impossibility of the enterprise, essentially on account of the lack of terms with near-identical meaning. However, the words are only the surface: the real problem is with the different concepts they express.

The same problem reappears when we try to describe and understand these cultures. Words like religion, creed, faith, belief, prayer, worship, church, heresy, conversion, and idol are far from the neutral scholarly terms they appear to be: they all are heavily laden with features and associations that derive from the context in which these concepts evolved. These are essentially Christian concepts, and their use about other cultures is ‘Orientalism’ in Said’s sense.

‘Tolerance’ is a pertinent example. For example, Buddhism is generally considered to be an extremely tolerant religion. While this insight reflects a real feature of Buddhism, still it is not true. Buddhism is as tolerant as a deer is vegetarian. The deer does not refrain from eating flesh: it has absolutely no wish to eat, touch, or even smell meat. Buddhism simply does not have the idea that everybody should be Buddhist. The Buddha himself unambiguously expressed his opinion that it is best for people to keep their traditional rites and beliefs. Further, it seems that Buddhism is not a very special case; rather it appears that the idea that other religions should be suppressed is an innovation of the Abrahamic religions only.

There is an important lesson to be learned from this for interreligious and intercultural dialogue. Tolerance is miserably inadequate as a ground for such contacts. You ‘tolerate’ what you do not like, what you would like to annihilate, just out of some practical wisdom you restrain yourself. We do not want to be merely ‘tolerated’; we want to be accepted, esteemed, and possibly even loved—and the same holds for our partners in the dialogue.

This is anything but a light demand on most participants of the dialogue. However, unless they wholeheartedly accept that there are innumerable valid and valuable paths, their ‘interreligious dialogue’ will remain little more than an uncomfortable ceasefire between hostile powers.