Tolerance and respect

Daniel, from San Luis, tells me he's not going to read this blog anymore because as a Catholic he feels I'm intolerant and disrespectful, based on my earlier post entitled "Monsignor my ass". I'm taking the opportunity to expand on that issue. (By the way, Daniel, I do publish comments like yours, which articulately disagree with what I think. What I don't allow is gratuitious insults and xenophobic rubbish, like she did.)

First, what is intolerance? Intolerance is saying, "I don't like what you think/say/do, so I'm going to discriminate you, or punish you, in some way." I can't do that with the archbishop. I believe he represents an evil organization, and I think many of the beliefs he holds are detrimental to human wellbeing. All I can do about it is criticize him, using the means at my disposal, one of which is ridicule. Any sensible member of any religion knows there are billions of people in the world who consider his or her religious beliefs false, ridiculous, absurd, or even supernaturally harmful. This doesn't mean those people are intolerant. I would have coffee or dinner with the archbishop any time and I'm sure we could get along fine, just as I get along with people of the most diverse beliefs in my daily life, as long as the archbishop refrains from telling me I'm going to hell because I'm a filthy unrepentant atheist.

Then, what is respect? More importantly, why do religious beliefs and to what extent do they deserve respect? (H. L. Mencken famously said, " We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.") My idea of this is that respect is for people, not for ideas. You respect a person when you talk to them using the proper words and not insults, acknowledging their opinions, and accepting that they have different ideas even if you don't like them. Ideas are not people! They can't feel pain when attacked! If you bring to a table the idea that it's OK to burn people alive to punish them for heresy, or that Jews are an inferior race, or that women should be locked up in their homes and be content with being loyal sexual objects for their husbands, your idea will be called horrible things, torn to pieces and exposed as discriminatory, barbaric, medieval, and utterly damnable. But if you're dealing with tolerant subjects, they'll attack your idea, not you. You will be attacked or forcefully restrained or expelled only if you actually try to enforce your idea.

I respect archbishop José Luis Mollaghan. I don't respect his religion, and I shouldn't, because it's been the source of a lot of suffering and continues to be, in my opinion, a force against positive change and even for death in many parts of the world. Above that, it's a religion whose leaders treat me and many of my compatriots as second-class people, and if they were in power, they'd most surely also make me a second-class citizen. I don't like the fact that the Vatican has a spokesman telling me and my compatriots that being a good Argentinian and a patriot is somehow linked to being a faithful Catholic. I don't like how assumes he speaks for all of us and in behalf of all of us. I find the whole Christian theology thing a huge lump of incoherent nonsense.

So that's my personal opinion, and you can disagree or not, but you can't take away my right to say it in this public, but explicitly personal, account of my life. If archbishop Mollaghan has a blog, a personal webpage, a diary, or a self-edited paper, he's also free to voice his beliefs there — but I say he shouldn't be allowed to do it in a public patriotic holiday, as if he were an authority that represents us, the people. We didn't elect him, it was some old guy in the Vatican who did. He's not monsignor, "my lord", to me. He has enough influence to be quoted in independent media, and he has his own place as well — let him speak in church.