In the early spring of 2009, the Equality Bill was introduced into Britain’s House of Commons. It is still churning its way through Parliament, now in the House of Lords. Anyone who wants to read the latest version of the bill, will find it quite in line with the usual chilling legally enforced advance of secularism. It is not really about equality, or even tolerance. Rather, it is simply a front door effort to enforce the secular agenda upon an already almost completely secularized Britain.

While not surprising, the Equality Bill is instructive as an example of what surely will be coming down the legislative pike for Americans in the clash between secular and Christian culture. Whatever its other merits, the goal of a large part of the bill is to force Brits to accept what Christians morally reject. For example, a church that rejects homosexuality will be forced to hire active homosexuals on its staff. Any public or private criticism of any sexual practice could land you in jail. "Tolerate—or Else!"

Pope Benedict XVI warned Britain that the Equality Bill violates natural law by demanding the acceptance of intrinsically immoral sexual practices. While a commitment to equality of opportunity is laudable, "the effect of some of the legislation [in the bill] designed to achieve this goal has been to impose unjust limitations on the freedom of religious communities to act in accordance with their beliefs." In the name of equality, the bill could force churches to employ active gays and transsexuals.

Britain’s Anglican Archbishop of York, Dr. John Sentamu, has also had enough. In his recent City of Peace Lecture, he stated "I want to persuade you why tolerance, as we experience it in Britain today is not enough as the core value on which to base our lives in civil society. In fact, I will go further, arguing that tolerance as it is practised in England today, is in danger of becoming a negative virtue, resulting in narrowness and in some cases, in oppression…. We…need to open our eyes to see what is actually happening in our society and in our cities today in the name of tolerance and the negative impact this is having."

The archbishop rightly rejects the pitchfork of tolerance being used primarily to drive religion from the public square. Furthermore, society simply can’t tolerate everything. "Morally, if we don't have any common vision or values, we can't operate effectively either as individuals or as a society." He concludes that "Using tolerance as [the] sole principle to determine our political and civil life doesn't work."

That’s an understatement. Contrary to what we’ve been repeatedly told, tolerance isn’t a virtue. It’s not even good enough to be a vice (although it resembles sloth, the resolution to be entirely irresolute about good and evil). The problem with enshrining tolerance as a moral principle is seen by the contradictory result of trying to impose it by force.

Here, we don’t even need to point to the secular effort to compel churches to accept the new secular sexual morality, or the even wider political agenda of driving religion out of the public square and into the privatized ghetto of harmless, subjective belief. Shudder at the following reported by Hal G. P. Colebatch of The Australian.

"In September 2006, a 14-year-old schoolgirl, Codie Stott, asked a teacher if she could sit with another group to do a science project as all the girls with her spoke only Urdu. The teacher's first response, according to Stott, was to scream at her: ‘It's racist, you're going to get done by the police!’ Upset and terrified, the schoolgirl went outside to calm down. The teacher called the police and a few days later, presumably after officialdom had thought the matter over, she was arrested and taken to a police station, where she was fingerprinted and photographed. According to her mother, she was placed in a bare cell for 3 1/2 hours. She was questioned on suspicion of committing a racial public order offence and then released without charge. The school was said to be investigating what further action to take, not against the teacher, but against Stott. Headmaster Anthony Edkins reportedly said: ‘An allegation of a serious nature was made concerning a racially motivated remark. We aim to ensure a caring and tolerant attitude towards pupils of all ethnic backgrounds and will not stand for racism in any form.’"

Their treatment of Codie Stott certainly seems caring and tolerant to me. After all, she was only in a bare cell for 3 1/2 hours—much less time than she might have gotten in the Soviet Union.

So, to return to the problem, the reason increasing state-sponsored thuggery is ironically being used to enforce tolerance is because tolerance itself is neither a virtue nor a political or moral principle. As it is now understood, it is merely a high-sounding means for secularists to impose their particular views by force on others, including the Muslims in Britain speaking Urdu. But these very Muslims will be the ones the tolerance police go after soon, knocking on the door of their mosques to inquire what they are doing to comply with mandated affirmation and hiring of transgendered employees. As Colebatch also reported, at one school Muslim and Christian parents objected to their children "being given books advocating same-sex marriage and adoption"…and "not only had their objections ignored but have been threatened with prosecution if they withdraw their children."

Dinesh D’Souza vs John Loftus Debate

From an atheist blog following the debate:

I will say this, with all due respect to Loftus and the fact that his voice was shot from a cold and his sinuses sounded like they were clogged tight, we atheists were trounced by D’Souza. I left with my head down and tail between my legs.

I would have to say that if I were on the fence, and I didn’t check D’Souza’s “facts”, I would drift toward the Christian camp. I’m not saying as an atheist I would be swayed by D’Souza. I’m saying as a non-commited member of society, given the two sides, Christianity stole the show for sure.

Jeremy Witteveen

Watch Debate:
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=B1C51E2581647EEB

Read more:
http://cafewitteveen.wordpress.com/2010/02/10/dinesh-dsouza-vs-john-loftus-debate

Campaigners to launch protest over Pope's UK visit after he condemns Harman equality drive as 'violation of natural law'

"The Pope declared that some recent equality legislation has acted 'to impose unjust limitations on the freedom of religious communities to act in accordance with their beliefs'.

He added: 'In some respects it actually violates the natural law upon which the equality of all human beings is grounded and by which it is guaranteed.'"

dailymail.co.uk

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1247706/Pope-faces-UK-protest-condemning-Harriet-Harman-equality-drive.html

The Bill of Rights and Tolerance

The First Amendment states: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

This is, more or less, a statement of political tolerance in the original and correct sense: a limitation on what government can and should do. The government is not the Church; therefore, it should not make any law (like Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy) that enforces ecclesiastical unity by political force. The founders were not affirming religious subjectivism, but limiting the federal government’s power to interfere in religious matters. The government must tolerate religious pluralism even though religious uniformity might make things a lot easier on the state.

In regard to tolerating free speech and a free press, the point is somewhat different. The federal government must tolerate political dissent for two reasons. First, the founders were quite aware that political tyrants quash opposition through control of speech and the press, and they had a very healthy fear of our federal government, as with any government run by mere human beings, being tempted to tyranny. Second, the attempt by the state to stop all false and calumnious speech in the name of truth would end up in creating a totalitarian thought police worse than lies, confusions, and errors it attempted to remove or prevent. But again, this toleration of speech and press, along with assembly and petition, was a political principle limiting the federal government’s power, not a moral principle to be enforced by the federal government with all its powers.

The differences between the two are of the greatest importance. There is the greatest of differences between a federal government that tolerates religious pluralism as a matter of political expediency, and one that actively forces religious bodies to water down their theological beliefs so that they don’t rub against anyone else’s theological beliefs. There is the greatest of differences between a government that tolerates political dissent in speech and in the press, and one that actively enforces and promotes moral diversity to the point of eliminating any notion of moral perversity.

Dr. Benjamin Wiker

Britain's Archbishop of York Decries The Limits of Tolerance in His City of Peace Lecture

Today, toleration is regarded, by a large number of people, as a negative rather than a positive virtue although this is not often openly admitted. Tolerance has become a restricting quality – a grudging 'putting up - with' rather that a positive means of building a caring, peaceful society.

The problem with this is that it does not give us the means of voicing and dealing constructively with differences.

We give people private space but do not encourage public discussion and debate on key areas which are seen as 'difficult' such as religion, immigration, the optimum funding for public services. In consequence, these areas of difference are thrust into the margins where they do not go away but instead, tend to fester.

http://www.archbishopofyork.org/2744

Wolfhart Pannenberg exhorts church leaders in his notable essay: How to Think About Secularism

"Secularists are right to expose irrationality, fanaticism, and intolerance when they appear in the name of religion, even if the secularists sometimes do so in order to discredit religion as such. Authentic Christian teaching appropriates all that is valid in the secularist culture, while laying claim to, and focusing attention upon, the truth that the secularist spirit no longer deems worthy of attention. Christians can confidently do this because they know that, just as Christian doctrines were once challenged in the name of reason and a rational approach to truth, so today secularism itself has become irrational. In our contemporary circumstance, there is high promise in renewing the classical alliance between Christian faith and reason.

Christians who lay claim to reason, however, must be ready to accept criticism, and to cultivate an ethos of self-criticism within their own communities. Traditional doctrines and forms of spirituality, along with the Bible itself, are not exempt from critical inquiry. Such inquiry is required by the alliance of faith and reason. Christian confidence in the truth of God and His revelation should be vigorous enough to assume that truth will not succumb to any findings of critical inquiry. Of course there are prejudiced and distorted forms of criticism that presuppose a secularist worldview that is inescapably hostile to Christian faith. For critical inquiry to flourish, such false criticisms must be firmly exposed and resisted. How to distinguish between critical inquiry and criticism that has been poisoned by the presuppositions of secularism is a subject for another essay. Suffice it to say that it can be done and it must be done. My argument is that, if we think it is necessary to protect divinely revealed truth from critical inquiry, we are in fact displaying our unbelief. Such inquiry, while it may at times pose difficulties, will finally enhance the splendor of the truth of God. Confidence in that truth—a confidence exhibited in proclamation and life—is the only adequate and worthy response to the challenge of secularism."

First Things

http://www.firstthings.com/article/2007/10/002-how-to-think-about-secularism-39

Noted social critic Herbert London opens his latest book with a simple statement: "Belief matters." Every bit a cri de coeur, in little more than 100 pages Mr. London goes on to show how Americans, to the contrary, have come to embrace secularism - and do so at their peril.

In a chapter titled "Secularism: America's New Religion," he writes: "So much of American society has been constructed on the basis of both the belief in the divine and the organizational religion that it entails that secularism threatens to leave America with a 'naked public square,' to borrow a phrase from Father Richard Neuhaus. Secularists justify their anti-religious sentiments by citing concerns about the impending 'theocracy' of the Religious Right. This is odd, because in many respects secularism is itself not unlike a religion. It is grounded in several ideas that are valued by its adherents as deeply and unquestioningly as any spiritual creed."

The Washington Times

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