This is sort of a reblog. 
This cracks me up. Really busts my buttons.
People who do not believe one word of scripture, who pretend to lecture they who believe every word of it, as if the unbelievers are PhD’s in telling believers they are doing Christianity all wrong. Yikes.
They who know nothing of God’s laws, statutes, ordinances, covenants, precepts, edicts, judgments, commands, and most importantly grace………..sit in judgment of believers as if we are some type of monkey who does not know how to turn a leaf on a book. Strange I tell ya.
And I got news for you. The so-called doctors of the law……..to whom, and through whom the law was given, were a few doughnuts short in the box of understanding WHY the law was given in the first place.
Imagine a young punk who just learned the alphabet………now lecturing an English professor on the improper use of ending a sentence in a preposition. Ouch kid. You may want to put a few years of learning and context in your life before you strut your foolishness. (continued here)
In response to someone who does not believe in Christianity, I commented on the post. That commenter dragged “tolerance” into the discussion.
Here is the bulk of my comment.
Toleration is not the subject of this post. Before I quit my apostate ways and decided I had made a dumb mistake, I became a Conservative. When I took the time to listen to the Democrat Liberal news media, I often found myself torn between grimacing in disgust and laughter. For some reason the talking heads always felt more qualified than Conservatives to tell Conservatives what to do. If only Conservatives would do such and such they would be much better Conservatives. It’s silly! Any Conservative dumb enough to go to Democrat Liberals for advice is not a Conservative; he or she is a Democrat Liberal (or a RINO).
Similarly, no Christian in his right mind is going to go to an unbeliever WHO HAS REJECTED Christianity for advice on how to be a Christian. Because that person is not a Christian, he or she will not be filled with the Holy Spirit. That person has rejected Jesus and the Holy Spirit. So what would be the point? Without God’s help, we cannot understand. Until we ask for understanding in Jesus’ name, we cannot understand. We cannot be wise in the way that the Bible speaks of wisdom.
Are there people who have not heard of Jesus or read the Bible who are wise? Yes. Are some Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, and so forth wise? Are they capable of giving good advice? Yes and Yes. Will Jesus save some people who are not Christians? I think so. Jesus is God. People can know God without being Christians. Still, if one wants to be a Christian, it is best to go to someone who is a devout Christian with the gift of teaching. (from here)
When I was much younger, I earned a reputation as something of a know-it-all. If I had been a real know-it-all, I suppose I would have known better and kept my mouth shut, but I was full of myself and quite ready to give advice. After being ridiculed sufficiently, I reconsidered the matter. I decided to blog anonymously on the Internet. I also observed that the people that other people go to for advice wait to be asked.
The respect that comes with expertise requires study and patience. If we yearn to teach, we have to build the expertise. If we yearn to teach, we have to wait for people to recognize our expertise and ask to partake of it.
All will not recognize our expertise. All will not ask. If you wanted to be a Buddhist, would you go to a Catholic priest for instruction? If you wanted to be a physical therapist, would you go to a school that teaches people how to be a chiropractor. For better or worse, we seek the gifts we value from the people we respect.
Toleration is just learning to accept the fact that others have the right to make their own choices. We accept what is a lesser evil than tyranny. What is tyranny? We tyrannize our fellows when we arrogantly force them to accept our choices.
Citizen Tom 
Great message and point which begs to this question..
Why is it wiser to go to a ‘dentist’ rather than a ‘doctor’ when you have a toothache when either can give you immediate pain relief medication?
Because……….
A dentist gets to the root of the problem. ~Dental Humor
Regards and goodwill blogging.
😆
They don’t call us naked apes for nothing.
When I was still a teen, I actually read The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris. It is a kind of disappointing way to regard ones fellow man. The notion that we are all sinners does not sit well, but we at least have a purpose. Morris’ book was technically interesting, but it was pointless bravado.
I just love it when some of my favorite folks mix and mingle 🙂
Me too!
Here’s the word you’re looking for, totali-tolerance! That’s the modern definition of tolerance,one that knows perfectly well it’s really totalitarianism in disguise. Tolerance for me, but not for thee.
In truth, tolerance is a terrible word, if we are speaking of something like being kind to people, because it really just means to put up with, to endure, to suffer a fool…. 🙂
@insanitybytes22
What Democrat Liberals do to words is kind of sick. They have as you say warped the definitions of tolerance and discrimination to the point where the words don’t mean anything like what they originally meant. Can you complimenting someone these days by telling them that they have discriminating taste?
Thought this quote funny.
Lots of gulpers these days. You don’t suppose that they are totali-tolerant Democrat Liberals do you?
So basically, “A little sin in the community is worth it so that I can claim no one can tell me what to do.” This is a great bit of logical mangling in order to justify the means to another end. If you are going to say that, in this case at least, one can do evil to affect a good outcome, you have basically contradicted the J-Man in Matthew 18:9. Rather than allow you member to sin and therefore affect the whole body, pluck it out. Root out the corruption, including this notion that the lesser of two evils is somehow justified.
@Stephen
No I did not say: “A little sin in the community is worth it so that I can claim no one can tell me what to do.” The last paragraph of my post is clear enough.
If you are going to interpret Matthew 18:9 that way, then instead of worrying about other people’s sins, you may as well pluck out your eyes and chop off your hands and feet. Your chances of stopping your own self from sinning are far better than any hope that someone else might stop you.
Imagine we decided to live in a community that prohibited any possibility of sinning, any possibility! Imagine the guy in charge decided to implement Matthew 18:9, kind of like Jim Jones in Jonestown in northwestern Guyana. You don’t think that is what you are talking about? Well, it is. As a practical matter, that poison lemonade was the only way Jones could stop everyone from sinning. Of course, his murderous behavior was worse than any evil he might have stopped.
Matthew 18:9 is hyperbole. We cannot implement Matthew 18:9. We can only strive to avoid sin by focusing upon doing good deeds. In a fallen world, we cannot make perfect moral choices. We can strive to do is what is right, but sometimes we have to accept the lesser of evils.
Every day I get out of bed I know that sometime during that day, at least once, I will do something or say something I should not do or say. I could just stay in bed, but that too would be a sin and a greater evil. Jesus wants us out in the world doing His will, not hiding in our beds.
Do you really think yourself any better? Than me? Perhaps, but that’s not saying much. I know for certain you don’t have the wisdom to boss everyone around and stop them from committing any form of sin. Given such power, you would abuse it just like anybody else.
So what do we do? We protect each other’s rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. What if someone sins and they don’t violate someone else’s right to life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness? Then we allow them to suffer the consequences. After all, every sin is hurtful to the one who sins, even if it hurts no one else.
Your last paragraph is actually the issue.
“Toleration is just learning to accept the fact that others have the right to make their own choices. We accept what is a lesser evil than tyranny. What is tyranny? We tyrannize our fellows when we arrogantly force them to accept our choices.”
When Cain asked if he was his brother’s keeper, the answer from every Christian commentary spanning about 1500 years was emphatically yes. There is no such thing as personal sin or a sin that does not affect everyone. And that is the difference. Liberals NEED to believe that their chosen lifestyles do not affect anyone because otherwise they cannot justify it. Your arguments for gun rights, ironically, mirror almost exactly the argument for gay marriage: we don’t harm anyone and we have the right to feel happy.
Yes, Matthew 18:9 is extreme. It was a rhetorical device similar to the phrase “seven times seventy.” Only the liberal bean counters take either verse to their literal extremes. They need to in order to reject the moral imperative inherent in the Gospel, an imperative that is not restricted to certain people only but the whole world. And that imperative is this: do not sin at any cost.
Evil is evil and even a little evil is still evil. And no one has the right to do evil, ever. Sure, there are areas of moral grey, but no one has the right to choose evil, ESPECIALLY if you are going to argue that our rights come Nature and Nature’s God. That would explicitly mean that God gave man the right to do what was contrary to his will and goodness, and even contrary to the very nature of man. You will argue, likely, that freedom gives man this right, but this is absolutely wrong. If man, by his freedom, was given the right to do evil, then God punishing Adam and Eve was the single most tyrannical act ever accomplished. Is it not tyrannical to punish someone for exercising their rights?
Therefore, it cannot be said that human freedom grants the right to do evil, only the ability. Since the Cain defense is no defense at all–otherwise God would have accepted it as valid, which he didn’t–then it is incumbent on society to limit man’s capacity to do evil AND encourage his responsibility to be virtuous. If we accept that people are going to do evil and allow them to do evil provided that they do it in the privacy of their homes, then you are implicitly saying that some evil is ok. You are giving evil a place to grow and thrive.
It was this logic that made gay marriage the law of the land. You liberals created the social ills we now face. Women are now permitted to murder their children because you liberals decided that she could not only redefine life, but remove another living thing to pursue happiness. These are the things that are created when you take this permissiveness towards evil to flourish. It festers like a malignant cancer until it metastasizes and then conservatives start defending it as immemorial precedent that every court should follow.
And your appeal to the fallibility of human wisdom is laughable. If I do not have the wisdom to know right from wrong, who does? How can any moral judgment be made and any law be passed for the security of the community? It is absurd to say that a person cannot perceive the objective moral law, especially if one claims any affiliation with Christianity.
The fact remains that the imperative of the laws of Nature and Nature’s God are that no evil is to be tolerated, that tolerating evil merely incubates it, and that evil once incubated gets defended as traditional values.
@Stephen
I wonder who you are arguing with. I have hardly said anything about gun rights. I also don’t support same-sex marriage. I just don’t consider it worth my trouble to stop two consenting adults from having sex.
Does what you are saying sound okay in theory? For the sake of argument, let’s say it does. Then how do you put it into practice? And no, you don’t get to assume that suddenly everyone agrees with you. You also don’t get to pretend you are God.
Mostly against your first principles. You see, if I can show how the common notions and postulates you are your philosophy from are absurd and contradictory, I can crash the house of cards.
You do reject any attempt to restrict the ownership and sale of firearms. For example, you list it here as a God-given right. https://citizentom.com/2016/09/04/where-do-the-candidates-stand-with-respect-to-our-god-given-rights-election-2016/
You say you do not support same-sex marriage but also say there is nothing you can say against two adults having sex. Do you see how allowing the latter to percolate in the culture birthed the former being a God-given right as defined by the court?
Don’t misunderstand; I don’t seek to immanentize the eschaton. Instead, I do not believe in accepting what is wrong in exchange for false security. By having a culture predicated on permitting anyone and everyone to do as they please in the privacy of their homes, you will inevitably have them crawling out and demanding the state recognize them as valid.
This is why I am incredulous when you state that immigrants must “integrate” into our culture. We honestly have no discernible culture but rather thousands of smaller cultures. Latino culture, white culture, black culture, LGBTQRSTUVWXYZ culture, and so on all, under your model, are equally valid and equally culture. So where are these immigrants to integrate themselves? I recall our last discussion on this topic basically boiled American culture down to learning English and knowing some civics stuff. If that is culture, then the bar is rather low. But I digress.
When the ancients spoke of culture, specifically Cicero in the Tuscan Disputations, they viewed it in agricultural terms. For Cicero, culture was the triumph of humanity over our inclination towards barbarism through the cultivation of the mind and soul.
This idea that all people should be allowed to think whatever wrong idea they choose AND–please note the conjunction and do not try to separate the clauses here for a straw man–advance those ideas as if they were true in spheres outside their own is absolutely suicidal.
Instead, we should be committed to the Truth. The ancients were able to discuss the Truth without their civilizations collapsing. Admitting that there is an objective Truth and that determining it is the end of human existence is not a radical proposition. What seems to be branded as radical is saying that another person can be wrong, and for that I am called a tyrant who wants to rule people’s lives. It is also the go to argument for people with no argument to back up their philosophies so I have taken to wear it as the badge of honor, having essentially won the rational debate by sending others into the throws of epistemological despair and hurling irrational accusations as they go down.
@Stephen
It is not particularly clear what you want to discuss. Is it always clear what I want? I suppose not, but your comments are all over the place.
Back up a bit. What it is you want to debate? Please frame your comment so it relevant to this post.
Simple. The proposition that we should we should accept a little evil to prevent tyranny is not only counter intuitive, but it is also evil.
@Stephen
You are, I presume, familiar with Romans 8:28. To achieve a greater good, God permits sin, not us. Go back and read Genesis 3. We live in a fallen world.
With the help of the Holy Spirit, you and I and other people can stop ourselves from sinning. We only have a limited ability to stop each other, and at some point our efforts to restrain each other become a greater evil than the sin (or supposed sin) we are trying to stop.
God works for the good and only the good. Sin is permitted by God because he is God, but where did Christ abrogate the law such that we are to tolerate evils?
The main source of dispute appears to be that you lack a belief that the Gospel has a social dimension, let alone a social imperative.
Two points.
1. I don’t believe I have the capacity to stop every evil. I don’t believe you do either. So I am not sure what you think you are proposing.
2. Nobody said the Gospel doesn’t have a social dimension. What we are debating is whether you have the right to use the government to force people to accept your version of Utopia.
1. But you do have the responsibility to limit it wherever possible.
2. I have always marveled at the propensity of you conservatives to misunderstand Sir More’s work. Perhaps because there are too many lessons in it. In any case, that may be what you are debating. I have merely debated the responsibility to avoid evil and its social dimension.
@Stephen
1. Apparently where we disagree is where our capacity to stop people from doing things they should not do ends.
2. Utopian means what it means. The fact the word comes from Sir More’s book does not change its contemporary meaning. However, you don’t like Utopian, we can just cut paste the definition.
a.of, relating to, or resembling Utopia, an idealized imaginary island described in Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516).
b. founded upon or involving idealized perfection.
c. given to impractical or unrealistic schemes of such perfection.
1. Not quite. Our capacity is greater than our willingness. You have stated you are unwilling to impose things on the personal lives of others and use capacity as an excuse. You say we cannot lest we be tyrannical, but the result of such thinking has allowed a myriad of evils to seep from the personal sphere into all areas of social life. And still you argue that something like the Gospel should be kept under the bushel basket of the personal sphere, as if such a sphere actually existed.
2. To be honest, I could accuse you of the same thinking. Your belief that free market competition and smaller–not necessarily more local–government will fix most if not all our ills is just as fanciful as my saying that positive law should reflect imperatives from the natural and divine laws.
1. I have a clear enough philosophy. It is in the Declaration of Independence. It is about protecting rights, not imposing my religious beliefs.
2. I don’t consider the free market a panacea. I just consider Socialism an alternative that doesn’t work, as history has repeated shown.
I agree with your initial observation CT, and would like to add to it. ‘Tolerance’ is certainly good when used properly, but it can be a dangerous smokescreen when isolated and having no context.
Some would say of our little ‘friend,’ (the kid who just learned the alphabet as he lectures the professor) that yes, we need to be tolerant of him. No! Nonsense should not be nurtured or rewarded. He is not a little genius, and he has no wisdom in the matter.
It is one thing to ‘know’ letters on a paper, it is quite another to put them together to form words, sentences, paragraphs, then ideas. The pretending unbeliever lecturing believers is simply trifling with the letters and has no understanding of the whole. This is not an insult, but just the facts.
So on the one hand while we can be ‘tolerant’ of unbelievers misunderstandings, we need not tolerate the pretended lecturing to us that it is WE, who do not know the alphabet, when in fact, we know He who is both Alpha and Omega.
(tkx for the heads up too, as usual, you take a sad song, and make it better………… 😉
@ColorStorm
Thanks for the use of your marvelous “song”.
Agreed, we don’t have to listen to bad advice.
When speak of tolerance, we often miss an important fact (Actually, I like the word “forbearance” better.). We tolerate things we don’t like. We don’t approve of them. We can even do our best to ignore what we tolerate. We simply put up with what we tolerate because getting rid of the things we tolerate poses a bigger problem, like tyranny.
What if I detest the color pink? I like wearing blue, and I prefer brown houses. Does that give me the right to impose my color choices on everyone else? No. I just wear blue clothing and paint my house brown and just intolerably lament and tolerate everyone else’s foolishness.
Since you wear brown fur, I guess I will forgive you. You sure you cannot dye it blue?
Great post. I would categorize it under common sense wisdom in my brain files.
Problem is some people do not file wisdom and common sense in their brain files.i
In my opinion, it is because they are too busy giving advice instead of discerning
wise common sense advice.
Regards and goodwill blogging.
Thank you.
While you are catching up on my blog, I am catching up on yours. We better be careful we don’t form a mutual admiration society.
😀
I think ‘Kindred Spirits’ might define our mutual admiration society.
Now if only we can convince another couple billion spirits to join in our society, this world might be a better place…….. or a worse place?
Time will tell.
Regards and goodwill blogging.