And while I think that's a great sentiment, isn't this part of the whole problem in the Middle East? Don't we already have a bunch of Jewish people, Islamists, Christians, etc, over there trying to "coexist"?
It's pretty hard to coexist when one group thinks dying in suicide bombings or driving planes into buildings is a glorious and righteous pursuit, and another group thinks they have biblical evidence that some chunk of land should actually be THEIRS - and they're willing to kill people to get it, and another group, whose government is regarded by western civilization as a terrorist organization, and so on and so on...
It's great to be tolerant, and preach tolerance, but really, it seems that in this world, we need to have seperate spaces where people who believe a certain way can be with similar-minded folks. We should all be tolerant of each other, but that has to be the way with EVERYBODY, not just a few. I mentioned this a while back, HERE. See item 2 there.
So there you go. In order for that to work, everybody playing the game needs to have the same level of repsect for each other's space.
2 comments:
Careful on the separate spaces thing. Although you did not intend it, it can come across a little bit like the arguments of the segregationists of the Jim Crow era.
Respect is a highly desirable value. I wish everyone shared this value. But to get respect you have to behave respectable. Some people won't do that, or won't do it enough to be tolerable.
So people end up having to protect themselves by rendering the dangerously disrespectful folks impotent. The result is prisons, war, and a host of other junk we'd all rather not have to deal with. That stinks.
You are right... I was just saying that the natural result of different cultures and value systems is a separation of space. Not that it is good or bad, it just happens that way.
When these different cultures and value systems have varying views on how to interact with respect toward each other, it is hard to all live under one roof, as it were. This is also the point I made in my previous post, linked in this post, where I asserted that to GET the respect of others, you must earn it by also GIVING respect to others.
:)
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