Whiteheadian Witticisms: Tolerance and Religion
By Tripp Fuller • Jun 12th, 2008 • Category: quotesWhitehead says, “There is no tolerance unless there is something to tolerate, and that, in practice, is likely to mean something in which most people would consider intolerable.”
A dinner guest responds by asking, “Do you suppose that the persecuting temper is peculiar to religions, or only to some religions?”
Whitehead responds by saying, “Religion carries two sorts of people in two entirely opposite directions, the mild and gentle people it carries towards mercy and justice; the persecuting people it carries into fiendish sadistic cruelty. Mind you, though this may seem to justify the eighteenth-century Age of Reason in its contention that religion is nothing but an organized, gigantic fraud and a curse to the human race, nothing could be more farther than the truth. It possess these two aspects, the evil one of the two appealing to people capable of naive hatred; but what is actually happening is that when you get natures stirred to their depths over questions which they feel to be overwhelmingly vital, you get the bad stirred up in them as well as the good; the mud as well as the water. It doesn’t seem to matter much which sect you have, for both types occur in all sects.”
Tripp Fuller is married to an awesome lady Alecia and has a handsome little baby boy named Elgin Thomas (aka E.T.) and Pebbles, the Schnoodle. He and Alecia are both graduates of Campbell University (where they met), the Divinity School of Wake Forest University and ordained ministers. He is working on his PhD in Philosophy of Religion and Theology at Claremont Graduate University. A few other things he digs are books, cigars, pipes, Shaq, guitar, pirates, fishing, the Counting Crows, and good conversations about Religion and Politics. The podcast is the most time consuming hobby he has ever had besides reading and blogging through Wolfhart Pannenberg's 3 volume systematic theology. Follow Tripp on Twitter | Tripp on Facebook
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