Last week, I asked the question: Is it okay to intolerate Newt? The broader question is, of course,  when does  useful tolerance and broadmindedness become dysfunctional facilitation of bad practice or passive acceptance of nonsense?

I loosely defined tolerance as our ability to be fearlessly curious about everything and everyone we come up against; broadmindedness as an ability to change one’s mind when presented with compelling evidence that what one has been thinking is either wrong or based on incomplete information. I see both as essential characteristics of a life lived in partnership with God — one’s working faith — for they are our access to reality.

Furthermore, I see intolerance and narrow-mindedness as the devil*’s minions, for they weaken our grasp on reality and so our relationship with God.

One’s educational level or IQ appears to offer scant protection from their inroads. Sam Harris, the first of the New Atheists I read, as well as being the first to publish a bestseller, is working on a doctorate in neuroscience, which to me means he’s certainly mega-smart and mega-educated. Mr. Harris begins his second book, Letter to a Christian Nation, this way:  “Since the publication of my first book, The End of Faith, thousands of people have written to tell me that I am wrong not to believe in God.” Yet, when I read The End of Faith, it seemed to me that Mr. Harris was writing about what he perceived as the inherent dangers of religion, which to me is hardly the same thing as writing about not believing in God.

Indeed, from what I make of their writing (and again, I’m no scholar), the New Atheists’ arguments against the existence of God are, in general, pretty squarely built upon their arguments against religion. These books, except for a few vague asides, neglect to consider God outside the God-in-a-Box concepts they denigrate. And, with all due respect, arguing humans have got God wrong argues nothing at all about God.

To me, this formidable collection of scholars and intellects appears quite close-minded in their collective failure simply to acknowledge the presence of Mystery in themselves and the world. So there go the New Atheists as poster children for broad-mindedness and tolerance in action!

Semantically and culturally on the other side of the religious practice spectrum from Sam Harris et al’s lurk today’s strident fundamentalists.  I’ve lived most of my life in the South, where Christian fundamentalists are legion—people for whom the Bible serves as life’s instruction manual. Of course as the Biblecontradicts itself, there is some disagreement as to what, exactly, those instructions are, but that does not stop these people from quoting chapter and verse to prove that they—and they alone—know exactly what God thinks and wants us to think and do. Take this nugget from ChristianAnswers.

Nobody else’s business?

Gay activists claim that homosexual activity is nobody’s business other than those involved in the relationship. However, this is not true. God, our Designer and Creator, has authority over all aspects of our lives. He makes the rules, and He quite specifically forbids homosexual behavior.

“You shall not lie with a male as with a woman. It is an abomination” (Leviticus 18:22; see also Leviticus 20:13).

Disobedience of such a clear command indicates rejection of God’s authority.

So there! He made the rules, His scribe put them down on paper, and that’s the end of that!  The Bible tells you everything you need to know, and then you either do it or you go straight to hell.

I think no one, including the fundamentalists themselves, would wish to describe that as tolerance and broadmindedness in action.

We humans, as religious fundamentalists certainly demonstrate to an extreme degree, feel unpleasantly unsettled whenever we’re facing aspects of human existence which, for whatever reason, make us psychologically uncomfortable. We term them moral ambiguities and we don’t like being faced with them one bit.

One of the great missions of organized religion appears to be helping congregants avoid such discomforts through the laying down of moral absolutes. First, a lot of  organized religions suggest that absolutes exist, telling us that it’s permissible to tell reality’s bothersome moral ambiguities to lie down in the corner, chew on these bits of faux truth, and be quiet. Or else that it’s permissible to shy away from these ambiguities by adopting a kind of paralytic religious forbearance that leaves us forever on the fringes of tough decision-making. Both proceedings seem to me to be intolerance and closed-mindedness in action. Both use religious practice to buffer us from reality, mark off areas of our lives as parts we don’t have to deal with, designate ranks of decisions as ones we don’t have to make.

So what’s this got to do with living as a person faith? In my opinion, a useful, working relationship with God challenges each of us, first and foremost, to remain open and responsive to reality—in all its glorious and disquieting disorder. This to me means that once we lapse into intolerance and close-mindedness, even dressed up as organized religious practice, we are effectively telling God to take a hike. Or conversely, once we use religious practice to hide from the responsibilities of faith—i.e. we claim our religion’s call to be tolerant and open-minded as an excuse for not participating in reality’s tough situations and decisions—we are essentially cherry-picking our commitment to God.

And, in my opinion, we are equally intolerant and close-minded when we ignore or dismiss the importance of  mystery, of that which we cannot understand or explain, instead of acknowledging its presence in us and in our world.

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*Again, I’m not referring to an entity living somewhere hot, but rather to whatever force works to weaken my grasp on what is in favor of what I’d, personally, be more comfortable with.