Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Where's the Tolerance?

I fight a continual battle with my Facebook account.  I am friends with several people I went to high school with, and a lot of them don't share my political views or religious beliefs.  There's nothing wrong with that necessarily, but it does mean that they clog up my feed with vulgarities and extreme political views that mock my own.  When I see these posts, I basically have two options: 1) ignore it, which sometimes feels like validation, or 2) reply to what I see, which almost always sparks a fruitless Facebook argument, which I can't stand.  I suppose I could just chop these folks off my friends list (I'm not a fan of blocking people - if you're going to cut off all communication with a person, why be friends with them?).

Case in point: there's a guy I went to high school who has extreme liberal political views.  He's also an atheist and rags on Christianity quite frequently.  I couldn't be silent, for example, when he said on his feed that anyone who holds to creationism should be arrested.  Seriously.  This spawned a long debate that went nowhere, of course (mostly because he seems to not be able to respond to my objections).  And just last week he posted a video of Bill Nye the Science Guy talking about how not teaching evolution to children is harmful to them.  I simply commented that the strength of the argument comes into question when Bill Nye the Science Guy is your only reputable source.  My high school friend responded with accusatory language and called me names.  You see my dilemma?

Anyway, today I logged on to my FB account and saw this comment (I've removed all the names).  I literally had to read it twice to make sure it said what I thought it said.  The irony and hypocrisy of this comment is unbelievable:
Later this evening I plan to post, "Hey man, where's the tolerance?"  That should lead to a fun discussion.


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