Chalcedon's definition of "tolerance" and your definition of "tolerance" have a significant delta between them.
And this stoning for blasphemy crap and other stuff...where'd that come from? Did CP make that up too? Or is it someone else's lies being spread here?
Note to a Pagan Timothy D. Terrell October 1, 2003 As a result of my frequent writing for various publications, I receive a fair number of emails. Most are innocuous asking for information or an opinion, or politely showing where I might have been in error. A few are bizarre, and others are openly hostile. Last year I received an email from a white supremacist who venomously objected to some things I had written about the European colonization of Africa. Hatred from people like that is an affirmation of what I do, so I posted the email on my office door for the benefit of my students. Last week I received this note in my inbox:
This email immediately struck me as being less than genuine. This is a person who has deep misgivings about a Biblical social order, I thought, and is offering this bait in the hope of obtaining a juicy quote that can be waved around to show how awful life would be if True Believers had their way. To confirm my suspicions, I did a quick search on the Internet using her name and email address. She turned up several times, once on a website dedicated to debate on evolution and creation. There, my correspondent had referred to "crazy christian groups" in an attack on creationism. Then I found her name all over a site for "pagan activists." On the site were several messages she had written to the pagan activist email group that pretty clearly revealed her religious persuasions. All of this information was completely "in the open." I am not sure what this woman expected me to write. Maybe it would be a waste of my time to respond at all, I thought. But I could not resist. So I quickly replied:
My objective in this response was not to enumerate all the ways in which pagans like this woman might see their religious activities restricted in a society governed under Christian principles. First, I wanted her to see that Christianity is not about gunpoint conversions or genocide. But I wanted her to also see that because the state cannot be religiously neutral, some religion's principles of government will inevitably prevail over others. It is not a question of whether religion, but which religion. While belief could not be mandatory in a Biblical society, and unbelievers could live and work among the people of God, not all religious practices would be permitted. A Biblical society would have to restrain religions based on murder, aggressive revolution, or other civilization-destroying practices. Exodus 22:18, 20 and Deuteronomy 18:10-12 indicate that the practice of occultist religions or religions involving sacrifice to idols was a capital crime under the civil law given to Moses. I did not mention this fact in my reply because it would invite hysterics over witch trials rather than an understanding of my broader point that the state, and therefore the idea of "crime," is necessarily religious. My correspondent evidently wants official state toleration for all religions, including outright paganism, Satanism, and witchcraft. I wanted her to see the impossibility of this pluralism. Pagans and occultists should not be ignored by Christians as fringe groups of little significance. R. J. Rushdoony, in The Institutes of Biblical Law, pointed out the danger posed by such groups in the past:
As I was finishing this article, I received a 1200-word response to my note. It was a flood of questions on Biblical law and Christian Reconstruction. Rather than spend a day or two trying to duplicate the efforts of dozens of authors, I directed her to do a little digging into the existing work. In subsequent correspondence, this woman told me she was a "non-practicing" Christian, while in emails on her pagan website she claimed to be a pagan. In any case, she has a great deal of confusion about what Christianity is. Meanwhile, I have been keeping an eye on the pagan activist website, to see if the correspondence becomes a topic of conversation there. Maybe I should join their email list .
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