Those who have read the second post on my blog in early August know my concerns about the hijacking of the meaning of the Holocaust into some kind of left-liberal lesson of the need for tolerance.

In fact, in the absence of religious values, there are many who make a religion out of being tolerant and non-violent.

There are a couple of problems with this.

The first is that the preachers of Tolerance are very loath to listen to any contrary opinions.  They tend to dismiss other opinions.   This happened the other day when we were visiting relatives.   The second is the immoral positions one starts to adopt when you are worshipping tolerance instead of a God of justice and morality.

One cousin of mine, who prides himself on his liberal values, the primary one being tolerance, reacted badly when I made a small comment on Judaism having foundational values of more substance than simple Tolerance.  He stated unequivocably that Tolerance was the most important value, and the major problems in history lie with religions and their non-tolerant approaches.   This moral equivalency concerning all religions, especially of an Orthodox or Fundamentalist nature has been reviewed here in my essay on Christiane Amanpour of CNN.

When I attempted to make a comment, he rebuffed my attempts to speak, saying it was unnecessary for me to talk, because he already knew that we didn't agree, and I shouldn't bother talking.   Not very tolerant.

I am at the point where I am used to being "shunned" by intolerant left-liberals who shun me because I am not tolerant enough.   But I really felt bad for my uncle (his father - age 90) and my father (age 87).

At one point I did manage to get in a comment that his father, a Canadian army veteran of the European campaign of the Second World War, obviously thought there was something more important at stake in 1941 than tolerance when he decided to risk his life to stop Hitler and preserve our freedoms.   His father nodded his head in agreement.   And I couldn't help but point out that had the Nazis been "tolerated" by soft pacifists too pure to participate in the violence of a war, then my father, liberated in Auschwitz, just in time to save his life, and therefore myself also, wouldn't be around.

There was no response offered, until a few minutes later, he launched into a long tirade against me for "lecturing" him, and how could I treat him as if my opinions were more valid than his.   I could not believe what I was hearing (he has 3 university degrees), but it occurred to me that the ultimate end-game of moral relativism is to take away the validity of any of my arguments, and even the necessity for him to as much as listen to them, because, in his post-religious framework, where there is no such thing as absolute right and wrong or good versus evil, every opinion is as good as every other one, and the only villains are people like me who purport to challenge this ideology of love and peace, and the validity of all opinions, however noxious.

And sure enough, when my father attempted to mention to him a favorite quote from Winston Churchill, my cousin rudely cut off my father, saying he didn't want to hear it and turned around and put his back to him.   Not very tolerant.

But if you stop practicing a religion, and start worshipping tolerance and moral relativism, I would suggest that you stay away from my father and myself.   We happen to think that there is a moral imperative to stop evil.   I guess we are not very tolerant either.