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God’s Patience as a Basis for Tolerance

Summary/Abstract: Neglecting God’s love for humankind significantly decreases the role of faith in creating better relations among people. The responsibility of the faithful is to constantly witness the endlessness of God’s patience, which should also encourage mutual tolerance. This is extremely important because tolerance in human relations is often reduced to ideological propaganda and often is an enforced situation controlled by the majority. This then creates a tyranny of the majority over the minority, while sometimes the situation changes and creates a tyranny of the minority over the majority. The reason for this is the downgrading of humanity’s God-given freedom to mere human rights and responsibilities, which is actually our self-denial in the state of powerlessness. We have lost the theanthropic dynamic due to the unwillingness of self-proclaimed super-people to recognize humanity’s likeness to God; they think of themselves as self-sufficient, while the others are needed as long as they are ready to submit. Therefore, the self-proclaimed super-people turn out to be non-people, unable to recognize their tragic situation because of their need to dominate. All their actions are determined by their urge to possess others, which makes the ideas they preach senseless. Tolerance, as something that self-sufficient individuals enforce upon others, loses its true meaning since irresponsible people turn it into an instrument of extortion, forgetting that without responsible freedom, there is no real tolerance. In order to make our lives meaningful, we must emphasize God’s love for humankind and overcome all our dubious and self-centered ideas. That is the only way to understand and implement tolerance correctly as a societal necessity and a maximum of human goodness.

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