Consecrated Virgins (Yes, They Exist)

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Sometimes I wonder if modern Christians are less tolerant. Remember that fundamentalism only started in about 1900.

I'm sure that's the case under certain circumstances. But even so, Christians today don't have inquiry-torture-try-execute arm like the Inquisition, or hasn't had civil justice carrying out the same function for religion.

True. I think a religion will become less tolerant whenever it feels threatened by a crisis. For the Inquisition, the crisis was the Reformation. For the modern fundamentalist movement, the crisis was modern ideas such as evolution.

The same principle can be applied to other religions. Islam because less tolerant after the crusades. They slowly worked their way back up over centuries but they again became less tolerant after the Soviet invasion.

Religions are more likely to be tolerant if they're not threated but that's not going to happen for Christianity, with church attendance numbers dwindling (especially among the young) Christianity will eventually face an existential crisis that could lead to more intolerance among the few remaining members. If this turns even more people away it could lead to a positive feedback loop.

Do we even want to dislodge it? "Irrationality" is the source of culture (music, literature, art, philosophy) and authentic virtue. (Is an act really good if you're going to get something out of it?) It's the source of the loving relationships that give us joy. Without a little irrationality, we would all be just cogs in a machine, human animals.

You know, I think I'm in agreement with you. Let's here it for the irrational!

I don't think the result would be anything like the Richard Dawkins or James Randi public presentation of it though. We're a culture of pathologies, isms, and various kinds of unhealthy/imbalanced exaggerations right now and what's truly rational will take a long time to take shape and it also can't discount the biological frames that we've started from and the shape of the story that brought us here.

My guess - if it's an incomplete life it probably won't be weighed in the balances and considered to be the full or real thing. Maybe I'd add that if it's not pragmatically informed it can't be rational - rather it would be distorted in such a way that we'd call it idealistic.

The kind of irrationality that concerns me is the type that has women still receiving involuntary cliterectomies in places around the world, slave trade in the 21st century, people being thrown from rooftops for being gay, being killed for stepping on a Brahman's shadow, incarcerated for exploring one's mind with substances, or the type of crazy work world we have where everyone's mental illness seems to marinate and amplify together to make us collectively worse for being together by the end of the day and where the Hunger Games mentality often rises to the top rather than integrity. IMHO art is actually a deeper form of truth in a lot of ways, we're still just not that far along in really understanding and appreciating abstractions, my guess is that'll be coming as we shift our meaning of life from work to other pursuits.