That’s so hurtful.

Sometimes people want to consoled and comforted by a loving lie or a loving partial, but misleading truth.

Allowing people to hold to a cherished delusion is sacrificial love. You have to sacrifice….”

The key word is sometimes.

T’was a joke… “Will you still love me….tomorrow” a pop culture reference from the 70′s. Carol King?

Ahh, nevermind. Illustrative of just what i am talking about.

But will you still, in the morning?

Okay. I tolerate, love, and respect your position.

That’s so hurtful.

Sometimes people want to consoled and comforted by a loving lie or a loving partial, but misleading truth.

Allowing people to hold to a cherished delusion is sacrificial love. You have to sacrifice….

There is real multi-dimensional relationship, and there is the Internet. David covered that (thanks, David).

There is real love rooted in truth, and there is the non-offensive counterfeit that seeks only not to make the other feel good. Love “does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth” (1 Corinthians 13:6); “that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ” (Ephesians 4:14-15). Sometimes love means speaking the truth even if the other doesn’t like it.

There is the attempt (or the goal), and there is the outcome. I don’t claim to have achieved the goal. Sometimes it’s not easy. At least I have something higher and more solid to aim for than mere tolerance.

I won’t speak for Tom, but I think you have hit upon one of the more troubling aspects of the internet and one of the more beautiful aspects of the Incarnation.

Tweeting, texting, facebook, blogs — all the so called “social media” are neutral to actively harmful on the scale of substitutes for genuine human relationships. Their immediacy, and seeming intimacy, (and their incredibly low social cost) however, make them highly addictive and compelling for many.

I would argue that neither tolerance, nor the higher virtues of love and respect, can really occur in any genuine sense without the sometime (or at least one time) physical presence of the other to be loved, respected, or tolerated… Unembodied love, respect, or tolerance are, in my view, abstractions at best, fantasies at worst.

One of the ways we define agape is to say that there is a ~cost~ involved. I can say that I love my internet brothers and sisters in Christ but what does it cost me to say that? (other than the dollar and thirty cents a day it costs me to have an internet connection).

The question as to whether I tolerate, love, or respect those I have had run ins with on the internet is therefore badly framed in my view. I probably demonstrate a kind of respect for them by taking their arguments seriously and answering them in kind… But love, or true tolerance? Not really possible in this case…

I realize that I am probably overstating this somewhat, as I do find in my heart a (supernatural I would insist) love for certain persons I have never met, but the point still stands in my view.

(Hard question) Circumscribing to the world of virtual online relationships and dynamics, do you tolerate C. Ehrlich and Hrafn or do you love and respect C. Ehrlich and Hrafn?

I see your point, and agree though I would be willing to make a case (in light of episodes like the Florida pastor who threatened a Koran burning and the Westboro Baptist’s continuing provocations) that the right kind of tolerance (rooted in agape) can be a Christian virtue.

Thanatos is Percy’s dystopic novel set in the near future (now?) — an imagined (and in my view, prophetic) examination of the likely consequences of embracing what John Paul 2 called “the culture of death”. A great read and worth any Christian’s time. More polemic than James’ “Children of Men” but just as worthwhile maybe more so for it’s wry humor.

I haven’t read the book. It sounds interesting.

I agree there is a much more dangerous side to it than what I spoke of here. My intent was to show that even for those who think tolerance is good, and even for the purposes they say they’re promoting through it, it’s empty and weak, and in fact produces the opposite of what they claim for it. If it’s no good even for what its proponents say it’s good for, then it’s no good right out of the starting gate.

I think there is, in fact, a less benign, more dangerous side to all this deification of “tolerance” in the sense(s) it is understood today — it ends up ‘tolerating’ (by minimizing or ignoring) the self evidently dangerous.

It reminds me of Father Smith’s discussion of niceness/tenderness in Walker Percy’s “Thanatos Syndrome”. Do you know it?