By excluding the intolerants from the scope of tolerance, Voltaire reduced tolerance to an empty box. Worse, he prepared the atrocities of the Terror of the French Revolution, which was in turn the model of Communist terror. Millions were killed by proclaiming they had no right to tolerance because they were themselves intolerant. …The dramatic mistake of Voltaire should be corrected by proclaiming that religions and philosophies have [the] right to be in different ways intolerant, and should still be tolerated.
Italian philosopher
(born June 14, 1955) is an Italian sociologist of religions. He is the founder and managing director of the Center for Studies on New Religions (), an international network of scholars who study new religious movements.
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Alternative Names:
Introvigne, Massimo
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There is physical pollution and there is the moral pollution of injustice. The two of them go together. We will not eliminate physical pollution if we do not eliminate moral pollution as well. …Getting the Buddhas back on their feet and creating a safe environment means changing our hearts, acknowledging the primacy of conscience, and facing and resolving injustice.
There are several misunderstandings about conscience. One is that the question of conscience is extremely complicated. As Dr. Hong [Tao-Tze] teaches us, this is basically a lie. A philosophical book about conscience can be very technical and difficult to read for the uninitiated, yet the common experience of conscience is very simple. …As Dr. Hong says, “conscience is innate.” It is within us. For believers, it is the voice of God; for non-believers, it is the voice of our deepest and noblest human nature. But the 19th century ideologues told us that it is a false voice of false gods.
The lesson of [the story about the Kalaupapa peninsula lepers’ colony of Molokaʻi, Hawaiʻi, and Belgian Catholic priest Father Damien De Veuster] is that living together in peace cannot be taken for granted.
Even those who share a misfortune can ultimately not be able to live in peace together unless they discover again the role of the conscience. …order can be restored by returning to conscience.
A key point of the texts attributed to Shotoku is that if rulers and bureaucrats believe they are the owners rather than the servants of the law, corruption will follow.
Corruption was already a problem in the 7th century, and the Shotoku writings define it as privileging the officials’ private interests over the public ones.
…Manipulating the public in the interest of the private is the very definition of corruption.
…Tai Ji Men refused all offers of settlement from the [National Taxation Bureau], insisting they were not guilty of tax evasion and should not pay even a single dollar for this. It may seem that this is a battle about money, but it isn’t for Tai Ji Men. They spent in legal fees only, in all these years of struggles, more than they would have paid had they settled with the NTB. They did not settle for a reason of principle. By settling, they would have admitted that they had been guilty of tax evasion, something that is both against their principles and factual truth, and in their eyes would even be a connivance with the criminal actions of some rogue officials. How can they tour the world and lecture about conscience and being good citizens, and at the same time admit they evaded taxes?
I believe that Dr. Hong [Tao-Tze, the leader of Tai Ji Men], who has made himself heard about conscience all over the world, will be remembered for having rescued conscience from the problems Svevo was immersed in when he published his novel. Conscience had been assaulted not only by Freud, but before him by Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). They all suggested that rather than being something natural or native conscience has been artificially created inside us by social forces not particularly well intentioned.
…Dr. Hong told us a simple truth, that we should forget ideologies and come back to conscience as the moral compass. Ideologies, as we know from the tragedies of the 20th century and are experiencing again in the 21st century, by obfuscating conscience create war and destruction. Only those who recognize the central role of conscience can build a civilization of peace and love.
I believe that public schools should not indoctrinate or proselytize for any religion but I am also persuaded that excluding an objective look at the role of religions and spirituality while designing a school curriculum would make it impossible for students to understand much of the art, culture, literature, and history of humanity in all continents.
Even when reflecting on the momentous question of how education can produce good citizens, excluding any consideration of values based on spirituality can only lead to catastrophic results.
Wilson himself argued that it would be in the best interest of humanity if organized religions as we know them would disappear.
There is, however, a misunderstanding. Wilson was not an atheist, nor was he against asking religious questions.
Since his main interest were ants, it is to his interesting we should turn to understand more about his ideas on religion.
[…]Kant believed that world peace was possible only if the enlightened elites in each country worked hard to promote conscience. Without conscience there would be no peace, no matter how much efforts a society of nations would make. I am not sure that Kant’s notion of conscience was the same as Dr. Hong’s and Tai Ji Men’s. Kant’s one was deeply rooted in a Protestant sense of guilt and sin, and he saw it more as an inner tribunal delivering an internal verdict of guilt for the bad actions we have performed. Yet, his idea of a necessary connection between peace and conscience remains valid.