A friend who teaches at another university tells me that recently he made his class read Ursula LeGuin’s novel science fiction novel The Lathe of Heaven. He writes,
To be liberal used to mean having the virtue of liberality, but liberals lost the spirit of liberality toward those who disagree with them a very long time ago. May they regain it.
Fanaticism isn’t about the strength of belief, but about its content. Someone who ardently believes that God forbids murder will not kill the innocent; someone who is deeply confident that He does not desire an unwilling obedience will not use a gun to convert.
Some people hang onto bitterness because of malice toward others, toward God, or toward themselves. Others hang on long after the original impetus is spent because there is a morose pleasure in sucking at dregs.
The Moral Case for Manners
Some things must be placed beyond argument; disputation can never make progress unless there are some things that we no longer need to dispute. In logic, for example, denying the law of non-contradiction is beyond the pale, or ought to be; in ethics, denying the Holocaust or defending the bayonetting of infants; in Christian theology, rejecting the Resurrection.