Brutality can be defeated by understanding and teaching tolerance universally

To end Brutality, the world must hold three things, simple values that apply to all. These values practiced can lead to progress. We have the freedom to decide our course. Armed with good values we achieve good goals.These Universal Values are -- tolerance, help, and democracy. These work for everyone. They are the substance of good action. Our speaking and our doing should reflect the benefit these values hold for all the world.

Brutal democracy

What happens when intolerance holds sway? Exactly what took place just yesterday. Democracy should trump brutality.

But yesterday things all went wrong. Read all about it below.

The president was right to show hesitancy about his political act. He has unleashed a whirlwind.

Irking the Pharisees

Jesus once told of a corn field where his disciples ate some corn. His story irked the Pharisees. The law was stretched but it all turned out well. What C. S. Peirce called pragmaticism.

Pragmaticism -- the thought of the future

The embedded points to, what turns out to be, one of the best descriptions of pragmaticism in existence.

Pragmaticism is the word Peirce, the founder of pragmatism, invented to distinguish his thought from the run-of-the mill thinking we associate with the term pragmatism.

Universal way

Tolerance is a universal value. To defeat brutality it must be taught for what it is. The binary view of tolerance is that it is weak -- a sort of goody-two-shoes morality.

That’s not what tolerance is.

Tolerance is strength rising from flexibility, the capacity to choose what is better over what is worse. It does not see good and evil as polar opposites. It sees all action as fallible. All acts have flaws. We have to choose with care.

Hypocrisy countered

Another Jesus story reminds us again that he came to modify fixed law.

When he broke the custom of not healing on the Sabbath, his retort to the Pharisees was, is it better to save a life, or to kill?

It is ironical that those who support repeal of the Dream Act include many evangelicals. If Jesus is the exemplar, they are on the wrong side.

Countering brutality

Brutality will never be brought down until tolerance is universal. Tolerance will never be universal until its virtues are shared by every teacher in the world with every student in the world. You have to be taught, the song says.

It is time to move toward a flexible morality based on universal values. We do not need the hypocrisy of claiming we are serving values by exposing innocents to brutality.