Tolerance and Intolerance. Contemporary Attitudes withing Religious, Racial, National, and Political Sphere

Tolerance is an often debated topic in the contemporary global village. It is permanently invoked and accusations of intolerance are equaly frequent. It is said that when a word is too much used it loses its deep meaning, its essence, its initial purpose, so that it becomes nothnig ore than a meaningless word among other meaningless words making up a discourse. The word tolerance is not an exception. We hear it every day in the street, at school, in debates, and especially on television. We might ask ourselves what tolerance stil means in the contemporay world. Is it a virtue or just a convention used at international level? These questions start, on the one hand, from Fethullan Gulen’s words who says that tolerance is forgiveness, forgiveness of all sins, compassion and mercy for the whole Creation, the hiding of people’s shame and mistakes, and on the other hand from the realities of the 21st century, the global world ordered by laws, rules, conventions. The present paper is an attempt to define and to comment on the concepts of tolerance and intolerance.