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Comment by mkaziz | Hacker News Reader

Disagree. If you as a Muslim live as a Muslim surrounded by Muslims, you're eventually going to otherize the Christians living across the border. If OTOH your neighbour is a Christian and your cousin is married to a Christian, you're going to feel a whole lot more charitable towards Christians when push comes to shove.

Fact of the matter is, we're prone to split into groups. If you homogenize, then before long, you'll be a Catholic othering the Protestant, or if you homogenize those even, you'll be a Lutheran othering some other denomination. Your best bet is to use diversity and multiculturalism to teach tolerance to the point that tolerance is institutionalized in your society.

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> If OTOH your neighbour is a Christian and your cousin is married to a Christian, you're going to feel a whole lot more charitable towards Christians when push comes to shove.

FWIW, don't rely too much on it, at least as far as neighbors go. There are numerous examples to the contrary during Balkan wars, and various ethnic conflicts that happened when the USSR was collapsing. For example, during the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict, which involved numerous ethnic cleanings by both sides, one thing that stood out from the surviving victims' reports was that it was often their neighbors, with whom they were on good terms, that led the marauding parties to their house to ransack it and drive them out or kill them. Similar reports have been heard from Kurds and Yazidi in areas of Iraq and Syria captured by ISIS.

Sorry but even recent history just proves you totally wrong.

You only have to go back less than 20 years and look at the Yugoslavian wars. Specially in Bosnia Herzegovina.

In Bosnia neighbours were killing neighbours, friends were killing friends and cousins were killing cousins just because of their religion.

But can we always have enough tolerance ? If in your country you had a community of people performing human sacrifices on unwilling victims, would you be able to tolerate it ? When something goes against our morality it may be very difficult to accept. The "usual" problem is religious belief, but it is necessarily the only one.

(If you think that the above example is a bit far fetched, consider that it is not much different from what some persons think about other people eating meat).

Obviously a line needs to be drawn, the question is where it is drawn. A good rule of thumb is that if it doesn't hurt anyone else and is between consenting people (adults?), you should be able to tolerate it. But you are right of course, some communities feel as strongly about killing animals for food as they do about killing humans. There are all sorts of edge cases involved in these situations. So I can't give you an ultimate answer to that - scholars have been trying to answer it for ages, and the only way to find out is to keep going with this muddled experiment that is modern civilization. :)

If that country kills people or keeps slaves then surely I'm not being intolerant by fighting and enslaving them, I'm adopting their views. /s

Also, if you're sacrificing someone and I tolerate it, there's no reason I can't listen to the victim and take you out as a favor. Tolerating doesn't mean blindly accepting.

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