Blog

TOLERANCE
I’ll stand up for truth and fairness and equal rights. I’ll stand up for your freedom of thought and expression. I’ll stand up for your right to use your own discretion. Because you’re worth it, and for me to stand up for you—well, to be truthful, that’s standing up for me, too.
TOLERANCE
But the only “knowledge” I had came from a “news” story about the marriage ceremony. I had never personally visited the church, read anything about it, or even met anyone who was a member.
TOLERANCE
It was the early 90s and we were sitting in a dingy film editing room in Encino, California. I looked over at Steve, who’d just asked me the question. He was a fellow film editor; we’d both met earlier that day when our boss, Fima, had pointed to stacks of film reels and told us in his thick Russian-Yiddish accent, “We have three film to cut, I don’t care who cuts which one.”
TOLERANCE
Today is Human Rights Day. It’s the anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by countries around the world—after the atrocities of World War II finally inspired the global community to work together to solve international disputes more constructively.
COMBATING BIGOTRY & HATE
No one deserves that. Yet the world is full of such conflicts. What can we do about it? Personal justice starts with each of us. It can span the gamut from resolving a playground fight between children with fairness to accommodation of religious beliefs in the workplace.
SCIENTOLOGY RELIGION
The philosophy of facing and handling life requires things like responsibility, courage, self-reliance, the ability to reason well, character, and many other characteristics considered desirable in the individual. The philosophy of avoiding and escaping involves the opposite: irresponsibility, fear, dependence, lack of resolve, emotional reaction, dishonesty.
RELIGIOUS FREEDOM
We need to grow up. We need to stop acting like mean girls making fun of our classmates or children fighting over a basketball.
RELIGIOUS LITERACY
It was the late 1400s in India. Religious fanaticism combined with the caste system to create a culture where the ruling Mughals could and did round up commoners and slaughter them solely to slake their royal hounds’ thirst for blood.
COMBATING BIGOTRY & HATE
I gave her a polite reply, but I realized she succeeded in making me feel slightly ashamed for asking her. I realized at that moment she was condemning me for my religion. She wanted me to know that it wasn’t ok that I was a Scientologist but it was perfectly acceptable for her to be a Christian.
TOLERANCE
After attending university and later, in corporate America, I noticed an odd trend—the more people become “molded” into the current expectations of society, the more they become entrenched in the workaday world, the more they ignore this hope that religion had perhaps once given them. They get caught up in their fast-paced life and begin subscribing to the religious cynicism currently in vogue, despite their social media accounts preaching “tolerance.”