Tolerance

I'm growing increasingly frustrated with either my computer, my operating system, my browser, or all three. I mentioned earlier that I was in the market for another gigabyte of memory for my aging XP box. Its just that...well, my laptop has 2GB of RAM and suffers from the same ailment here recently, that being Firefox is starting to piss me off!

If I want to "Stop loading this page" why does the Stop button only work once the page has completely loaded? Sometimes clearing out my browser cache will speed up downloading images, but just WTF is Firefox doing that it requires upwards of 30 seconds to download a 500kb file? Perhaps its just these last few point updates to Version 2 which is the cause of my consternation? Maybe everything will be sorted in Version 3.

I've turned over Safari to my wife for her internet activities, so I'm now testing Opera. If it really is as light and as fast as they say it is, I'll quickly be able to tell where the problem lies. Of course Opera's not exactly for rocket scientists. The instructions to get spell-checking to work are inane and childish: "Install GNU spell and restart your browser." I did. It still didn't work.

Firefox has its strengths, and I'm not giving up on it. I'm just...testing the waters. I don't like being angry all the time. And if I think my XP box is slowing down, getting my mac up and running again is going to push me over the edge. I can't tolerate much more of this.

I'm not a big fan of tolerance.

I do not believe that we, as a nation, nay, as a people should be forced to accept things our instinct screams at us to shun. Stereotypes are not evil fabrications, rather inappropriate generalizations. The difference being the propagation of repeatable, recordable idiosyncrasies or traits. I don't want to be tolerant of things which I believe may harm me. But that's ok, because in this day and age, you have to tolerate my intolerance! How wonderfully flawed.

I feel tolerance is even antithetical to the bible. So you have God, who is clearly a badass, smiting entire nations for going astray,¹ threating the same for those who choose to follow anyone else or stray from His law for four generations for disobeying His Word,² and making very clear that He and He alone is the Supreme Being of the universe.³

Along comes Jesus - crafted from a 1000-year-old amalgamation of identical pagan personages preaching what? "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me."⁴ And once the authors have established that, they continue with, "Judge not, that ye be not judged."⁵ thus begins a long line of both tossing out Old Testament law in favor of teaching tolerance and introducing spiritual exclusivity which in a humorous twist of fate, makes them the very thing they wish to destroy.

Tolerance, real tolerance, is not about disagreeing with they way another person chooses to live their life, its agreeing that every one should choose for themselves how to live. I have another word for that: Liberty.

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¹(Zechariah 14:3) Then shall the LORD go forth, and fight against those nations, as when he fought in the day of battle.
²(Exodus 20:5) Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me;
³(Deuteronomy 4:39) Know therefore this day, and consider it in thine heart, that the LORD he is God in heaven above, and upon the earth beneath: there is none else.
⁴John 14:6
⁵Matthew 7:1