What is tolerance?

It's the "capacity to endure pain or hardship" and "sympathy or indulgence for beliefs or practices differing from or conflicting with one's own".

I see words like "endure", "sympathy", and "indulgence" and I can't help but cringe. There's nothing admirable of your ability to tolerate. We understand that it's not a compliment but yet this is something America values. The ability of the people to tolerate one another despite their differences.

If I told you I could tolerate you, would you smile and say thank you?

Yet, this is what we've been taught, what we serve to children in grade school when they get into tiffs with the other school children. Or what we say when a Muslim woman sits across from you on the train, wearing a headscarf or the Sikh man wearing a turban. Now when we look at the rising instances of violence due to religious  intolerance, can we truly wonder why?

Tolerance is not the goal here, tolerance teaches us to pretend we don't see one another. You might as well say you don't see color.

How does pretending someone doesn't exist solve a problem? How is it that we're teaching children and training ourselves to ignore someone's identity something that has become socially acceptable?

The clear solution for this issue is teaching religion in schools. I am a reasonable person and I see WHY people might cringe at the taught of some stranger teaching their innocent child about multiple religions.

But, I don't see too many parents jumping up at the chance to do it either, and I can't imagine many parents who can do it without their own prejudices involved. If they could we would see a lot less idiots on our twitter feeds or holding positions in public office.

We need to start actively educating kids and if you can't do it at home then just leave it to a trained professional, like a teacher who carries a degree in teaching. We need to teach acceptance and in order to do that, we must first understand.