Rite and Reason:The dictionary defines respect chillingly: "To refrain from violating something." Tolerance means putting up with something you don't like. In Northern Ireland, back home, respect means not saying or doing bad things to the "other sort".
But respect and tolerance don't touch hatred and ignorance. They don't imply dialogue or interaction and the "other" may not know they are being tolerated. These "virtues" have a dangerous blind spot.
The important stuff, faith, people, politics, gets left alone - "respected". Nice, liberal people are beguiled by tolerance and respect until there's a gun up their nose and it's "no more Mr Nice Guy". Then our traumatised liberals want to machine-gun all extremists .
Historically, among world religions, Christianity's intolerance is surpassed only by the Aztecs. The core of love, compassion, acceptance and forgiveness in Jesus's teaching became confounded by a tendency to demonise - everyone but us is wrong, and therefore bad and damned! Love is reserved for us alone; heathen, heretics and other denominations need not apply.
More recently Christianity espoused tolerance and respect, and the churches are mostly on speaking terms. But religious fundamentalism is growing.
In Ireland, most Christians respect each other, but interaction and dialogue are minimal and nothing may have really changed. Tolerance is not an ideal. It describes an in-between state which may go in any direction. In Northern Ireland, tolerance and respect veiled a mess of hatred, distrust and hurt that killed over 3,000 people. Many of those died because of their Christian denomination, and while the churches condemned it, mass ecumenism didn't break out among the faithful to distance themselves from murder committed in their name.
Where was the Christ-like behaviour that could have appalled Rome and given Rev Paisley apoplexy? The churches apparently tolerate and respect each other. But Christ didn't frame the gospel in those terms. We are not to respect God and neighbour. Christ used another word.
We Christians think the answer to everything is always Jesus. In this case, what he taught may be the answer. The person of the resurrected Christ may not be acceptable to those of other faiths and none, but the core of what he taught displeases no one, and is also re-affirmed in other faiths and philosophies.
There is commonality between faiths that we ignore, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and most laughably of all, between Christian denominations. The world's faiths speak of personal change, growth in love and compassion, acceptance and forgiveness, a wakened, conscious involvement in one's own life.
But that demands change of self. While hatred depersonalises the other, we need to recognise the full person of the other, making them three-dimensional, real and like us. Only then can change happen.
Faith is perverted too easily by power. Power does not love. Neither does tolerance and respect. They are a facet of power, in a complex relationship. Where tolerance stops is where power, the ego, feels threatened, and anger arises from fear. This results in war, and the idea of an acceptable level of violence, or of global warming or starvation.
As long as it is not a direct threat to me, personally, tribally or nationally, I can tolerate and respect it. But only for so long.
Each ego is a fundamentalist. Where the relative is made absolute you have fundamentalism, where someone thinks: "I am absolutely right."
Here the ego projects and inflicts its own personal political, ideological, scientific or religious universe on to reality, and seeks power to enforce it. Ego cannot let down any defences and allow in doubt or change. That is the ego-death implied in Christian baptism, the blowing out of the flame in Nirvana, the surrender of Islam.
Tolerance is the compromise, preserving the ego. The ego is what most faiths are designed to do away with, to allow in that greater self.
Zen says: "Great faith requires great doubt." Small faith, the ego's faith in itself, fundamentalism, cannot tolerate any doubt.
We must keep doubting. Continuous reformation must be an ideal. Reform, personal and institutional, becomes tainted by power and compromise until it resembles what came before. Change, great doubt must happen in all faiths and disciplines and in each individual.
We must tolerate tolerance, respect respect as symptoms of ego, correlates of power. To move beyond tolerance is to relinquish power. Love is the bridge. This is the goal of religious faith, the answer to the violence of ego sparking off ego.
We need the gospel ideas of salt and yeast rather than world conversion and domination. Non-violence and compassion, not damning judgment. Tolerance and respect can produce a ceasefire. Only love and compassion bring peace.
• Rev Gary Hastingsis Church of Ireland rector in Westport.