I believe in peace and religious tolerance.

[JDPriestly]

I think we should make it clear to all who come to America including the refugees from Syria that we will expect them to respect the cultural and religious freedoms of others including people of the Jewish religion if they come here.

Here is the history of the wars between Syria and Israel.

The same goes for people from any country including Israel.

Don't bring hate to America. We have enough haters here already. They are mostly called Republicans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel%E2%80%93Syria_relations

[Warpy]

1. I'm a stranger in a strange land

and a member of that most misunderstood and despised religious minority, the atheists. All religions look equally wacky to me and equally damaging to the human spirit, although expressed in different ways.

I have even less of a stake than you do in enforcing any sort of belief system. Neither one of us makes the rules for other people. I've also got the advantage of knowing Muslims as schoolmates, neighbors, coworkers and friends for 50 years and only one of many dozens turned out to be a bomb throwing nutcase, about the same number proportionately of Christians I've known.

This used to be a rich country before the 0.1% stole all our wages for 40 years. We can still afford to be generous to people fleeing war. We should be more generous than Obama is suggesting.

Think of it as enlightened self interest. Refugee populations have a history of coming here and starting restaurants. Middle East cuisine is wonderful and I'm greatly looking forward to having them open up places to eat.

[JDPriestly]

2. Without tolerance there is no peace.

I totally agree about Middle East cuisine, and I like the people I know from the Middle East.

But no matter who comes to our country, we must make clear to everyone that religious tolerance including tolerance of the Muslim religion and of atheism (which is not a religion but which benefits from our tolerance of all belief systems that conform with our laws) is essential to our internal peace and harmony.

We will not tolerate intolerance whether based on religion, race or gender. That is something all refugees need to understand first and foremost.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel%E2%80%93Syria_relations

[sibelian]

3. We have to be careful. Many of them don't come from a multicultural background.

Reddit has various revealing threads on this subject.

It's time we started taking these poor people seriously.

There are many Muslims now coming forward and finding things about their religion disturbing. We have benefitted for many decades, centuries, even, from the concepts of mutual tolerance and respect for differing belief systems and largely expect these ideas to be self-evident. It's not necessarily as clear-cut for someone who grew up in a country that has never supported any particular distinction between Church and State.

Some of these guys are still wandering around in a fog of "Islam will dominate the world". We mustn't dismiss this idea and just let it "disappear all by itself", that's actually deeply disrespectful and treating Islam as a joke. It's just abandoning responsibility for making a good case for our OWN beliefs.

[JDPriestly]

4. I have lived in a country in which people were tolerant but in which Catholicism was the

dominant religion. I have nothing against Catholicism, but it can be uncomfortable for me as an American to live in a country in which everyone assumes that I am Catholic. I am not.

Americans tend to think that everyone in the world is as tolerant as we Americans are in general. Ant that will seem strange to Americans because we just take our own tolerance for granted and many of us (and I agree) would like us to be much more tolerant of different beliefs.

But we need to impress on newcomers that if they want to enjoy the benefits of tolerance, they have to extend it to others. It is a two-way (more-ways-than-that) street. It's not always easy.

No one in the US will object to the fact that a woman wears a scarf because of her religion or that a man wears a yarmulka or an Orthodox Jewish woman wears a wig. Or that someone has a beard for a religious reason. But that tolerance has to be extended to others. In many parts of the world, this tolerance is not extended.

This has to be made clear.

I am a Unitarian-Universalist, and religious freedom and tolerance are very, very important to me. I do not discuss all aspects of my personal life on DU. If people knew me, they would find it very ironic that one of my posts was hidden because I reminded people, what with all of the enthusiasm about welcoming the Syrian refugees (which is a good thing of itself) that Syrians have been less than welcoming of the Israeli immigrants. It is rather ironic that we are welcoming Syrian immigrants when they so passionately fought against Israelis that emigrated to their part of the world. It strikes me as so ironic.

I am in favor of hospitality to refugees, strongly in favor of it. But it is unfair to those who are here as well as to the refugees to fail to make clear that the peace and prosperity in our country exists because of our tolerance of others who disagree with us on things and ideas that may be fundamental in our lives.

I favor tolerance over everything. The alternatives are always (historically) repression, possibly even genocide and eventually, war.

The events in France, whether perpetrated by French-born individuals or by refugees are deadly proof of the importance of tolerance. And that goes for tolerance of Muslims as well as tolerance on the part of Muslims for other religions.

I think the issues are more complex than many on DU are recognizing.