There is no problem with critiquing anyone in their roles and, yes, their are games using the "tolerance" issue to deflect such criticism. Look at the cries of "class warfare" everytime benefits for the wealthy are criticized.
> For instance, are
>atheists who criticize the theological philosophical
>beliefs-practices of Jews anti-semitic? How should they go about
>deflecting the charge of bigotry and anti-semitism? What about
>Christians who criticize those beliefs? And what about Jews who
>criticize Hindu and Muslim beliefs? At what point do we determine
>that criticism of the acts and beliefs that are constitutive of
>group identity -and the roles and functions they enable- becomes
>morally unjustified and inexcusable?
>Ecumenism has failed and the last thing we want is the 'clash of
>civilizations' theory to become a self-fulfilling dynamic.
Frankly, I find the breast-beating about anti-semitism silly when Christians say Jews are damned to hell. Of course, under most Christian theology, Jews are damned-- that's what the New Testament says. Why should Jews care the Christian god says they are going to hell, since they don't believe in that god.
So the bare point of theological dispute is irrelevant-- it's fake tolerance to ignore those issues. The crucial issue is whether such theological statements of moral damnation are translated into political terms of the discussed group losing civil rights.
The saving grace is that every major religion specifically makes room for unbelievers in their political theory of society-- Christians have their "render under Caesar" views and Jews obviously have had to deal with other groups and Islam has a long history of political tolerance for other religious groups within their polities. Christianity actually has the worst track record of such political tolerance within its states.
So all the clash of civilizations rhetoric has nothing to do with fundamental (in both meanings) theological impulses in the various world religions; it is about much more current grievances and military adventurism that is harnessing the rhetoric of religion for its own uses.
Actually, the worst thing that happens to any religion is to become too identified with a particular nation-state, since then it ends up absorbing all the discrediting that politics necessarily involves. I will bet that within twenty years, because of the mullah-politics in Iran, that country will be the most secular state in the region. The US is probably the most religious Christian country in the world precisely because of its separation of church and state, a point many of the original religious First Amendment supporters predicted based on their experience with state religions in Europe.
-- Nathan Newman