yazadjal.com

Often, there I’ll be, debating how meaningless I consider something like
astrology, and someone will say, “MadMan, you say you’re a libertarian.
Then why don’t you show any tolerance for the views of others?”

Ah… “tolerance”. In India, most of us are taught as children to
“respect your elders”, “respect other people’s views” and
other such unconditional statements. That’s a discussion for another day, but I
just want to clarify why we folks seemingly have no “respect” for
contrasting views on various matters and why our interpretation of
“tolerance” is not the same.

At the heart of the libertarian philosophy is the right of all people to live
their life as they see fit, hold any views, and generally do away with state
restrictions on their lives, provided of course that what they do does not
interfere with the rights of other individuals to lead their lives the same way.
If you will excuse the unusual length of that last sentence, that also means we
heartily support the freedom of individuals to believe whatever they darn well
please. So if you want to believe you were abducted by aliens, that astrology
works, that there’s a bearded old man up in the sky looking after you, we’ll
support that.

That is what we call tolerance.

But that doesn’t mean that just because you hold an opinion, we are obliged
to respect it. We, on our part, are also perfectly entitled to treat your
beliefs with utter contempt and consider you a loon for having them. This kind
of topic comes up frequently in discussion on blogs and other community sites,
where someone will ask that their views also be respected, citing
“tolerance” as the reason. I’m sorry, you have an equal right to state
your opinion, but no automatic right to be respected.