[Avodah] Religious tolerance

[Daniel Israel]

Michael Makovi wrote:
> I was just musing, apropos of nothing**, about the following:

I'm not quite sure if there was a point you were trying to get to, but I 
would note the following:

> In theory, we say that anyone who doesn't follow the Noachide laws is
> a heretic or infidel or whatever, end of story. And of course, were we
> to have a religious state, there'd be practical implications (accept
> the laws or leave the country). But in practice, we don't go around
> criticizing any gentiles of being apikorsim for believing in a
> three-for-one special, and on the contrary, many (at least in the
> MOish community) have quite positive relationships with gentiles. I'm
> sure we all know that he believes in 3-in-1 and that he's surely
> stolen *something* from *someone* ( = violate Noachide laws) sometime
> in his life, and yet we don't seem to hold it against him, at least
> not publicly. I am thinking that perhaps it is a gap between theory
> and practice.

I think you are mixing two things here.  As far as I know, none of the 
Jews I've met are free of sin either.   I would list three specific 
distinctions:

First, usually someone who practices AZ actually rejects monothesim, 
whereas a thief doesn't necessarily reject the notion that stealing is 
wrong, rather he has some rationalization as to why this is not 
stealing, or why he has no choice, or just admits he is doing something 
he shouldn't be.

Second, even for Jews we recognize that ganievah is not the same as AZ. 
  A Jew who worships AZ is kofer b'ikar, but a Jewish thief is a choteh, 
but not rejected from amchah.

Thirdly, there is definitely who to rely on that 3-in-1 is not AZ for goyim.

The consequence of the first two points is that we don't necessarily 
have to relate to a non-Jewish thief all that differently than to a 
Jewish thief, at least as far as the question of whether the person is a 
"apikoris."

And from the third point, the non-Jewish trinitarian (but not pantheist) 
may not even be an aku"m in the strict sense.

-- 
Daniel M. Israel
dmi1 at cornell.edu