You say tomAtoe I say tomAHto. You say E-meter, I laugh hysterically

For a couple weeks now I've written about religious tolerance and the dangers of fundamentalist who refuse to compromise their beliefs. Separately, I had also been planning to include a YouTube clip from South Park in one of my blogs, but as I thought about it more, it seemed more and more appropriate to bring the two together in one blog post. I am a fan of South Park, and two of my favorite episodes are the one on Mormonism and the one on Scientology. As I was just watching them, I wondered to myself, is South Park a form of religious intolerance? I realized it would be very hypocritical of me to preach religious tolerance for weeks and then put up a video about how ridiculous I find religions like Mormonism and Scientology. This may be a biased opinion, but my first instinct is to say that they are not religiously intolerant (but then I guess I have to define what I mean by religious intolerance). I would define religious intolerance as imposing one's own religious beliefs on others and denies the beliefs of others. In the most egregious cases of religious intolerance, these differences in beliefs are cause for persecution of a group and often violence. I would argue that South Park, at least in the two episodes discussed above, does not impose any beliefs on the audience; it merely presents facts (though, probably not the same way the religions would have presented these facts) and allows the audience to draw their own conclusions. There is a bias to these episodes, but there is a fairly large margin between bias and difference of opinion and religious intolerance. Plus, in the commentary to the episode “All About Mormons”, the creators say that they have no problem with Mormons as people, but just want to make a point of how ridiculous their beliefs seem to outsiders.
It can get complicated though, because religious intolerance is pretty much an exacerbation of difference of opinions. I wouldn't necessarily say that South Park is being intolerant. South Park definitely mocks religion, but is that intolerance? I can understand why people of a faith would find South Park episodes that ask viewers to take in one-sided information about their religion and then laugh at how stupid it is that people could believe in such things would be offensive. However, just because I think that history and beliefs of other religions are ridiculous, doesn't mean those who are believers can't or shouldn't keep their beliefs. I think intolerance is a word that gets thrown around a lot and its definition has become muddied by different levels of "intolerance".
This reminds me of our discussion in class about having a Darwin fish on your car or Sarah Vosper's post about wearing religious symbols for aesthetic rather than symbolic value. In an age of political correctness, I think that many people are overly sensitive to offending other people's beliefs. It may be sacrilegious to wear a cross if you are not Christian and to put a Darwin fish on your car, but is sacrilege intolerance? This may be a bigger topic than I can tackle in one posting, but I think it's interesting to think about the line between offending people, sacrilege, and intolerance. If the situation was reversed and Mormons or Scientologists mocked my lack of belief, I don’t think that I would be offended; I would just think that they’re wrong. However I understand that faith is very meaningful to some people, so this type of mockery is an affront to their way of life. While religion is not one of them, I’m sure there are other parts of my life that I would be just as offended about if they were mocked. I personally think it all boils down to being open minded to other opinions, but even that may be up for debate.

I've included two videos, one is some clips from the South Park episode "Trapped in the Closet" about Scientology and the other is commentary from South Park's creators, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, about the episode "All About Mormons".