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Religous intolerance has been passed down from generation to generation. Even if you are tolerant, we were still influenced by our parents (unless you parents were extremely tolerant) and influenced by society. Each generation it gets better and we can learn to be more tolerant later on in life. You just tend not to like other religions because that is what you were taught.

Well, that is how religous intolerance is spread in my opinion. Still, the root. I guess that is the nature of man. We tend not to like the people that are different from us. They are strange and sometimes that added in with one mistake causes a war. Then that war causes another and even in peace time, we hate people of different religions. We'll never know the first case of it, but we can still poeint out the cause. Man, sadly, hasn't changed much. We still get in wars and we still want money.

Believing your personal path to be the one true path.

Okay, we'll get to these ideas one by one, so to start of with, let's think about the idea of intolerance being something inherited or learned from the previous generation.

What were some bad things you've learned or heard from other people about a religious group? Let's be as tactful about this as we can; in knowing what we've been taught we can unlearn what we've learned. I'll start out.

I've heard a lot of nasty stuff about Scientology ranging from accusations of it being some brainwashing cult to people just treating it with derision for (near as I can figure) no real good reason. Personally I know practically nothing about Scientology, aside from all the negative things I've heard from other people. Fortunately I know better than to give too much creedence to hearsay without personally verifying its truth, but from hearing so much badmouthing of this system, I know I probably have a subconscious bias against Scientiology. And that's sad. Sad to be unconsciously biased about something in a negative way just because of some crap other people said.

Yup. Never underestimate the power of words, folks. Any words, spoken and heard often enough, become to both speaker and listener... truths.

Well, let's take this as an example. In book challenge lists, sometimes classics are challenged because they show historical prejudices that used to exist. Sometimes the arguments against the books are that they're teaching children that these kinds of prejudices are okay. What sorts of prejudices do we pick up from books we read or media we view? If we do keep reading these books, does it in any way perpetuate the idea of that original intolerance?

If people do read their own messages into things, what's the source of that then? Where might that be learned from? If you're ignorant of biases agianst a particular group, chances are low that you'll read that into a more subtle portrayal of intolerance.

So what are factors that might contribute to the unlearning of learned biases, or ignoring biases that you're fed?

Its a lack of knowledge. People only know what is around them, they have to be taught everything else, but if they arent taught, they are ignorant. We have the freedom of to worship any religion we want to in this country, but those descisions are made for us a young age. We generaly inherit the religion of our parents, and they inherited it from their parents. But our parents (who are generaly very loyal to their religion) don't normally want their children to be exposed to anything different, for the fear that they might like it more. So in fear they try to keep them away from it as long as possible, so that when the time comes where the children are exposed to these new ways of thinking, they have also became loyal to their religion, but also, at the same time, come to dislike ideas that are different than their own. Its hard to be accept something different than what you already think. Like if they were to prove evolution, all those creationists would have a VERY hard time trying to accept that fact, and alternatively, if creation was proved, evolutionists would have a hard time accepting that.