History of The Group and Its Website
Bruce A. Robinson, who is described as the "chief architect" of the organization, presents a history of the group and its website in the book Religion on the Internet: Research Prospects and Promises (edited by Jeffrey K. Hadden and Douglas E. Cowan). In 1995, Robinson set out to create an organization that promotes religious tolerance, comprising people from as many different religious backgrounds as possible. The group currently consists of an Agnostic, an Atheist, a Christian, a Wiccan, and a Zen Buddhist.
Feeling that much of the information spread about religious minorities was inaccurate, the group created its ReligiousTolerance.org website in an attempt to explain the nature of these beliefs. Satanism, Wicca, other Neopagan religions and New Age were some of the first belief systems they focused on. The site hosts over six thousand articles devoted to the description of numerous religions and religious controversies, and features advertisements.
The group has stated that religious tolerance does not mean having to accept that the beliefs of others are true, or will lead to the same God. Rather, it means according to others the right to choose their beliefs without being oppressed or discriminated against: "We can believe that members of another religious group are hopelessly deluded, and still support their right to enjoy religious freedom."
Having originally begun as an informal group, the Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance were registered as a sole proprietorship in 1996, one year after the website had first been made available online. In addition to his writings on the website, Robinson has also contributed a chapter on "Satanic Ritual Abuse" to The Encyclopedia of Cults, Sects, and New Religions (2001), edited by James R. Lewis.
Read more about this topic: Ontario Consultants On Religious Tolerance
Famous quotes containing the words history of the, history of, history and/or group:
“No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept.... For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“The history of reform is always identical; it is the comparison of the idea with the fact. Our modes of living are not agreeable to our imagination. We suspect they are unworthy. We arraign our daily employments.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I feel as tall as you.”
—Ellis Meredith, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 14, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“My routines come out of total unhappiness. My audiences are my group therapy.”
—Joan Rivers (b. 1935)