Meanwhile, tolerant regimes are the ones that go down in history as the "golden ages" of their cultures. By allowing people to continue their own faiths and traditions while also encouraging new ideas, these states are able to attract brilliant people who might face discrimination elsewhere and encourage the brilliant people at home to share their ideas, rather than hide them out of fear of punishment. Especially successful states or cultures in the world create a type of meritocracy, where their government is run by people based on their abilities and knowledge rather than who their family is and how much money they have.
Now, there is something about to be said about too much tolerance. Not all opinions and ideas are equal, and some lead to the type of narrow-minded intolerance that can lead terrible people to power even in a society that had once been more tolerant in its past (I'll use the specific example of how the Mughal Empire [an empire in northern India that was in power when the Taj Mahal was built] went from an extremely tolerant state under Akbar to a massively intolerant one under Aurangzeb--which would lead to its deterioration and collapse). It's the problem with unbridled tolerance: tolerance of intolerance can lead to the destruction of the tolerance that allowed the intolerance to grow, thus tolerance needs to be slightly intolerant.
One of the reasons that I love America is that it is the "great melting pot" of the world. Like an alloy, America takes people, cultures, faiths, and ideas from around the world and allows them to mix and grow into something better a more powerful. America has not always done the best job at this. In fact, due to some people's intolerance, terribly things have been done in our history and to this very day. I despise any person our group who works to discriminate, alienate, or harm other people who look, speak, act, or think differently from them--not just because such people and groups might believe differently than me, but because they are so clearly against what America truly stands for.