Children in an Adult’s World

Western Cultural Imperialism At Its Most Dangerous

The debate about liberty, free-speech and the stance of Islam rolls on.  The West’s position is, shall we say, conflicted.  The Western Commentariat has been playing a divide-and-rule strategy.  It presupposes that Islam is a broad-church religion, with a wide range of variants, denominations, sects and opinions about Islam.

Simply put, the Commentariat assumes that Islam is just like modern Judaism and modern Christianity–both alike are festooned with multi-form denominations, traditions, beliefs, and expressions–yet these days they all tend to get along in an irenical co-existence.  In Christianity, for example, one has every kind of manifestation imaginable, from those that deny the existence of Jesus Christ right through to those who worship Him as Lord of heaven and earth.  But in both Judaism and Christianity alike there are, from time-to-time, extremist elements that have no legitimate claim to their respective religions.  Some Jews have  become militant zionists who murder innocent Palestinians.  Some Christians have engaged in a fratricidal war in Northern Ireland in recent history.  These extremist elements do not represent either Judaism or Christianity respectively.  Or so the narrative rolls.

The Commentariat believes Islam is just the same.  The terrorists, the suicide bombers are the extremists: the vast majority of Islamic believers are tolerant, peaceful, law-abiding citizens.  The strategic objective is to “reach out” to the mainstream, and isolate the extremists. Ben Shapiro provides us a recitation of with how the Obama administration has systematically and consistently played out this strategy. 

Is this view of the Western Commentariat a gratuitous, fabricated assumption, or is it based in reality?  The answer to the question is to apply a straightforward sociological test.  Mainstream Islam–by definition–can be seen in those countries which are Muslim countries: Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Libya, Sudan–and so forth.  In these countries, Islam has become institutionalised.  Its influences can be observed.  Its culture can be studied.  These countries represent mainstream Islam. 

When we apply this canon, it immediately becomes clear that the Western Commentariat is simply engaged in wishful thinking.  Worse, it is engaged in a perverse form of Western cultural imperialism.  The Commentariat is assuming and operating as if the entire world were an extension of Western liberal values and secular mores.  It assumes the whole world is really a Western secularist world. 

We will cite one example, just to make the point–although it is so obvious, only the most wilfully blinded will not grant it.

Amnesty International is calling on Saudi Arabia’s authorities to quash the outrageous sentencing today of Raif Badawi in connection with an online forum for public debate he set up and accusations that he insulted Islam.  Raif Badawi, co-founder of the “Saudi Arabian Liberals” website, was sentenced to 10 years in prison, 1,000 lashes and a fine of 1 million Saudi riyals (about US$266,631) by Jeddah’s Criminal Court.

This kind of thing is found repeatedly in mainstream Islam. It is a praxis buttressed by teaching, law codes, tradition, and popular support.  Thus, we are on solid ground when we say that those Islamic folk in the West who are tolerant, peace-loving, gracious, respectful of the opinions of others, and who believe in free-speech are at the extreme end of the Islamic spectrum.  They are definitely not mainstream.  Today’s tolerant Muslim is the extremist Muslim, when considered on a sociological spectrum.

Contrary to popular misconception, Islam does not mean peace but rather means submission to the commands of Allah alone. Therefore, Muslims do not believe in the concept of freedom of expression, as their speech and actions are determined by divine revelation and not based on people’s desires.

USA Today carried a piece by an Islamic cleric,  Anjem Choudary, whom the Commentariat calls an extremist and a hate preacher. He is also a highly educated man–which elicits more than a few genteel coughs amongst the Chattering Classes.  Our point is simple: Choudary is not an extreme Muslim; he is a mainstream Muslim.  It is only the Commentariat’s cultural hegemony and imperialism which prevents it seeing what is blindingly obvious to anyone except the self-duped.  

Here is Choudary’s apologia for Islam’s intolerance.  We defy anyone to prove that it is not the mainstream Islamic position, using the straightforward sociological test we have proposed above.  

Contrary to popular misconception, Islam does not mean peace but rather means submission to the commands of Allah alone. Therefore, Muslims do not believe in the concept of freedom of expression, as their speech and actions are determined by divine revelation and not based on people’s desires.

Although Muslims may not agree about the idea of freedom of expression, even non-Muslims who espouse it say it comes with responsibilities. In an increasingly unstable and insecure world, the potential consequences of insulting the Messenger Muhammad are known to Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

Muslims consider the honor of the Prophet Muhammad to be dearer to them than that of their parents or even themselves. To defend it is considered to be an obligation upon them. The strict punishment if found guilty of this crime under sharia (Islamic law) is capital punishment implementable by an Islamic State. This is because the Messenger Muhammad said, “Whoever insults a Prophet kill him.”

However, because the honor of the Prophet is something which all Muslims want to defend, many will take the law into their own hands, as we often see.  Within liberal democracies, freedom of expression has curtailments, such as laws against incitement and hatred.

The truth is that Western governments are content to sacrifice liberties and freedoms when being complicit to torture and rendition — or when restricting the freedom of movement of Muslims, under the guise of protecting national security.  So why in this case did the French government allow the magazine Charlie Hebdo to continue to provoke Muslims, thereby placing the sanctity of its citizens at risk?

It is time that the sanctity of a Prophet revered by up to one-quarter of the world’s population was protected.

Anjem Choudary is a radical Muslim cleric in London and a lecturer in sharia.

Anjem Choudary lives in the mainstream real Islamic world.  The Western Commentariat lives in a make-believe world.  Over the next fifty years, as the real, mainstream Islamic world confronts the West’s make-believe, mirage world which do you believe will win? 

We expect it is the world which is self-aware and not living in a childish saccharine, make-believe fantasy world that will make huge strides.  Islam is speaking and living the truth about itself; the West is in hopeless denial, both about itself and about mainstream Islam. 

 

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From Moscow

The Gaylag Archipelago

Blog and Mablog 
Douglas Wilson

So a marginal football player got drafted into the NFL, kissed his boyfriend smack on the lips, and then another football player tweeted something that expressed the sentiment ick gross, and so the second player was hustled into sensitivity training. Got that?

As the revolution is established, there will be no heckling. Kirsten Powers got it right. I have as much of an expectation of broad-minded tolerance from the left these days as I do of somebody hoisting up a John 3:16 sign at a North Korean missile parade. These people are coercion junkies.

How will they stop the heckling? Vee haff vays. Notice that I did that obliquely because I didn’t want to violate Godwin’s Law — the first person in a debate to invoke Nazi parallels loses. This is because it is a well known principle of political science that political coercion and tyranny was only possible in the 1940s. All claims about oppressive coercion in our day are therefore bogus by definition, and one begins to suspect that the person who won’t stop expressing his views when the establishment wishes for him to express theirs is cruising for a sensitivity seminar. I also brought up Godwin’s Law because Nazi analogies are not the only negative examples that we should take into account.

Look. If you use language in ways they disapprove of, they will show the world what thorough-going malice looks like. That is why I make a point of doing it. They will send you off to the Gaylag Archipelago — there’s an example of what I do — where they will upbraid you for your intolerance until you come to realize that love is the answer. Love is all you need. Love is the best. Love is what Big Br . . . love is a good thing. Who could be against love except for the haters?

Anybody who says they believe in free speech, but who insists that Christians start groveling lest we “hurt” the perpetually hurt is someone who is himself a central part of the problem. The church is full of effeminate cowards who want us to truckle before the machinery of our passive aggressive police state. Beneath the visor of the leader of the SWAT team hauling me off, I saw a slow tear trickling down. I guess my language was hurtful. I see that now.

Second, they like to marginalize anybody who observes the obvious and comments on it, and they do this by claiming that some Christians can’t get over their loss of privilege, and are just a bunch of whiners. Now I have many faults, deep and grievous, but I think that whining is not one of them. Try another one.

As to the charge that I am fighting for Christian privilege, the reply is “you bet I am.” When the Christian faith is privileged, then freedom for everyone becomes a possibility. When Christian privilege is made illegal, and its denunciation mandatory, as it has been in our time, the first thing that happens is that we see the essentially coercive nature of unbelief revealed. Unbelievers have never built a free society and they never will. They have been running this one for just a few minutes now, and they are already driving up and down the streets with their Coercion Trucks, loudspeakers blaring that it is past curfew and we are all supposed to go inside now, place our noses on the specially designated freedom wall, and think grateful thoughts about how much Uplift Congress will be able to generate next session. When we wake up in the morning, we can all have a breakfast of liberty gruel, designed by the first lady’s personal nutritionist and national sadist.
You know what we need around here? We need a liberty czar.

How many commencement speakers have been uninvited this graduation season? Tolerant liberals are going the way of the dodo, and they really might well be the one genuine victim of climate change. But speaking of commencement speeches, let me share with you the paragraph that got my speaking gig at Oberlin nixed. They had the prudence to ask for a manuscript beforehand, and I was foolish enough to send it to them.

“. . . and now, moving on to your women’s study department, an exercise in what I call petticoat feminism. They have instructed a generation of young women on the art of demanding to be treated like the men are, and then to burst into tears if somebody does, and to contact an attorney shortly afterward so that they can have the security of some fatherly legal protection. This is a mass of . . .”

Third, never forget that discrimination is inescapable. Why are people going along with this ludicrous claim that same sex mirage is marriage? Well, it is because Americans have been taught to hate “discrimination,” as though discrimination is a thing out there all by itself. Discrimination is not a stand alone characteristic. I would discriminate against people who take away liberty; they discriminate against people who exercise it. But everybody discriminates.

But Americans dislike unnecessary coercion, and they have been persuaded that traditional Christians like myself are “coercing” homosexuals by denying them the delights of nuptial bliss. Well, yes, but only in the same sense that I am coercing them by denying them the delights of the hawk’s ability to soar above the clouds, the marlin’s ability to swim the coral reef without scuba gear, and the gazelle’s ability to dash across the savannah. I am coercing them by observing (mildly enough, I thought) that they don’t have a body equipped for such delights, and they don’t have it because God didn’t give it to them. You can’t be born retroactively something else, and as it all came down, you weren’t born a hawk, marlin, gazelle or girl. But you know, things are tough all over.

The one bright spot in this whole rolling debacle is that this kind of big E on the eye chart punditry just encourages them further in their torquemadian tolerance crusade, and this means they start manifesting what actual coercion looks like.

Keep it up, boys, keep it up. I want as many people as possible to see your political theory in action.

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From Moscow

Put an Egg In Their Shoe

Posted on Monday, February 24, 2014  

By Douglas Wilson

Blog and Mablog

In just a moment I would like to interact with a post by Kirsten Powers and Jonathan Merritt, which you can read here if you haven’t already. In one sense, I wish they hadn’t written that thing together, because I have some respect for Kirsten Powers. She has done some very fine against-the-tide work on things like international persecution of Christians, and on the Gosnell horrors.

I don’t know as much about Merritt, but what I have seen seems to indicate someone who is being wafted along by the breezes emanating from the Zeitgeist Wind Farm, which is a bad metaphor because that’s not how wind farms work. To change metaphors, it is as though they happened to be at the same place on the road because she was walking into a great city while he was walking out of it. Anyhow, however they came to say it, what they said needs a response.

But before saying anything about their argument, I want to say something else about a necessary scriptural backdrop to all such discussions.

As conservative Christians, we are accustomed to discuss homosexual issues in the light of Romans 1. There Paul tells us that our gay pride parades are the result of refusing to honor God as God, and refusing to give Him thanks (Rom. 1:21). Nothing is plainer to exegetes — who are not selling out, or who don’t have a gun to their head — than the fact that an apostle of Jesus Christ taught us that for a man to burn with lust for another man was unnatural, and that for a woman to burn with lust for another woman was even more unnatural. But that is not the point I would like to make, although the point I need to make assumes this. We need to go on to see that this chapter teaches us something else quite important about our current controversies.

The wrath of God is described in this chapter (Rom. 1:18), and it is described as God giving people over to their desires (Rom. 1:24). The mercy of God is found in the restraints He places on us, and His wrath is revealed from heaven whenever He lets us run headlong, which is what is happening to us now. This wrath is described this same way again a couple verses later. God gave them up to dishonorable passions (Rom. 1:26). It is repeated a third time just a moment later. God gave them up to a debased mind (Rom. 1:28). When God lets go, that is His wrath. As Lewis says somewhere, Heaven is when we say to God “thy will be done.” Hell is when He says that to us.

So what consequences follow when He lets go? What does this wrath look like when it is visited on a culture?

The next point is often missed. This progression amounts to the wrath of God being revealed against us because we are being delivered up to the tender mercies of the wicked, which are cruel (Prov. 12:10).

Notice Paul’s description of what these people are like outside the bedroom. Right after his observations on men burning in lust for men, and women for women, he gives us an additional character description.

“And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient; being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers, backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, without understanding, covenantbreakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful . . .” (Rom. 1:28-31).

Now who do you want to put in charge of the new civility? Who do you want as an arbiter of true sensitivity in speech? Who should run the training seminars for all the big corporations on what “hate” is? Who should set the boundaries for acceptable public discourse? Who should be the appointed gatekeepers on what constitutes tolerant speech? For any Christian who has read Romans 1 rightly, not these people.

They don’t know what tolerance is. They don’t know how to spell it. They hate the very idea of it. They have taken the biblical doctrine of tolerance and have filed it into a shiv, so that they might smite us all under the fifth rib, as Joab did to people. This should not be surprising to us. Someone who finds the anus of another the object of his desire is not someone that I would trust to determine whether or not this sentence is a hate crime. They are liars and filled with all malice. They are backbiters, overflowing with malignity. They are implacable.

So if you want to form a brigade of tolerance cops, that is bad enough, but then, when you want to staff the whole brigade with these people, the entire spectacle turns into how the right panel of The Garden of Earthly Delights would look if Bosch had just taken three hits of acid just before painting it. The way of peace they have not known (Rom. 3:17). There is no fear of God before their eyes (Rom. 3:18). The only thing that their lawlessness can really do well is breed more lawlessness (Rom. 6:19). So I know! Let’s put them in charge of civility in public discourse.

This is the wrath of God upon us, and the wrath of God delivers us over to more than just our demented lusts. It delivers us over to the ministrations and judicial processes of those who refuse to tolerate any rebuke of their lusts, whether the rebuke is express or implied.

So then, on to the central argument presented by Powers and Merritt. They point out that there are more ways to be unbiblical in weddings than homosexuality, which is quite true, and they wonder why photographers don’t refuse to do weddings for people who are on their third unbiblical marriage. Two quick points, and then to the real issue. First, all such professionals should have the full right to refuse service to anyone, whether or not they are spiritually consistent in the exercise of that right. Second, the reason service is being refused in the cases of homosexual weddings is because the sin involved is flagrant and obvious, and results in something that is not marriage at all. It is same sex mirage, not same sex marriage. A photographer would have to hire a private detective to find out if the previous heterosexual marriage ended on biblical grounds.

With the homosexual marriage, the perverse nature of the proposed arrangement has been brought to him, and is standing right on the other side of counter, as much as to say, “whatcha gonna do about it?” So this evangelical photographers, bakers, etc. are not pushing. They are pushing back. Homosexuals are pressing this issue with bakers, photographers, and so forth because they are full of the malignity that Paul described for us earlier. They are the ones picking a fight, and I hope they get a real one.

But now let’s go to the heart of the principle that Powers and Merritt are advancing. They are arguing that if an activity is legal, and if someone has a privately-owned business that is open to the public, and a little bell that rings when you open the door, then that someone should be required to provide their professional services to any customer who walks in, so long as they are not required individually to “affirm” whatever they believe to be the sin in question. They can be required to make the sin look good, just so long as they don’t have to sign a paper saying that it is good.

Now to think this “protection” will last any time at all in our current climate is to be a black belt naif. The quaint idea is that liberty of conscience means that we don’t have to affirm that homosexuality is normal. Are we allowed to affirm the contrary? I am glad that Powers and Merritt want to leave us something, but this standard is already under assault, as we speak. So can I be a television broadcaster, or a public school teacher, or a newspaper columnist, or a weatherman, and I can post on my own Facebook page that homosexual behavior “is disgusting,” and I can do this without activists calling for my head and my job, in that order? The only thing to do here is express the wish that Powers and Merritt would get out more. This kind of “protection” is like hoping that we will be spared the worst ravages of the tsunami because the children have built us some sturdy sand castles on the beach.

So let’s see what this principle of theirs would look like if applied in other sectors. Does the proprietor of a business for the public have the right to decline service to someone because that someone’s behavior is offensive to them, although perfectly legal? Powers and Merritt say no, and urge us all to grow up. So . . . a web designer who wants to decline his services to a men-only golf club? A printer of business cards who did not want to serve Gosnell prior to his arrest? A graphic designer in Nevada who does not want to design any newspaper ads for the Moonlight Bunny Ranch?

Someone might say that these scenarios are not realistic, because nobody in those categories is (currently) demanding to be served. The Moonlight Bunny Ranch guy knows not to call the ad agencies that have that little fish on their web site. Right. But the issue is the principle. Suppose he did come into my little graphics shop, and I am being advised in the back room by Powers and Merritt. They are willing to show me the way Jesus would have done it, had He been a graphic designer. My customer thinks my first draft was okay, but he came back in because he wants me to “make her tits bigger.” That’s what draws most of their clientele, he explains. Wait, I say, because I have to do a quick consult on the back room — I fortunately happen to have a couple of experts back there. What, in the column they have written, would give me the right to go back out to my almost customer in order to tell him to put an egg in his shoe and beat it?

Read over their column again. Nothing they have argued would give me that right. And this means that their argument is not just inimical to religious liberty, but also to personal liberty generally. Not good at all.

What Would the Martyrs Be Thinking?

A Full Centimetre Longer Than High Street Minis

The by-line in an article published in the Daily Telegraph informs us that the new Archbishop of Canterbury is warning that ‘the Church of England . . . had to face up to a “revolution” in attitudes to homosexuality.’  So far, so good.

That a “revolution” in attitudes to homosexuality is taking place in the West, including Britain, is undeniable, although arguably the word “revolution” is misleading.  Change, or more accurately, devolution is certainly occurring.  But it is consistent change.  It is expected change.  The West has no moral absolutes, no ethical fundamentals.  It gave that away a long time ago, when it rebelled against the God of the heavens and the earth. Instead the creed, “Man is the measure of all things, and nothing human is foreign or immoral to me” has become the UK’s established religion.  Homosexuality is a human activity, non?  Therefore, there can be nothing foreign nor immoral about it.  Consequently, in the West homosexuality must inevitably come to be recognised as a human right, an activity protected by law.  The duty and function of the law then becomes to  condemn and punish any who disagree because they refuse to accept and submit to the (now) established humanist religion. 

How is the Church of England to face up to such a “revolution”  is the key question?
  The Church of England could face up to the issue by declaring a season of national fasting and humiliation and penitence before our Lord.  It could call for renewed efforts to preach the Gospel, proclaiming the law of God and the sinfulness of homosexuality (and adultery, and fornication, and porneia of all kinds), since “sin is any want of conformity unto, or transgression of the law of God”.  It could redouble its efforts to proclaim Jesus Christ as the only way to be cleansed of all sin and be delivered from the degradation and slavery of sexual sins. All these would be thoroughly Christian ways of facing up to the secular “revolution” in attitudes to homosexuality. 

But that is sadly not what Archbishop Welby is calling for.  He is asking the Church of England to move with the times.

In his most widely anticipated address since taking over the leadership of the Church, the Most Rev Justin Welby insisted that it was now “absurd and impossible” to ignore an “overwhelming” change in social attitudes. In a deliberate echo of Harold MacMillan’s 1950 speech which attacked apartheid in South Africa, the Archbishop warned church leaders that they needed to reassess their own attitudes to gay people – even if they do not “like it”.  While insisting he had no immediate plans to change policy on issues such as gay marriage, he announced a major campaign to curb anti-gay bullying in the Church of England’s more than 5,000 schools. He is understood to have approached Stonewall, which led the campaign in favour of gay marriage, to invite it into church schools to teach up to a million children about homosexuality.

Campaigns against bullying sound distinctly Christian.  We would expect widespread bullying in societies operating out of evolutionist ethical systems, since the fittest are those who are able to neuter, if not kill off, the weakest.  But bullying of any kind is a violation of the sixth commandment, Thou shalt not kill.  So campaigns against bullying of homosexuals in Church schools sound about right.  But it remains a half-truth, and therefore deceptive. 

What about if the Archbishop were calling for a campaign in church schools against the bullying of homosexual, pederast teachers who were sexually involved with pupils?  After all, such teachers would be clearly at the forefront of extending tolerance and understanding and sympathy and compassion to pupils who believed themselves to be homosexual.  But we would immediately see through such ratiocination.  Whilst pederast teachers ought not be bullied, neither ought their homosexual lust towards pupils be condoned or tolerated. 

If the Archbishop were calling for a representation of the Bible’s teaching on sexual ethics, sin, redemption, the atonement, forgiveness, cleansing, eternal life and a re-proclamation of the Lord Jesus Christ as Saviour in all the Church of England’s schools we would have reason for rejoicing and thanksgiving.  But sadly that is not the case.    

Why this new direction?  The article in the Telegraph gives us a hint.

In a wide-ranging address he said that Britain, like other countries, is living through a “time of revolutions” affecting the economic and political sphere but also in social attitudes. He acknowledged a “radical” decline in religious affiliation, as borne out by the recent census and other polling, as well as an “overwhelming” shift in public attitudes on issues such as sexuality where “predictable attitudes” were disappearing.  But he insisted that the Church could benefit and even begin to grow again if it was willing to “respond radically and imaginatively” to a changing world.

This suggests that the Archbishop’s animus is a desire for the Church of England to be relevant to society.  Society’s attitudes were changing; the church has to change as well (to remain in touch, as it were).  It faces a “radical decline in religious affiliation”.  If it responded “radically and imaginatively” people might come back to the church again. 

The call for the Church to be relevant has often been voiced.  Such a call consists of one of two kinds.  The first is is a call to be biblically relevant to the world–to proclaim and communicate the truth of God to a lost and despairing generation.  The second is a call that is socially relevant–a call to be more like, more accommodating to that lost world. 

Calls of the second kind lead to an even more drastic decline in church numbers and affiliation.  Such calls end up as ridiculous and ludicrous.  They amount to a campaign to have skirts a full centimetre longer than the current High Street minis. 

Normophobia

Carl Trueman Finds the World to be Upside Down

Pleased to meet you. Hope you guessed my name.

Posted by Carl Trueman

Reformation 21 Blog

Every now and then I find myself reminded of just how much the world has changed.  One such moment came for me on Saturday.  I was up in Boston to preach for my friend and fellow member of a certain parachurch blacklist, Mike Abendroth. On Saturday afternoon, he offered to take me to Northampton, location of the early ministry of Jonathan Edwards.   As I always try to travel light, I ditched my jacket but had no choice but to wear my chinos and a button down shirt for the trip.  In short, I had the humiliation, as an OPC man, of walking around Northampton looking like some newly-minted associate pastor at your typical PCA church.

We went to Starbucks.  There I saw a lady who was, as we would say back in Blighty, clearly a ‘bloke’ dressed as a ‘bird.’  Now I have seen transgendered people before.
  On one level, the sight no longer shocks me as it once did, though I have to say that I can never overcome my firm belief that men usually make remarkably ugly women.  And I can assure you that this chap was no exception to the general aesthetic rule.

What surprised me, however, was how everybody else in the coffee shop (including, I have to confess, myself) simply went about their business as if everything was normal.  And, of course, the reason was simple: everything was indeed normal.  The sight of a man dressed as a woman is no longer weird. It is part of the rich tapestry of everyday life.  My grandfather would have had no categories even to compute such a sight; but now it passes without so much as snigger or a nudge-nudge.

None of this would have been so bad except for the fact that it was clear as I walked up the  street in Northampton that one or two heads were turning to stare at the weird guy dressed like a PCA associate pastor.   My very nondescript, ordinary, balding, middle-aged blandness made me stand out as utterly weird.  Even Mike’s soul patch and sub-AC DC standard tee gave him a little bit of cover; my wing tip shoes simply sealed my fate.   Indeed, I have to say that I have never been subject to such evident and oppressive neophiliac normaphobia in all my life.   The sooner normaphobes are categorised as hate criminals, the better it will be for those of us who belong to the despised minority of the once but clearly no longer normal.

Two things came to mind: the beautiful young things of the reformed renaissance have a hard choice to make in the next decade.  You really do kid only yourselves if you think you can be an orthodox Christian and be at the same time cool enough and hip enough to cut it in the wider world. Frankly, in a couple of years it will not matter how much urban ink you sport, how much fair trade coffee you drink, how many craft brews you can name, how much urban gibberish you spout, how many art house movies you can find that redeemer figure in, and how much money you divert from gospel preaching to social justice: maintaining biblical sexual ethics will be the equivalent in our culture of being a white supremacist.

And the second thing that came to mind were the lyrics of a Jagger-Richards song: ‘Just as every cop is a criminal And all the sinners saints’.  That is surely a brilliant statement of the topsy-turvy morality of the world which sin has produced and in which we now live. 

Oh, and the name of the song?  ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, of course

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

A Whipped Up Tolerance Mob

Culture and Politics – Sex and Culture
Written by Douglas Wilson
Wednesday, 25 April 2012

We live in a highly politicized (and therefore dishonest) culture, and this means that before you decide whether you are for or against any proposed measure, law, or pr campaign, you have to look past the language. “Hate crimes” is code. “Anti-bullying” is code. Invariably it turns out to be code for some aspect of the radical egalitarian agenda for human sexuality.

Things are so bad that the Left has lost almost all sense of irony or self-awareness.
During the Q&A at the Bloomington event a week and a half ago, I was being asked about my blog defense of “bullying” at school. I had written a post defending the use of a phrase like “that’s so gay,” and it was read back to me by a questioner in a way calculated to make me ashamed of my defense of bullying, which it wasn’t. The post the questioner quoted from is here, and a couple of other related ones are here and here.

Anyhoo, I was explaining that, of course, I was against actual bullying, the real kind. In the course of this answer I used an example of mean girls ganging up on another girl, and I said something like “suppose they are being really catty and bitchy . . .” As soon as I said “bitchy,” there was an audible gasp throughout the room, and one woman starting yelling something along the lines of “Bitchy! What the effin’ razzum skazzum effin’ hate-monger effin’ HATE!” She apparently had a problem with the language I had been using.

The Left has no sense of proportion, no sense of irony, and no sense of humor. Whenever they propose hate crimes legislation, or anti-bullying legislation, or anti-anything legislation, they are doing so with the full intention of applying their peculiar (and contradictory) understanding of those standards, as soon as they get the chance, as part of a whipped up tolerance-mob.

Filled with hate, they march against hate. Angry at bullying, they bully. In support of free speech, they shout speakers down. Their punishment is that they have to be them.

This means the only reason they want tough anti-bullying legislation (for example) is so that they might have another blunt instrument to use in their ceaseless bullying of Christians.

Completely Unexpected

We Did Not See This Coming

Sectarian violence has broken out in Iraq before the dust had settled from the departure of the US army.  Shi’ite, versus Sunni, versus Kurds, with a dash of Iran, and possibly Al Qaeda.  Sixty people dead from terrorist bombs.

The reverberations will continue for a while.  It shows into high relief, yet again, that governing elites and the Commentariat of the West neither understand religion nor see its vital significance in human action. One reason for this is the West’s self delusion that it has risen above, evolved beyond religion.  Its demeanour is to look down from a lofty height, dismissing all religions as something mature people grow out of when they start thinking for themselves.  The West sees itself as a-religious.
  It is in denial.  The West remains deeply religious, committed to the ultimacy of Man, of His rights, and the works of super-erogation which collective Man–the State–can achieve.

But because the West denies its own religiosity, it loses sight of the intractable power of religion to guide and control human action–whether for good or ill.  The religious atheism of the West blinds it to the all-shaping power of religion, the ultimate beliefs nourished in every human heart.  Consequently, it reflexively and habitually overlooks the controlling and conditioning power of religion everywhere in the world.  Nowhere is this more the case than in its view of Islamic countries.

Its hard to credit how stupid the West is.  Because it lies to itself about its own deep religiousness and its religion’s power over the Western soul, it is blind to the power of religion elsewhere.  It ignores it as a material factor, even as it tries to impose its own secular religion upon the rest of the world.  Nowhere is this more evident than the public orgy of self-congratulation when the US recently withdrew from Iraq.  That country, we were told, is now free.  It has self-government.  Whilst it is not perfect, it is well on the way to higher things. The sub-text was that Iraq was becoming Westernised, secularised.  Ironically, the thunder in the background was not the rolling of celebratory drums, but the explosions of bombs in Baghdad.

Why do we at this blog regard sectarian violence as inevitable in that country until either one faction obliterates the others, or the country breaks apart?  Because religion holds its iron grip upon human action.  And in this case, the religion is Islam.

Since the chattering classes in the West have not noticed the religion of Islam is one of command, control, and suppression, their expectations of how things will “pan out” in Islamic countries is naive at best, delusional at worst.  Alfred Guillaume (Islam [Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1956]) explains what happened when Muhammad fled from Mecca, where he was persecuted, to Medina where he gained a far greater measure of control. 

From the first it was evident that Muhammad believed that his message was for all Arabs–and perhaps for all mankind–and it had now become clear they could be made to listen only by force.  There could be no compromise with idolatry.  Therefore it followed that all those who refused to believe in Islam must be quelled.  Idolaters whose very existence was an insult to the one true God would have to accept Islam or the sword; other monotheists would have to acknowledge their inferiority by paying a special tax.  This became the established principle of Islam . . . . It was put into effect in the whole of the Arab empire in the century that followed. (Ibid., p. 40)

As sects developed in the Islamic religion, whenever a sect came to be viewed as idolatrous or contrary to the prophet’s teaching, its suppression by force and violence by other sects inevitably followed.  You could not claim to be a believer in Allah and a follower of Muhammad without suppressing all idolatry by force, and punishing those who had apostasized from the true path into idolatrous practices.  The clash between Sunni and Shi’ite is a clash between two groups who regard the other as idolatrous and as engaged in apostasy.   Suppression by means of the sword is obligatory.  Thus is the Islamic religion, and, like all religions, it controls the hearts and actions of its adherents. 

Those who naively think that sitting around a negotiating table discussing differences and seeking to find a middle way will be effective in bringing Shi’ites and Sunnis together is ignorant of Islamic teaching, or of the controlling hold of religious beliefs over the human heart–of all humans.  If the Islamic religion had a doctrine of tolerance it would be different, but it does not.  One cannot be developed without denying the very authority of the prophet–which would be to self-immolate Islam.

Of course sectarian violence will rack Iraq, until one group gains dominance and suppresses the others, or the country splits apart into smaller entities.  That the West refuses to see this tells you more about the blindness of our own established religion than it does about Iraq.

And do we think Afghanistan will be any different, once the West comes to its senses and withdraws?  Only fools and horses would believe so.

>Welcome to Your Future

>Secular Multi-Culturalism Will Always Drive Christianity Underground

Multi-culturalism sounds like a neat idea. Reasonable people appreciate its implicit tolerance, acceptance, welcoming facade. Respecting, celebrating, and appreciating differences seems like a refined human attitude. And this is great–up to a point.

But if we live in a fallen world, where evil is intrinsic to life itself, indiscriminate multi-culturalism would rapidly becomes an oppressive disaster. We do, and it is. It destroys society itself–for there is nothing around which society can cohere. In the end the only force which can keep society from disintegrating when multi-culturalism is the regnant value is the oppression of the state.

Christians live under the rule of zero-tolerance of evil–within one’s own heart and life first and foremost, but also in one’s family and community and society. But Christians also live under the rule of the utter impotence of laws and regulation to remove evil. Therefore, Christianity alone holds a zero tolerance towards evil, on the one hand, and a belief in a very limited state and coercive power, on the other. Rules and regulations do not the righteous make. Christ alone can deliver mankind from evil, for He alone died for sin and to sin and rose again to newness of life totally lived for God (Romans 6: 1–11). When individuals and families are baptized into Christ, they are baptized into His death to sin and His life to God. For Christians rules and regulations are always servants of Christ and not His master.

Christians therefore live under the obligation of maximal lawkeeping (we speak of the law of Christ), but Christians also recognize the inability of non-Christians to reverence, let alone keep, Christ’s law. This means that Christians, on one level, tolerate an awful lot of evil in society, whilst at the same time they earnestly direct the attention to society-at-large to Christ alone as the One who can deliver from sin’s corruption and grasp.

Secular multi-culturalism, however, does not recognize evil within cultures. Therefore it sets itself up to tolerate every culture and defend its equal place and expression in society. Every culture has equal bragging rights. Every culture is to be affirmed. The one thing that will absolutely not be tolerated is any form of discrimination or criticism of a culture or cultural practice. So, Islam practises polygamy and the forced marriage of children. The multi-culturalist says, “That’s cute”. Islam practises honour killings. Multi-culturalism says, “How interesting”. The West kills off its unborn children. The multi-culturalism intones, “I believe in a woman’s right to choose”.

The Christian, however, not only must discriminate between evil and righteous cultural practises whether in Timbuktoo or Topeko, but is obligated to mould the culture of his own life around the commands of Christ. And this affects everything. Everything. Even down to how he eats and drinks (I Corinthians 10:31). It affects how he lives and with whom he will live. It affects how he worships and with whom he will worship.

Multi-culturalism, however, insists that you will either accept and tolerate all, or you will be punished. This is to say that multi-culturalism will tolerate only a certain kind of Christian religion–one that would dethrone the Christ and replace multi-culturalism as His overlord. This situation is a ground-hog day repetition of Roman multi-culturalism. Everything was tolerated so long as Caesar was recognized as the over-lord.

Here is a classic example of secular humanism’s multi-culturalism at work. It illustrates how it will always turn upon and oppress the Christian faith and Christians. The next step will be active persecution, if it is allowed to continue.

Michigan Woman Faces Civil Rights Complaint for Seeking a Christian Roommate

Published October 22, 2010

A civil rights complaint has been filed against a woman in Grand Rapids, Mich., who posted an advertisement at her church last July seeking a Christian roommate.

The ad “expresses an illegal preference for a Christian roommate, thus excluding people of other faiths,” according to the complaint filed by the Fair Housing Center of West Michigan.

“It’s a violation to make, print or publish a discriminatory statement,” Executive Director Nancy Haynes told Fox News. “There are no exemptions to that.” Haynes said the unnamed 31-year-old woman’s case was turned over to the Michigan Department of Civil Rights. Depending on the outcome of the case, she said, the woman could face several hundreds of dollars in fines and “fair housing training so it doesn’t happen again.”

Harold Core, director of public affairs with the Michigan Department of Civil Rights, told the Grand Rapids Press that the Fair Housing Act prevents people from publishing an advertisement stating their preference of religion, race or handicap with respect to the sale or rental of a dwelling. “It’s really difficult to say at this point what could potentially happen,” he told the newspaper, noting that there are exemptions in the law for gender when there is a shared living space.

But Joel Oster, an attorney with the Alliance Defense Fund, which is representing the woman free of charge, describes the case as “outrageous. Clearly this woman has a right to pick and choose who she wants to live with,” he said.  “Christians shouldn’t live in fear of being punished by the government for being Christians. It is completely absurd to try to penalize a single Christian woman for privately seeking a Christian roommate at church — an obviously legal and constitutionally protected activity.”

Haynes said the person who filed the initial complaint saw the ad on the church bulletin board and contacted the local fair housing organization. The ad included the words, “Christian roommate wanted,” along with the woman’s contact information. Had the ad not included the word “Christian,” Haynes said, it would not have been illegal. “If you read it and you were not Christian, would you not feel welcome to rent there?” Haynes asked.

Oster said he hopes the case will eventually be dropped and that he’s sent a letter to the state asking the authorities to dismiss the case as groundless. “The First Amendment guarantees us Freedom of Religion,” he said. “And we have the right to live with someone of the same faith. The Michigan Department of Civil Rights is denying her rights by pursuing this complaint.”

But Haynes said officials plan on pursuing the matter. “We want to make sure it doesn’t happen again,” she said.

Hat Tip: Andrei at NZ Conservative

>Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

>Dancing ACLU Lawyers 

Political Dualism – Mere Christendom
Written by Douglas Wilson
Tuesday, September 28, 2010

One of the problems with using Constantine as a marker is that there is a tendency to anachronism, attributing to him any subsequent malfeasance on the part of Christians in power. But the Constantinian settlement was, by and large, a tolerant one. Lactantius, the early church father who tutored Constantine’s children, was an apologist for this kind of toleration, which, in his day, was a toleration of pagans.

But there is a distinction between toleration of the views held by others, and toleration as an absolute desideratum. The former is crucial to every form of civilized society, Constantine let pagans continue to be pagans, and to think like pagans, and he let them continue to serve in the army (for example), but at the same time, Constantine ended the pagan sacrifices — a momentous step, and foundational to all religious liberty.

This distinction is necessary because at a certain level, the whole society has to decide whether to go this way or that way. For example, democracy does not mean that everybody votes for president, and the winner gets to be president 57% of the time, while the loser only gets to be president on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. It is not like a custody battle. The public sacrifices for the whole society either have to be performed or not. The public square cannot be a pantheon — for if it is, then the state is god, and that is idolatry. Calling it “secularism” doesn’t fix it.

There must be a God over all. That God may tell us not to hassle the people who don’t believe in Him, and that is precisely what the triune God does tell us. In this mere Christendom I am talking about (you know, the idyllic one, down the road), Muslims could come from other lands and live peaceably, they could buy and sell, write letters to the editor, own property, have that property protected by the cops, and worship Allah in their hearts and homes. What they could not do is argue that minnarets have the same rights of public expression that church bells do. The public space would belong to Jesus.

Our secular gods promised to do exactly this kind of thing, saying that if we kept this public space “neutral” (as they defined neutral), then all would be allowed to do our own thing on our own time. But this secularism is teetering, and is clearly displaying its hostility to the Christian faith. What I am saying here is that a Christian settlement would do a better job of protecting the true rights of Muslims and secularists, than secularists do in protecting the rights of Christians.

The argument goes this way. If I wanted Muslims to have the right to refuse baptism (which I would certainly want), then I would have to argue that case in the name of Jesus, and from the Bible. Obviously, I think that it can be done. But if I wanted to argue from the premises of secularism that all of us are anything more than meat, bones, and protoplasm, where do I go to make the argument? The implications of a godless universe have worked their way into the structure of our laws, and it is not too long afterwards that the darkness falls. And it won’t be the kind of night that you can dance away.

When tolerance becomes a universal virtue, suspended upon its own air hook and nothing else, then you come to think you can’t say no to virtually anything — including those things which will issue a fatwa against your silly views of tolerance. The universally tolerant do say no to one thing, however, and that is to any idea of Christendom. If you mention sharia law, they will talk about the rich cultural diversity that is found in certain parts of Ohio. But if you mention biblical theonomy, as being perhaps more attractive in other parts of Ohio, you will find these folks with heads between their knees, breathing into paper bags, in preparation for writing a hysterial letter to the editor. This is because universal toleration is suicidal. In Proverbs, Wisdom says that all who hate her love death (Prov. 8:36), and they really do.

Our fin de siecle secularism is fully prepared to embrace that which will destroy it pronto, and to shun as a menace that faith which actually invented true toleration.
But I propose a contest. Let’s build an altar of stones, an altar of absolute toleration. Let’s have ACLU lawyers dance around it until noon, cutting themselves with knives, and hitting themselves on the head with briefcases. Let us build another altar, and ask Elijah to stretch out his hands toward Heaven, and call upon Yahweh. The God that answers with a truly free and tolerant society . . . He is God. Let us serve Him.

>Doug Wilson’s Letter From America

>Tolerance as a Christian Virtue

Political Dualism – Mere Christendom
Written by Douglas Wilson
Wednesday, June 23, 2010

There are two basic points to make about tolerance as a civic virtue. The first is logical and the second historical.

The logical point is that tolerance cannot be a free-floating virtue. This is because no virtue (or vice either) can be found in a transitive verb. It is not a matter of whether you tolerate, for everyone does, but rather a matter of what you tolerate.

If we were to say that Smith tolerates “x”, we do not yet know if Smith is a hero or a skunk. Does he tolerate respectable dissent, responsibly offered? Child porn? Smokers in bars? Trans-fats in restaurants? Ethnic violence? What does he tolerate? This is what Rushdoony used to call an inescapable concept — not whether, but which. As soon as a man shows his hand, and we know what he tolerates, he is put in a position where he cannot tolerate those who refuse to tolerate what he does.

A wide acceptance of the homosexual agenda, for example, means that a society has to crack down on the “homophobes.” Not whether, but which.

This leads to the question of what a “mere Christendom” would tolerate. Every organized society excludes certain behaviors by definition, and is inclusive of others. This is what it means to be a society. Every society has shared values, and it polices those values. When those values are not policed, you have a condition of anarchy, or what the older civic theorists used to call “a state of nature.”

This being the case, it is certainly appropriate for people to ask what a member nation of this mere Christendom would tolerate, and what it would not. For those who gain their information about such things from the screechings of the alarmist left, the answer will perhaps be surprising.

Christians invented the most open and tolerant society in the history of the world. Tolerance, as we have known it historically, is a Christian virtue. As preachers of the gospel spread throughout a society, and new life comes to more and more of the population, the preconditions for an open society are being established. The more the law of God is written on hearts and minds, which is what happens under the new covenant, the less necessary it is to have standards of public decency urged upon us from billboards. There were all sorts of things which, prior to the last several generations of general deterioration, “went without saying.” Once that consensus is gone, you have to start calling the cops for more and more situations, and freedom starts to erode.

Now some might say in protest that they are quite certain that if evangelical Christians had their way, there would be no more acts of simulated copulation on parade floats in San Francisco, which is quite true. The observer would go on to point that that such open behavior would not fly in the totalitarian hellhole that we call North Korea, and QED. But they fail to note that such frank displays of deranged yearnings would not have flown in America in 1958 either, which was a truly open and free society. All freedom necessitates restraint and, for those who have been following this, the question has to do with who is restrained, and how.

An important part of the how concerns not the identity of those restrained, but their position in that society. This will have to be discussed further in its place, but are those being restrained at the center of that society, or are they outliers? Is the standard enforced with fines ten times a day, or twice every ten years?

Free societies can only function when the authority of restraint is found in the old fashioned virtues of self-restraint and self-control. Free governments presuppose self-government. This is why John Adams said that our Constitution presupposes a moral and religious people — it is, he said, “wholly unfit for any other.” And it is wholly unfit for any other.

All this said, it remains an ineradicable part of the historical record that free societies arose and grew out of Christian societies. I am arguing that there is a connection, and that this is not mere coincidence. I am arguing for a return to the preconditions of civic freedom, and am not arguing for an abandonment of them. Unbelief does not generate free societies. Out of all the explicitly atheistic societies that formed over the course of the last century, how many of them were open and free societies? Ah . . .
For secularists to treat believing Christians as the principle threat to their freedoms would be, were it not so serious, not very serious. But that goes without saying.

So as I envision it, a mere Christendom that would provide more real freedoms for the unbeliever than the current unbelieving society grants to believers. Measured by the Golden Rule, when we evaluate our respective proposals, they have far less to worry about than I do.

But for some, it all comes down to sex. They want to keep the government “out of our bedrooms.” What are they talking about? I have to live in their society, remember. And I built my house, which means I built my bedroom. The government told me how far apart the studs had to be in my bedroom wall, they dictated how thick the sheetrock had to be, they mandated how far apart the sheetrock screws had to be, they had policies on the configuration of those sheetrock screws, they have laws on the size of the windows, what kind of glass I can have in them, and there are stern legal warnings on the mattress tags. What do you mean, you want to keep the government out of our bedrooms. The president is probably contemplating, right this minute, the establishment of a bedroom czar. And when he does, the usual suspects will be out there on the Sunday morning talk shows, defending it. This is because secularists don’t know what real freedom is. Their worldview doesn’t have a slot for it.

>The Truth About The Tolerant

>Urban Myths About Christian Fundamentalists

If you were to be given a list of various categories of people and be asked to rank them according to least tolerant to most tolerant, and “Right-Wing Christian Fundamentalists” was one of the category groups, we suspect that most people would think that they would feature as one of the least tolerant of social or religious groups.

We were intrigued to read the following in a book published by MatthiasMedia in Sydney on some research that has been carried out on this very question:

In a book called The Religious Factor in Australian Life, Gary Bouma analyses the results of an extensive “values survey” that was carried out in Australia in 1983.

One part of the survey dealt with “tolerance” by asking people about their attitudes to various “undesirable” groups. People were asked: “Would you object to your next door neighbours being–people with a criminal record; people of a different race; students; left-wing extremsists; never-married mothers; heavy drinkers; people with large families; right-wing extremists; emotionally unstable people; members of minority religious sects or cults; immigrants/foreign workers; unemployed persons; aborigines; homosexuals?”

The answers were analysed according to various social and religious groupings and an “index of tolerance” was calculated showing, on average, the tolerance level of different groups. In the religious category there were five groupings:

-Roman Catholic
-Anglican
-Presbyterian, Methodist, Uniting
-Right Wing Protestants
-No Religion

Can you guess which group was the most tolerant?

The survey results ranked them as follows, from most to least tolerant:

1. Right-Wing Protestants
2. Anglican
3. Presbyterian, Methodist, Uniting
4. Roman Catholic
5. No Religion

The result surprised everybody. The hardline, fundamentalist, Bible-bashing Christians turned out to be the most tolerant group by a significant margin. Those with no religion came last, also by a significant margin. We might well wonder why this is the case.

Why indeed? Here is our take on it. Bible-believing Christians have a clear view on what is right and wrong. Such things are defined by Holy Writ. Therefore, they will have convictions that such practices as abortion, homosexuality, and drunkenness are wrong and sinful. People naively assume that having such strong convictions means that Bible-believing Christians will be intolerant and uncaring of people taken in such sins.

But Bible-believing Christians also are deeply convicted over their own sinfulness and sins. Because of the gracious on-going work of the Holy Spirit in their lives they constantly see the logs in their own eyes. When face-to-face with one taken in such sinfulness, they are more likely to have a sorrow over sinfulness, rather than a haughty disgust and condemnation.

Moreover, all Bible-believing Christians hold to the redeeming love of Christ towards sinful men and that whosoever comes to Christ will be saved from their sin. Therefore, living next to notoriously sinful people or interacting with others in general tends to be framed by an over-arching desire that they, too, would come to know the Lord. Bible-believing Christians know that “there but for the grace of God, go I” and that at best they are nothing more than one beggar telling another beggar where he can find food.

Hence, while the survey results may surprise those who subscribe to the urban myths about “fundamentalist Christians”, they will certainly not surprise those who walk in fields of grace.

>Is Tolerance a Virtue?

>Beware of Appeals to Tolerance

“Free” societies extol the virtue of tolerance. The two concepts of freedom and tolerance are closely related. If people are to be free to be, do, pursue and achieve as they please the rest of the population must extend a permissive tolerance towards them. This would appear to be self-evident.

Yet, it is also self-evident that society cannot continue without a profound intolerance. Without prescribed rules and regulations, laws and institutions of punishment, no society can exist for long. It turns out that tolerance, while having an intuitive appeal, is a problematic idea. Most people espouse it, without much rigour or honesty at all. People like to view themselves as tolerant and “big hearted”. To be accused of intolerance is tantamount to accusing someone of having a sexually transmitted disease. It is one of modern society’s nastiest skewers.

We take the view that everyone without exception has to be both tolerant and intolerant. Every single human being approves, approbates, and therefore tolerates something. Equally, every single human being is intolerant of its opposite. Consequently, neither toleration nor intolerance is a virtue. It is the object of tolerance or intolerance that makes it so.

It is standard operating procedure for the Unbeliever to accuse the citizen of Jerusalem of bigoted intolerance. You will not tolerate homosexuals! You are bigoted towards abortion! Your intolerance makes you a hater and a wrecker. We, however, are profoundly tolerant, says the Unbeliever. We welcome all. We may not necessarily agree, but we accept and tolerate. That makes us more human. It means we operate on a higher more positive level of being.

This sort of discourse is nothing more than a lazy dissent into ad hominem name calling. The real and substantial issue remains this: since all human beings are both tolerant and intolerant, what should we be tolerant about and what should we be intolerant towards? And on what basis are such determinations to be made—that is, by what standard are they to be measured?

And, are there different standards of tolerance and intolerance to be applied by different institutions of society? For example, all sins are not crimes. Therefore, the State may tolerate practices that some believe to be profoundly evil and immoral, and which particular individuals and families utterly reject. On the other hand, the State may legitimately be intolerant towards something which other institutions in society find perfectly acceptable—such as immigration, as in whether a member of my extended family should be allowed residency in my new adopted country. What is the basis or standard by which such decisions or differences might be tolerated and promulgated?

When Unbelievers accuse Believers of intolerance they are calling upon their own particular religious beliefs to make the judgment. Nine times out of ten they are failing to take the log out of their own eye. It will turn out that they also are deeply intolerant—just over different things.

Moreover, Believers are often far more open and liberal and tolerant to so many more things than Unbelievers. After all, it is the Scripture itself which teaches that doctrines of “taste not” and “touch not” are demonic. All of creation is good and holy and given by God our Creator as a gift to men. It is often the Unbeliever these days who is the wowser, being deeply intolerant towards certain foods, carbon footprints, types of lightbulbs and so forth. It is the intolerant Unbeliever who says, “No” to nuclear power. Believers view our created world as a wonder to be loved, enjoyed, used, and subdued. Believers celebrate life, food, feasting and the wealth of labour and industry. It is the Unbeliever in our day who has become the nagging and querulous wowser.

We are always amused by people who proclaim that they are Liberal. Usually this claim is made with a degree of self-satisfaction or pride. It turns out that there are only two kinds of Liberals: those who believe everyone else should be like them, and those who believe that no-one else need or ought to be like them. If the former, a malodorous bigotry, intolerance and illiberality are always present. If the latter kind, they are irrelevant to any discussion whatsoever.

However empty arguments over tolerance or intolerance might be, we should never lose sight of the emotive power of appeals to tolerance. Unbelievers will continue to hurl the accusation of intolerance against the Church and citizens of Jerusalem. We need to be acutely aware that in an age where government-run humanist education dominates; where, consequently; educational standards are falling steadily; and where over thirty percent of the adult population is now functionally illiterate, fewer and fewer people are able to think critically and rationally. Therefore irrelevant and emotional appeals to tolerance will be increasingly powerful to the lazy or easily led, regardless of their irrelevance or dissembling nature.

To be forewarned is to be forearmed.