Cancel Culture « Gratia Veritas Lumen

Blessed Are the Peacemakers: LEOs Respectfully try to School Indoctrinated Leftist White Liberal

June 26, 2020 — Leave a comment

Watch as both white and black police officers respectfully try to school (or perhaps its better to say unschool?) this leftist, white woman, after she accuses the white police officer of being a racist (and therefore evil) because of his shade of melanin.

One of the officers near the end nails it saying, “let me tell you something, America has a sin problem. The world has a sin problem. Jesus said “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the father except through me.” America and the world has a sin problem. That’s where racism, injustice, and hate, and anger, and violence, are coming from. It’s not about racism. Read the Bible!”

Associating evil with skin colour in the name of anti-racism, is racism. Worse, it’s demonising a complete ethnic group in much the same way the Nazis demonised the Jews, and in the same way Bolsheviks demonised the “kulaks”. The end result of this kind of thinking is bloodshed.

You can help end this before it gets to that point, by speaking truth into the falsehoods, and rejecting that trajectory as graciously as possible.

Big kudos to these lads from law enforcement.

“Blessed are the peacemakers…”

Video: Breitbart

In Political Theology, Politics Cancel Culture, Indoctrination, Law Enforcement, Leftism, Peacemakers

Leftist Hypocrisy & Cancel Culture’s “life unworthy of life” prescription for Cultural Suicide

June 26, 2020 — Leave a comment

Eric Abetz (LNP) is proving to be no mediocre politician. His speech from July last year remains relevant, making his message one of the best ever entered into the Australian senate’s Hansard.[i]

This year the Senator for Tasmania provided us with a sequel. Speaking about ‘Political Discourse’ Abetz went head to head with cancel culture and the Left’s double standards.

The speech highlighted Queensland University Law professor, James Allen’s piece for The Australian on the June, 16^th.

He gave a long list of examples where people were being bullied into submission, and their livelihoods cancelled because of a small, boisterous percentage of people online, and within corporations, looking for oppression, prejudice, malice and racism in everything.

Under Cancel Culture, it no longer matters whether or not a perceived offense was intentional or unintentional (or accidental). These are often labeled micro-aggressions. All that matters is the perceived outcome.

This is what Jonathon Haidt called ‘outcome over intent’ [ii]. Haidt explains that micro-aggression theory is the life blood of cancel culture. If the outcome is perceived to be offensive, intention doesn’t matter.

Appearance and accusation, follows emotional reasoning. Feelings are then placed as lord and master over evidence based reasoning. If something feels offensive, than that something, or someone, is no longer deemed worthy of life or livelihood.

Not only is this culture unstable, it’s unsustainable, and as Abetz argues, ultimately destructive.

Make no mistake about it. Cancel culture is a “life unworthy of life” prescription that echoes the same kind of ideology which allowed Stalin’s Gulags, and purges, along with Nazi Germany’s Auschwitz, Dachau, Ravensbruck and Buchenwald (among others).

This should send a chill up and down the proverbial spine of Western society. The same callous boney fingers which gripped Europe in the 20^th Century, is wrapping its hands round the necks of Western society.

It gives us a strong reason to step back, assess and rethink any agreement with, or participation in such a culture and its ideology.

For these reasons alone, I don’t think it a stretch to say here that, yet again, Abetz is spot on in both his warning, and rebuttal of Cancel Culture’s, “life unworthy of life” prescription for cultural suicide.

Full Transcript of Eric’s five minute speech:

“If an individual were to engage in self-loathing, relentlessly finding the fault with self, and ridiculing and denigrating all their past endeavors, we would rightly conclude the individual had issues. Counseling might be in order.

So to with a society; if a society is willing to engage and embrace those who relentlessly spread negativity, and wallow in fault-finding it will have an extremely bleak future. A mature reflection of self or of society recognizes the good, with the not so good.

We should learn from past mistakes, not to tear down and destroy, but to build an even better future. This is how our society has progressed, and why we are where we are today as a nation – the envy of the world.

Let’s be clear. One of the great freedoms we have in Australia is the liberty to leave if we don’t like it. I don’t see any of the professionally and perpetually outraged leaving Australia for North Korea, Cuba or China.

For its alleged and real faults, Australia is the favored destination of the peoples of the world seeking freedom and opportunity.

As professor [James] Allen so eloquently wrote, “you know you’re living in George Orwell’s world, when speech is considered violence, and violence is considered speech.”

And that is exactly what we are witnessing today. Ugly double standards courtesy of the Anarchist Left; when conservatives speak they are accused of violence if they take a view contrary to the “woke” Left, but if the same language is used by the Left, it as indication of empathy, and “wokeness” – always excused.

Bettina Arndt’s award earlier this year was vehemently attacked by Labor senate leadership team. That same team of two women remain as silent as a rock, over the more recent award to that purveyor of ugly, sexist violence to women and anti-Semitic tweets, Mike Carlton.

Reason? He’s from the tribe. He’s from the Left. Similarly the treatment of Cardinal George Pell, and Paul Bonjornio, both in a seminary with that horrific pedophile, Ridgedale.

Pell should have been fully alert and known all that went on. Bonjornio on the other hand, fully excused, “of course, he couldn’t have known.”

The difference of treatment? Pell is of a conservative disposition; Bonjornio from the Left. We see the “woke” Left attacking statues of former Coalition leaders and Captain Cook, possibly the world’s greatest ever navigator; for allegedly being racist.

But a Labor leader [Arthur Calwell] who supported the ‘White Australia Policy’, and famously (or infamously) said, “two wongs, don’t make a white” sits in the pantheon of Labor leaders. As does another Labor leader [Gough Whitlam] who referred to Vietnamese refugees “[expletive deleted], Vietnamese Balts.”

No their names are not to be vilified or desecrated. Instead they are hallowed. Why? Because they are from the Left, whereas the Coalition leader [Tony Abbott] who voluntarily dedicated a week per year assisting Indigenous communities without media fan fare, needs to be vilified for his alleged racism.

Go figure!

Refusal to acknowledge any good in others, and any possible failings in the tribe has become the mantra and justification to remove people from employment, films and books from the public; for sports people to kneel for a cause and close businesses.

So much for the celebration of diversity – everything is judged in terms of claimable victimhood, division and partisanship.

The tribe excuses each other and accuses everyone else – the recipe for disharmony, anarchy and societal collapse. Facts, evidence, objective truths are junked in favor of bullying, sloganeering, and emoting.

The time has come to stand firm, push back and advocate the cause of our wonderful heritage bequeathed to us by our forebears; an heritage of civility, a system of democratic government, the rule of law, personal freedoms, and the standard of living, all of which makes Australians the envy of the world.

I for one will continue to be thankful and defend and promote that heritage, because for all its faults I know no better country.

I know no better people.”

References:

[i] Abetz, E. Freedom of Speech, 2^nd July 2019.

[ii] Haidt, J. & Lukianoff. G. 2018. The Coddling of the American Mind Penguin Books Ltd.

[iii] Allen, J. Cowardly Elites appease bullies of Cancel Culture The Australian, 16^th June, 2020

First published on Caldron Pool, 25th June 2020.

Photo by Mateus Campos Felipe on Unsplash

In Australia, Politics Cancel Culture, Eric Abetz, James Allen, Jonathon Haidt, Life unworthy of life

Answering Cancel Culture With Unconquerable Joy

April 20, 2020 — Leave a comment

In a brief five minute video posted to Desiring God’s YouTube channel, John Piper rips apart the cultural control of ‘cancel culture’. The small segment was taken from a talk given in January called ‘Serious Joy, Cultural Conflict, & Christian Humility: Thoughts on Christian Education.’

Piper’s argument is one of the best I’ve heard so far from Christian leaders – Voddie Baucham’s lengthy, but poignant takedown of ‘Cultural Marxism’ being the only exception (as has been discussed by Caldron Pool’s Editor Ben Davis, here).

Like Baucham, Piper turns the light on where few seem willing to do so. Leaning on work from Jonathon Haidt and Greg Lukianoff in their outstanding book, ‘The Coddling of the American Mind’ (2018), Piper briefly addresses the non-sequitur, and vacuous subjective nature of the movement. In sum, Haidt and Lukianoff identify ‘cancel culture’ as part of a broader new paradigm which measures good and evil by the yardstick of ‘safe versus dangerous, instead of true versus false.’

Under the authoritarian, whimsical hegemony of ‘cancel culture’, ‘if you take your stand and speak your truth, you may be subject to call-out, outrage, or being cancelled, because you have not sufficiently coddled’ the feelings of others, or sufficiently met any number of asinine politically correct requirements. As Haidt and Lukianoff quip, the response then is one where ‘you must call out [the offence giver]! Assemble a coalition of the righteous, and shame the evil ones until they change their ways.”

As part of their introduction, Haidt writes that ‘cancel culture’ ‘unwittingly employs the very cognitive distortions that Cognitive Behavioural Therapy tries to correct. For example: catastrophizing (jumping the worst possible conclusions), and negative filtering (negative self-talk; such as saying to yourself, “I’ll never amount to anything”). Haidt then notes, ‘stated simply: Many university students are learning to think in distorted ways, and this increases their likelihood of becoming fragile, anxious, and easily hurt.’

Equating ‘cancel culture’ with the persecution of Christians in Acts 5:27-41, Piper supports this appraisal. Just as the ‘Sanhedrin tried to silence the voice of Christian leaders’, so sways the motion and violent conclusions of ‘cancel culture.’ Being easily offended, or a person having their feelings hurt, isn’t enough just-cause to rage at people, call people out, or “cancel” them.

According to Piper, the response to ‘cancel culture’ is ‘serious joy.’ The Apostle Peter, beaten by enraged, and blood-thirsty authorities, ‘rejoiced’ that he and others ‘were counted worthy to suffer dishonour’ for speaking in Jesus Christ’s name; that name having been banned – cancelled – deemed offensive by the authorities.

Piper’s conclusion:

“If you take a stand the culture hates, and speak a word the culture condemns, and they shame you, and persecute you, and plunder you, but your serious joy remains, they’ve lost their power to control where you stand and what you say.

If your joy comes from the world — its benefits, its comforts, its kudos — you’re like a leaf in the wind. Yours is not a serious joy. It’s a secondhand joy. You are not free. Serious joy sets people free. And makes them the most secure and subversive people when it comes to cultural control.

This has always been true, for two thousand years. Serious joy in Christ through pain has always been radically liberating from cultural control. In getting their joy from heaven, Christians become free on earth.”

Piper is right. ‘Cancel culture’ cannot beat ‘serious joy.’ There’s no excuse for our response to be joyless. Humility wins. We speak truth in love, bearing the name of Jesus Christ. Not falling into step with the spirit of the age, but keeping in step with the Holy Spirit, knowing that though, would-be and actual authoritarians may try to cancel us, our work – or even our entire livelihoods – the unconquerable joy gifted to us in Jesus Christ, and the gracious provision God brings with, through, and because of it, cannot, and will not be cancelled.

Extending out from Piper’s final word is this: ‘stand firm in serious joy’ – for the fact that man ‘is not God. We are sinners. We are finite’ (Piper); and though men and women may arrogantly try to control it, for the very fact that ‘man has no control over God’s grace.’ (Karl Barth, CD. 3:4:105).