Let Me Put it To You Plainly

Progressives and others on the “left” generally do not understand the difference between a legitimate and an illegitimate protest. On the one hand they think that somebody who hands out a tract about the evil of murdering the unborn to a woman headed to an abortion clinic or who stands on the sidewalk across from it holding a placard with a pro-life message is doing something horrible that should be against the law. On the other hand they think that when a gang of environmentalist activists who claim to speak for aboriginal people blockades a railroad, preventing it from conducting its daily business of shuttling people and transporting goods across the country, and costing Canadian businesses multiple millions of dollars a day, that they are within their rights and may even consider it a noble and laudable act.

Since lefties have such difficulties with grasping this simple concept, I will explain it to them plainly.

Let us imagine that you are mad about some public issue and want to make your opinion known. You make up a sign expressing your point of view, go to the people who you want to hear it, and march up and down on the sidewalk in front of their building holding the sign up for everyone to read. Or, if a sign just won’t cut it, you write a pamphlet, have several copies printed, and start handing them out.

Note what you have not done. You have not gotten in anyone’s way. You have not used force to prevent other people from going somewhere or doing something.

Your protest, therefore, is a legitimate one. It does not matter whether your opinion is one that the vast majority of people would heartily agree with or one that the vast majority of people would find repugnant. You have made your position known without forcibly interfering with other people’s rights to go about their daily business.

Suppose, however, that you were to take a different approach. Let us say, for example, that the local university is hosting a speaker whose political views you disagree with. When the university refuses to listen to your demands that the lecture be cancelled you form a posse of like-minded individuals and go to the auditorium where the event is scheduled to occur and block all the entrances preventing speaker and audience alike from getting in.

In this instance you have not just made your opinion known, but you have forcibly interfered with the freedom of others to share and hear views different from yours. Your protest, in this case, is not a legitimate one. This has nothing to do with the content of your views, or the matter of whether they are right or wrong. It is because you are interfering with the rights and freedoms of other people.

Having made the basic difference between a legitimate and an illegitimate protest clear, let us consider one more scenario.

In the previous example of an illegitimate protest, you had interfered with the rights and freedoms of others but at least those others were people holding to the views you were protesting against. Suppose that you were upset that Project X was taking place somewhere in the country and in order to protest this you went somewhere else and erected an illegal barricade that interfered with the movement and daily business of millions of people regardless of whether or not they had anything to do with Project X.

Is it not obvious that by doing so you have exited the sphere of mere illegitimate protest and entered that of unlawful aggression against the civil order itself?

The duty of Her Majesty’s government in such an instance is clear. Unfortunately, since the First Minister of that government is still Captain Airhead, the Canadian electorate having proven itself foolish enough last fall to give him a totally undeserved second term, we are not likely to see that duty done any time soon. As the events of this past week have demonstrated, even beneath his fancy new beard, Captain Airhead is still Captain Airhead.

Should, however, Captain Airhead experience a miraculous epiphany, enduing him with a newfound sense of obligation towards the constitution, laws, and common good of our country, here is what he would do.

He would call a press conference immediately. He would address the “protesters” who have blocked the railroad, informing them that their action is one of unlawful aggression against the Dominion of Canada, its constitution, government, laws, civil order in general, economy and people. He would give them twenty four hours to cease and desist this aggression, remove their blockades from the railroad, and to surrender themselves to the police. He would then inform them that the police have been instructed that immediately at the end of that twenty four hour grace period they are to move in and remove any remaining barrier from the railroad and that the Canadian Armed Forces have been put on notice and are standing by to back up the police using whatever force is necessary to accomplish this end.

Yeah, I’m not holding my breath waiting for that to happen either.

The above arguments are, as stated, independent of any question of whether or not the protesters are right or wrong. Nevertheless, it is a fairly obvious observation that the illegitimate forms of protest are more likely to prove tempting to those whose cause rests upon a weak foundation. In the case of those currently blocking the railroad, you have environmentalist activists opposed to the pipeline project in British Columbia. They purport to be speaking on behalf of the Wet’suwet’en aboriginal tribe, but that tribe’s leaders have, in fact, approved the pipeline project, as have the other tribes in the area in question. This tribe has both elected and hereditary chiefs and the protesters claim that the latter are the legitimate chiefs for whom they speak, but even then only a minority of the hereditary chiefs have opposed the pipeline and it would appear that some shenanigans went down with regards to the hereditary titles apart from which this minority would have been even smaller. At any rate, contrary to the impression one would get from the CBC, the protesters are not all aboriginals, many appear to be of white European descent, and some have only recently come to Canada. As is often the case with environmentalist “protest” movements that speak entirely in neo-Marxist jargon, it is likely that the only people these protesters truly speak for are the American petroleum companies who benefit from environmentalist protests against Canadian pipelines because these pipelines, if constructed, would allow our major oil-producing provinces, both landlocked, to access world markets and no longer be dependent upon the American market.

Even if none of that were case and this was a sincere protest movement, however, its actions are intolerable and the government’s duty remains clear. It is the duty of all lawfully constituted civil authority to use lawful force to combat those who use unlawful force to wage anarchical war against order and civilization. Again, the government’s duty is clear. If only the Prime Minister cared.

Semantic Shift and the Decline of Orthodoxy: Part One - Orthodoxy

Words often undergo changes in meaning over time. The changes can be slight or tremendous, ranging from a subtle alteration in nuance to a radical reversal in which a word evolves into its own antonym. This does not occur with every word, of course, and there are words whose meaning has remained stable, enduring the wear of centuries, millennia, and even the leap from one language to another.

Semantic shift has affected dogmatic or theological words as much as any other. There are several instances in which these changes have served as indicators of the weakening of orthodoxy. The word orthodoxy itself is an interesting example of this.

Within the Churches of the Magisterial Reformation orthodoxy used to refer to the essential Christian kerygma, stated dogmatically, and was understood to come in two tiers. First, and most important, was Catholic orthodoxy – the truths defined as orthodox in the Creeds of the early, undivided, Church. The second tier was Confessional orthodoxy, that is to say the truths defined as orthodoxy by the Confessions of the Protestant Churches – the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion of the Anglican Church, the Augsburg Confession, Smalcald Articles and Formula of Concord of the Lutheran Church, and the Belgic and Helvetic Confessions and Heidelberg Catechism of the Reformed Church. Note that the degree of orthodoxy varies between these Confessions, as must inevitably be the case between Confessions that are not completely in agreement, and I have organized them in order from most orthodox to least. Note also that although the Canons of Dort are traditionally considered one of the Three Forms of Unity of the Reformed Church, they are not included because they only pertain to doctrines that have to do with the Reformed Church’s distinct view of predestination. Finally note that the Westminster Confession of Faith and all the other Confessions that have been modified from it are not included. The Confessions of seditious, regicidal, schismatics, however much truth they may contain and however well they might be worded, must never be regarded as orthodox.

In the last century there arose a “neo-orthodoxy” in the writings of Swiss theologian Karl Barth, a “paleo-orthodoxy” associated primarily with United Methodist theologian and Drew University Professor Thomas C. Oden’s project of recovering the consensus of the pre-Schism Patristic Church, a “Radical Orthodoxy”, a movement founded by High Anglican theologian and University of Nottingham Professor John Milbank, and a “Generous Orthodoxy” associated with Brian McLaren and the Emergent Church movement.

The first two of these were the efforts of former theological liberals to return to the orthodoxy that liberalism had abandoned. Barth notoriously failed at this – his “neo-orthodoxy” was an attempt to dress up existentialist philosophy in the language of Christian orthodoxy, but it fell short of the historical, orthodox, Catholic consensus on a number of points of doctrine, including the very foundation of the orthodox view of Scriptural authority, the doctrine of verbal inspiration, id est, that the very words of Scripture were inspired in the sense of being given to us or “breathed out” by God. Oden may have succeeded where Barth failed. In his last book Francis Schaeffer expressed a cautious optimism towards Oden’s project which was then in its infancy stage. Almost twenty years later Oden published his The Rebirth of Orthodoxy which would seem to have justified this optimism.

With regards to Radical Orthodoxy, it strikes me as being vulnerable to the same criticism Margaret Thatcher once made of Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservatism, i.e., that there is too much stress on the adjective and not enough on the noun. Radical Orthodoxy began with Milbank’s rejection of the sacred-secular divide in Theology and Social Theory (1990), a promising start, and grew into a more thorough critique of modern thought and thinking. It borrowed heavily, however, from the other critiques of modernity that are collectively known as “post-modern”, including the obnoxious and barbaric methodology of writing largely in overly technical neologism. This methodology was, of course, designed for the purpose of subverting language itself, since language is seen by the post-modern mind as an unjust tool of oppression which needs to be deconstructed. This idea cannot be reconciled with true Christian orthodoxy which requires fidelity to Him Who was introduced by St. John with the words Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος. Post-modernism, for all of its claims of skepticism towards the metanarratives of modernity, has demonstrated no ability to think outside of the box of modernity and has been interpreted as being merely one of the elements of modernity taken to extremes and turned on modernity itself.

While this is not entirely true of Radical Orthodoxy, the leading figures of which have drawn heavily from such pre-modern wells as Platonic philosophy, Augustinian and Medieval Theology, and the Patristic writings, especially of the East, its inability to escape the modern box is quite evident when one considers, as one is not supposed to in theological discussions but which convention I have little respect for, how its ideas are applied in the realm of the political. Although this school of thought began among High Anglicans it is hard to imagine any of them, transported to the seventeenth century, taking up arms on behalf of King Charles I. They would be far more likely to side with the Levellers, the Puritan fanatics who were too extreme even for Cromwell. Consider Milbank’s tweet when Boris Johnson was elected Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

If, however, you want a theological example, there is the book advocating universalism published by Yale last year and written by David Bentley Hart, a disciple of Milbank’s who converted from Anglicanism to Eastern Orthodoxy. While some Westerners convert to Eastern Orthodoxy out of a sincere conviction that the Greek Church was in the right in 1054 AD and that all the Western Churches are schismatic there is also a type of convert who is drawn to the Eastern Church because its unfamiliarity to most Westerners allows him to selectively draw from minority voices within that tradition and present them as if they were the mainstream of that tradition in order to create the impression that ideas of his that would be considered liberal neo-Protestantism in the West are really the ancient views of this venerable Church. I am not saying that all of those drawn to Eastern Orthodoxy out of Radical Orthodoxy are of the latter type but read Hart’s book – it is entitled That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation – and draw your own conclusion.

If Radical Orthodoxy has borrowed certain ideas and methodology from secular postmodernism, the Emergent Church has embraced the latter with both arms. The very expression “Emergent Church” points to the movement’s understanding of the Church, not as an institution founded almost two thousand years ago, which we of the present have inherited from the past, but of something yet to be, which is now in the process of becoming. This distinction does not correspond to the traditional distinction between the Church militant and the Church triumphant. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the ecumenical movement arose, the name of which pointed back to the unity of the early centuries prior to the schisms, and which had as its stated goal the restoration of this primitive unity. This movement, however, was extremely vulnerable to the criticism that its approach to Christian unity was the exact opposite of the Fathers of the earlier era. Whereas the latter promoted the unity of the Church by drawing up the ecumenical Creeds, so as to define orthodoxy and exclude heresy, which latter was the mother of schism, the ecumenical movement of recent years seeks an artificial sort of unity through a lowest-common denominator approach which avoids divisive and contentious doctrines however essential to historical orthodoxy they may be. The Emergent Church, in looking forward to the “Church” that is becoming in the post-modern age, has taken this ecumenism to the next level. Thus, McLaren’s “Generous Orthodoxy”, is not orthodoxy at all, that is to say, a canon of sound doctrine that identifies and excludes heresy, but something that seeks the exact opposite of this, the inclusion of as many, radically diverse, viewpoints as possible. It is the theological equivalent of multiculturalism and the cult of diversity.

To summarize, when “Orthodoxy” is qualified by “Neo”, “Radical” or “Generous” it is to one degree or another, a significant departure from historical and traditional orthodoxy, both the orthodoxy of the early Catholic Creeds and the orthodoxy of the Magisterial Protestant Confessions. Clearly the “orthodoxy” in the names of these movements means something different from what “orthodoxy” was understood to mean until the early twentieth century. This change in the meaning of the word is indicative of how the movements themselves have departed from historical and traditional orthodoxy. In the case of “paleo-orthodoxy”, “orthodoxy” appears to have retained its original meaning and is indicative of a movement that is trying to be genuinely orthodox.

Orthodoxy is not the only word that has undergone this kind of semantic shift. In the next entry in this series we shall, Deus Vult, consider how the meaning of the word “evangelical” has changed from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries and how this change indicates a departure from orthodoxy. We shall look at how in the eighteenth century this word came to indicate a highly individualistic, experience-based, approach to Christianity that is in many ways similar to a form of religious fanaticism that was condemned as heresy by Catholic orthodoxy in the Patristic era and which was strongly opposed by the orthodox Reformers. We shall also look at how the word “Catholic” has undergone a change in meaning in Protestant usage from the sixteenth century to the present. In the century of the Reformation, the orthodox Reformers – Anglican, Lutheran and Reformed – when speaking of the abuses they condemned, used such epithets as “Romish” and “popish”, but never condemned that which was truly “Catholic”, that is, belonging to whole Church, everywhere and in all ages, since Apostolic times. They rejected the papacy’s claim to be the locus of Catholicity and refused to use this ancient, Creedal, word as an exclusive description of the Roman communion. Today, Protestants, whether they be neo-evangelicals who have grown soft on the truths of the Reformation or fundamentalists blasting the errors of what they regard as the whore of Babylon, both tend to use the word Catholic in the way the Roman communion uses it, as an exclusive description of their communion. We shall consider how this is related to the change in meaning of evangelical, for they are related, and how both changes indicate a shift in evangelicalism to an extremely unsound view of Church history, one which is directly responsible for the revival of virtually every ancient heresy in the last two centuries.

In a third entry we shall, again DV, look at how the word fundamentalist has changed its meaning very quickly in the century since it was coined, moving from its original meaning of a sort of alternative, conservative, ecumenism to now denote a kind of radical separatism. We shall see how this change in meaning serves the purposes of those who wish to deny the obvious truth – that the view of Scriptural authority now associated with the word “fundamentalist”, that of verbal inspiration – has been Catholic orthodoxy since Patristic times. In relation to this we shall consider a different sort of semantic change – how, in the middle of the last century, we stopped referring to the English Vulgate – not an English translation of the Latin Vulgate but the English version produced by the English Church and adopted as its version of the Bible for over three centuries - by its proper name – the Authorized Version – and began calling it the King James Version in order to lower it, in people’s estimation, to the level of the myriad of inferior translations that have now glutted the market, none of which can ever achieve the status it once held, and how at best, even the best of them can only ever be a helpful secondary resource in the study of what shall ever be the true English Bible. We shall see how this belongs to a series of steps, beginning with eighteenth century evangelicalism’s departure from the evangelicalism of the Magisterial Reformers, by which faith in Scriptural authority was gradually undermined from within.

Who Can’t Say What Now?

Here in Winnipeg, a local man by the name of Jamie Sitar has recently opted to take the Social Justice Warrior route in pursuit of his five minutes of fame. He has received assistance along the way to this ignoble end from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, paid for by your taxes and mine.

One cannot walk the SJW path without trampling all over people who usually – I would say always except that I don’t want to commit the basic philosophical fallacy of ruling out an albino crow on the grounds of the ninety-nine regular ones who proceeded him – don’t deserve it. That is the very nature of the road. Its every layer, from the upper pavement down to the subbase, is composed of the crushed human detritus of those who have been deemed insufficiently progressive and enlightened by the self-appointed watchmen of the moral and intellectual hygiene of public discussion.

In this case, the victim is John Sawatzky, the principal of the elementary school that belongs to Calvin Christian, an evangelical collegiate in Transcona that was founded by the Dutch Reformed sixty years ago. He committed what, in the eyes of the progressive Left, is an unpardonable example of crimethink when, earlier this week, he made reference to the last century’s most famous incident of missionary martyrdom in the devotional section of the school’s weekly newsletter.

The incident took place in 1956. Five American missionaries from various evangelical backgrounds and representing various mission agencies – Jim Elliott, Pete Fleming, Nate Saint, Ed McCully and Roger Rouderian – most of whom had been educated at Wheaton College, had been attempting to evangelize the native tribe in Ecuador that they knew only as the Aucas. This was the label that the much larger Quechua people who were their closest neighbours used for them. The reason the missionaries knew them only by this name, and not by the name by which they called themselves, was because this tribe was notoriously and extremely xenophobic and insular even by the standards of tribal societies in general. The missionaries’ evangelistic efforts had begun in the fall of the previous year, when they located their settlements and initiated contact by lowering gifts to them from their airplane. This led to further interaction between the missionaries and the aboriginals that seemed promising, but went south badly on January 8th. That day a party of the natives went to the missionaries’ camp on the bank of the Curaray River and, sending three of their women to the other side of the river, lured Elliot and Fleming into the water where one of the native men attacked them from behind with a spear. Meanwhile, the other three missionaries who were back on the shore were beset by the rest of the party who speared them to death. The incident made international news and the following year Jim Elliott’s widow Elizabeth published her bestseller Through Gates of Splendour which tells the story in detail. In 2005 Nate Saint’s son Steve published End of the Spear, which re-tells and continues the story, recounting the successful evangelism of the tribe, including the conversion of some of the killers themselves. This became the basis of a dramatized motion picture version of the events that was released the following year.

So why has Mr. Sawatzky’s reference to this story, that has been told and re-told, in books, films, and even on the stage, gotten Mr. Sitar’s knickers in a knot?

The following phrase appeared in it “The savage Auca Indians of Ecuador.”

It was the word “savage” in particular that rained on Mr. Sitar’s parade, hurt his precious little feelings, got his dander up and his blood boiling, so much so that he e-mailed a complaint to the principal the next day and brought the matter to the attention of the media.

Was Mr. Sitar upset about the redundancy in the phrase?

The word “Auca” you see, is the Quechua word for “savage.” It was how their closest neighbours, also indigenous South Americans, chose to describe them.

So is Mr. Sitar some sort of grammar policeman, blowing his whistle at the qualification of a noun by an adjective with the same semantic meaning?

Hardly.

Mr. Sitar apparently believes that describing a people group as “savage” is “racist.” Or perhaps he thinks that it is racist for someone from a higher civilization - permanent settlements, rule of law, constitutional government, monotheistic religion, advanced science and technology, etc. – to describe a tribal society as savage. One obvious flaw in that reasoning in this case is that the description of this tribal society as savage originated in the neighbouring tribal society.

It is worth observing that even if we were to grant the presupposition that seems to be assumed by Mr. Sitar – that calling another people group savage is racist – and to apply this consistently, by saying that the Quechua were racist in calling their neighbours the Auca, it can be argued that this is a lesser degree of racism than that which is to be found in this people group’s way of speaking of itself.

The people in question call themselves the Waoroni. In their own language their self-appellation is the word for “people”, as in, “human beings.” They called themselves this in order to distinguish the members of their tribe from those they derogatorily called the “Cowodi”, which included everyone outside their tribe, all of whom they looked upon as subhuman. This is, by the way, by no means atypical of the way tribal societies refer to themselves and their neighbours. The great irony is that the politically correct demand that we call each ethnos only by its own name for itself requires that we adopt a host of names that enshrine concepts of ethnic supremacy and are therefore more “racist” than mere derogatory slurs.

This illustrates an important truth which can be readily observed by anyone with eyes to see. The phenomena in the real world that most closely match the meaning that the word racism suggests to most people – the belief that one’s own people group is superior to all others on the one hand and a contemptuous view of other people groups on the other – is much stronger, far more intense, and much more likely to express itself in a violent way in societies that exist on the tribal level than in societies that have a higher civilization. In other words, the people the anti-colonialists and anti-imperialists usually see as the victims of racism are in fact far more racist than the people these same ideologues usually see as the perpetrators of racism. Indeed, this must inevitably be the case. For a society to advance beyond tribalism and build a higher civilization, requires that it engage in a much larger exchange of goods and ideas with other societies than ever exists at the tribal level. This in turn requires that to some degree or another, a concept of a common humanity be held by all the participants in this exchange.

This leads me to a further irony about the anti-racist ideologues themselves. Keep in mind that anti-racist is not the same thing as non-racist. Someone who does not subscribe to any sort of racialist ideology, belong to any organization devoted to such ideology, speak in slurs about other groups, or treat members of other groups unfairly in his personal interactions with them, can reasonably be described as a non-racist. An anti-racist, however, is someone who believes that he has the duty to seek out “racists”, call them out publicly, and, in many cases, drive them out of society, ruining their careers, reputations, social standing, sometimes marriages, and lives in the process. The people whom anti-racists target are not necessarily people committed to an explicit racialist ideology. Anyone who is skeptical of the one-world project, the latter days revival of King Nimrod’s Babel project (“Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth” Genesis 11:4) by eliminating what boundaries remain between nations, societies, and civilizations, and who believes that such things as national borders, laws protecting the same, and privileges of citizenship are indispensable to civilized order is likely to be condemned by the anti-racists. The anti-racists profess to believe that these views are a regressive hold-over from tribalism and a roadblock in the way of progress towards their one-world utopia. It is this latter aspect that explains their irrational and intense hostility towards anyone they perceive as racist. The irony, however, is that if anything is a holdover from tribalism it is their own perspective. The one-world project is essentially a white liberal project. Its ideal, despite its ancient antecedent, is not an ideal universally held, by all peoples in all times, but is rather a white liberal ideal. If a sense of tribal superiority has survived among white Europeans in Western Civilization it is most obviously to be found, not among the handful of clowns who like to dress up in Schutzstaffel uniforms and celebrate every April 20th, but among the liberal antiracists, an almost exclusively white club, who regard this ideal of theirs, held almost exclusively by whites, to be superior to the sense of the importance of national loyalty and belonging that can be found in every people group of the world and which is the true ideal. The anti-racists are the true white supremacists.

However, by articulating this response to such people I have committed the grievous error of granting them and their position a respectability that it does not deserve. In reality, such people are just bullies who take full advantage of “sound-byte reporting”, an activist media, a debased moral, intellectual, cultural, and spiritual climate, and the other depravities of the age, to impose their will upon those they perceive to be vulnerable to such tactics. If you do not think the principal of Calvin Christian Elementary School to fall into such a category check out the “Respect for Human Dignity and Diversity Policy” of his employer, especially sections 12 and 13. Undoubtedly, the school adapted this policy with the idea that it would serve as a sort of protection against false accusations of discrimination in this perverse age of Human Rights Commissions. This is foolish because it does the exact opposite – it signals fear and vulnerability to the predatory enforcers of diversity.

Mr. Sitar is quoted by the CBC as having said of Mr. Sawatzky’s language that it “is inappropriate and racist and ethnocentric”, which, if that had been all he had said, I would probably not have bothered to type this essay. It would be merely his expression of his wrong-headed opinion and I couldn’t care less what he thinks about anything. The CBC, however, then quoted him as saying “You can’t say this.”

Oh really?

Well, perhaps it may be “ethnocentric” on my part to adhere strongly to old Saxon notions of freedom, but frankly, in the words of Rhett Butler, I don’t give a damn. The moment someone says “you can’t say this” or “you can’t say that” my gut response is to say exactly what they say you can’t say. Where, exactly, do people like this derive their assumed authority to tell other Canadians what they can and cannot say?

The answer is they don’t derive it legitimately from anywhere. Therefore it is usurped authority, the ancient term for which is tyranny.

The CBC, every time it manufactures a racial incident, likes to call upon one of the self-appointed experts on diversity, race, and hate. They have many to choose from because this type keeps popping up all over our country like some particularly noxious form of toadstool. In this case they called upon Ry Moran, the director of the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation in Winnipeg. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was the organization that produced a study of the Indian Residential Schools for the government a few years back which, despite its claim to be scientific, gives every impression, to me at least, of having started with its conclusion and worked towards it, suppressed whatever contrary evidence that it could, and where it could not, buried it in a report so long that most people, especially politicians, could not be bothered to read it but just jump to the conclusion. Whatever one thinks of the Residential Schools – and I unapologetically declare my opinion to be the opposite of whatever the TRC thinks – they had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with what happened in Ecuador in 1956. Yet Moran, who like most professional anti-racists – look up pictures of Richard Warman, Evan Balgord, Bernie Farber, Helmut-Harry Loewen, Harry Abrams, and Kurt Phillips the recently doxxed figure behind the Nosferatu persona at AntiRacist Canada some time and note the conspicuous homogeneity in skin colour – appears to be lily-white, uses the schools to argue that the word to which objection is being made belongs to “a very problematic and longstanding narrative that frankly has no place in society anymore”. Which is just a more pedantic way of saying “you can’t say this.”

Perhaps the real problem that people like Mr. Sitar and Mr. Moran have with what Mr. Sawatzky wrote, has less to do with the word “savage” – amusingly the CBC article consistently uses the word “Auca” in reference to the tribe even when speaking in the writer’s own voice – than with what Mr. Elliott, et. al, were in Ecuador to do. After the above quotation from Moran the article goes on to say:

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 94 recommendations include calls to action for faith communities to proactively recognize Indigenous spirituality as being legitimate in its own right, he added.

In other words, the TRC is ordering Christians to abandon their belief that Jesus Christ is “the Way, the Truth, and the Life” Who is the only way to God. Since Jesus Christ Himself was the one Who said this abandoning this belief is not an option for us. Any Christian leader that follows through on the TRC’s call to action thereby commits an act of apostasy.

As for Mr. Sawatzky, the same day he received Mr. Sitar’s complaint, he made an apology which is quoted in the CBC article:

I could have found a more helpful way to describe the event I shared, and again apologize to those who may have been unintentionally hurt by such descriptions.

Quod onus stercoris!

There was nothing wrong with what Mr. Sawatzky had originally said, the tribe which murdered the missionaries certainly deserved to be called “savage”, nobody who has demanded an apology from him deserves one, and issuing the apology has not done him any good since the CBC reported the whole story the next day paving the way for him to be bombarded with the kind of harassment that the SJW mob culture excels in.

The lesson to be learned from all this is to never give in to these sort of demands. When you give bullies what they want you only invite more bullying, not just of yourself, but of others as well. These kind of bullies have gotten away with this sort of bullying for so long, only because far too few of us have been willing to stand up to them, to say what they say we can’t say, and refuse to apologize for it.

Lord haste the day when once again we can say whatever we think in Canada. With the possible sole exception of “you can’t say this.”