Yes – thou shalt discriminate!
Exclusive: Scott Lively on how the left has manipulated culture by redefining terms
One of the prominent indicators of our decline as a nation is the dramatic loss of critical-thinking skills in our population.
This is not accidental, of course, but a goal of the Marxist strategists who have been working relentlessly to dismantle Judeo-Christian civilization for nearly two centuries.
America's emerging "Snowflake Generation" is evidence of their success in pursuing that goal through their control of our public schools and the entertainment, news and social media.
That generation is a ticking time bomb of irrationality and gullibility that might just finish us off as a nation when these mindless "social justice" fanatics come of age.
Hopefully, their influence in the coming presidential election will be minimal.
However, the more pressing threat at the moment is their parents and grandparents – the people currently in charge of everything – whose minds have also been damaged by humanist mind games.
These are the people who can't discriminate between objective truth and subjective belief because of the deliberate, systematic corruption of the English language.
Take the word "discriminate," for example.
To discriminate is simply to choose between options.
It's an extremely simple concept that even toddlers can grasp.
So how is it that "discrimination" has come to mean "malicious bigotry" in the common vernacular?
How can a word that is so foundational to rational decision-making (and to teaching others about rational decision-making) – a word that really doesn't have a precise one-word synonym to replace it – be transformed into a tool of "social justice" indoctrination with no meaningful push-back from the vast majority of English-speakers?
Worse, how has "discriminater" become a deadly slur that even many Christians will go to great lengths to avoid being labeled with – even to the point of endorsing things God has harshly condemned and history has proved are highly destructive to public health and social order?
Some might argue that "discrimination" has just become our common rhetorical short-hand for "irrational discrimination" – that everyone still knows how to choose right from wrong even though the word discrimination has been redefined. But is that really true?
In the beginning of the process of its transformation, when "discrimination" was shorthand for "racial discrimination," that might have been a valid argument (questions of the legitimacy of redefining an essential word for social engineering purposes aside), because discriminating against people on the basis of skin color IS irrational:
skin color is not just an immutable trait, it is morally, spiritually and behaviorally neutral.
But once "discrimination" was legally broadened to encompass "sexual orientation" the calculus changed, because, as Gen. Colin Powell once succinctly observed, "Skin color is a benign, non-behavioral characteristic.
Sexual orientation is perhaps the most profound of all behavioral characteristics.
Comparison of the two is a convenient but invalid argument." (Colin Powell, "My American Journey," 1995, p. 533)
So why does nearly the entire English-speaking world submit to the indignity of defining their own inalienable right (and duty) to discriminate against sexual perversion (for the sake of their own children and civilization itself) as "malicious bigotry" by using the word "discrimination" as if it still means "irrational discrimination"?
Why is this glaring disconnect not even a matter of public discussion?
Why? Because, for one thing the word "discrimination" is only one of many words that have been hijacked and redefined by the Marxists.
They are the masters of the euphemism, and of establishing "ostensible meanings" for words and phrases in the public mind that actually have no clear written definition.
Ambiguity of language, combined with control of the most influential sources of public information, allows them to steer public opinion through emotional and psychological manipulation without having to defend themselves against arguments rooted in logic-based objectivity.
Take the word "hate," for example, as it is used by the Southern Poverty Law Center, one of the key puppet-masters of the American far-left elites.
They don't and won't precisely define hate, because their self-defined (and media-affirmed) role as arbiter of "hate groups" could then be exposed as hyper-partisan.
Any definition they could write would necessarily apply to themselves – and so ambiguity of meaning – and their power to steer public opinion – is absolutely essential to them, as it is to every Marxist strategist.
"Sexual orientation" is likewise never defined by objective criteria, even in law!
At best, it may declare what specific "sexual orientations" are covered by the law, but it never defines the phrase by the meanings of the words.
Objectively, an orientation is just the relationship between a subject and an object, so a "sexual orientation" is defined (in simple, self-evident logic) by whatever a person is sexually oriented toward, and thus there are many sexual orientations, including quite a few fairly common ones.
But, to define the words is to give opponents of the LGBT agenda a platform to raise questions about where the lines should be drawn and why – and they can't allow that because the emotional arguments they have used to gain public sympathy could then be challenged by logic-based counter-arguments.
One of the best (or worst) examples of the left's abuse of language is the term "homophobia" – which was coined (in the 1940 or '50s, I believe) to describe a psychiatric patient's fear of his own homosexual thoughts or inclinations.
It was quickly hijacked and morphed by the political strategists of the LGBT movement into a slur defining all opposition to their agenda as a pathology:
an anxiety disorder characterized by hate and fear of homosexuals.
Ask anyone who uses that term to give you an objective definition that differentiates "homophobia" from legitimate opposition to the LGBT agenda – and you'll get a blank stare.
(Even some so-called conservative journalists now shamefully regularly employ the term without a hint of challenge over its implications.)
There is no line!
ALL opposition is "homophobia," because "homophobia" is not a legitimate descriptor of a person's behavior grounded in science but a politically motivated rhetorical tactic of psychological manipulation to suppress public discussion and intimidate opponents of the LGBT agenda into silence and self-censorship.
Sadly, like sheep to the slaughter vast numbers of American Christians have acquiesced to the transformation of their language and the indoctrination of their children in the anti-biblical worldview it establishes.
They still have the full and incomparable truth of God's Word available to them, and pastors like myself are still fervently exhorting them to return to the biblical worldview by diligently studying and following the pure logic of biblical rationality upon the sure foundation of Genesis 1:1.
They may still nominally "believe in Jesus," but the fact we have come to this place in the history of America is proof that the church that once faithfully stewarded this nation
(excluding a truly faithful remnant) has turned from the biblical worldview,
lost its biblical literacy and can no longer effectively discriminate between God's truth and Satan's lies.
No comments:
Post a Comment