[Vision2020] Missing the point

[Taro Tanaka]

Joe Campbell <joekc at adelphia.net> wrote:

[[ The whole damn debate started when Wilson tried to suggest (a) that 
slavery wasn't as bad as we thought that it was, (b) that some instances of 
slavery were justified (as long as the Master was "Christian" and the slave 
was Non-"Christian"), (c) and that persons deserved death on the basis of 
their sexual orientation. That sounds pretty intolerant to me . . . If he 
ever took it upon himself to stop saying such nonsense and to apologize to 
those in the community that he's offended we'd be well beyond this mess. ]]

Joe, I can't speak for Wilson, but I agree it sounds intolerant because it 
is intolerant, although I must point out one of your distortions of Wilson's 
teachings: he has NEVER said that anyone deserves the death penalty on the 
basis of their sexual orientation. In any case, what he did actually say is 
plenty offensive enough to those who find the Bible offensive. The 
likelihood of Wilson ever ceasing from saying that or of him apologizing to 
people in the community that were offended by that would seem to be zero, 
because that is what the Bible itself teaches, and the church has recognized 
that for millennia, and there is no need to apologize for to be embarrassed 
by anything that is in the Bible. You will note, for example, that by no 
stretch of the imagination has he has ever advocated vigilante violence 
against anyone. Rather, he is working (including praying and preaching) for 
society to return to a consistently biblical foundation. Presumably when 
that happens, the penal system will be reformed through the governmental 
system currently available to us, and, among other things, homosexual 
perversions will once again be recognized as criminal behavior rather than 
protected behavior. If that does happen, it will be through the work of the 
Holy Spirit convicting enough individual people so that as a net result 
society ends up being transformed. It will not be the result of some sort of 
a coup d'etat by Doug Wilson and like-minded men who then impose some sort 
of a perverse "theonomic" martial law, Nick Gier's sick comparisons to the 
Taliban notwithstanding.

[[ Criticism of intolerance is not itself a display of intolerance. ]]

Actually, in your case that is exactly what it is. You can tolerate anything 
except an absolutist position, because you have absolutized your radical 
relativism. You speak in praise of diversity until you encounter someone who 
really is different from you, and then you can't handle that. The fact of 
the matter is that your much-vaunted commitments to tolerance and diversity 
are a sham -- a ruse aimed at silencing the voice of orthodox Christianity 
in the public square. When I say "sham," "ruse," and "aimed," I don't mean 
that you personally -- or for that matter necessarily anyone on V2020 -- is 
self-consciously aware of that. But that is exactly the case at a certain 
spiritual level. The great engine motivating all this is a deep-seated 
hostility to God's biblical revelation and to biblical revelation's God.

-- Princesss Sushitushi

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