Ed Iverson is one of NSA’s faculty members and serves as the librarian of our Tyndale Library. In addition to these duties, as well as being a gracious Christian gentleman, he also writes a periodic column for the Moscow/Pullman Daily News. But the ongoing reaction to his column by our local lefties resembles a series of bottle rockets more than anything else. Today there was a letter to the editor demanding an end to his dissenting voice. Last night there was a letter lamenting the fact that Ed’s column ran on a weekend when many out-of-towners were visiting, the effect of which was to recklessly expose them to another point of view entirely. They might start thinking that some red state gunk is seeping into our little blue town. And then some of them might move here, bringing more gunk with them.
But the thing that is really fascinating about the ongoing objections to Ed’s column (not to mention objections to other stuff we are doing and saying), is the regular assertion that his column espouses “hate.”
And so it does, but you have to be really creative to get to that conclusion. If hatred is defined as disagreement with secularist fundamentals, and if Ed is guilty of that (which he is, routinely), then of course he is guilty of “hate.” And liberals do define hatred this way. Liberals are so committed to the unity of their god Demos that any disagreement on their fundamentals is not just “disagreement,” it is an attempt to divide the godhead. It is therefore hatred, blasphemy.
But one of the basic tenets of the Christian faith is that the human race is divided into two categories — the saved and the lost. This means that the Christian claim is that humanity is divided — but if humanity is the god, and it is blasphemy to divide the god this way, then the historic Christian faith is a hate crime by definition.
Of course this sets up a troublesome problem. If Christians see the world as divided between the sheep and the goats, the humanists see the world as divided between those who know the world is not divided and and those who erroneously think that it is divided. Now wait a minute . . . There are three kinds of people in the world: those who can count and those who can’t.
This inconsistency is why liberals are so shrill when it comes to the presence of actual disagreement. They have to get the inconsistency out of sight pronto. Express disagreement at any kind of basic level, and off they go, like the aforementioned bottle rockets. But they cannot afford a reasoned discussion of about whether the humanist god is divisible; the claim has to be treated as outrageous on the face of it. To treat it as a reasonable question would be to allow pollution in their sanctuary, which they cannot do. So the person who blasphemes in this way must be shouted down and frogmarched off the stage. There is a mob of liberals gathered in the hall, standing on their seats, shouting their indignation, and pumping the air with their fists. If the hapless offender is not careful he will find himself in a Reeducation Center for the Tolerance Impaired. Who do the leftists want send there? Who must learn that differences must be accepted and embraced? Why those who are different, of course, Where you been?