ECP Ignite our Culture Western Conference

I'll be attending the ECP Centre's Ignite our Culture Conference in Langley, BC this weekend. The theme is "New Media and a Christian Perspective on Free Speech". I'll post comments on the conference proceedings here as I find opportunity.

At the heart of this issue in our culture is the concept of human rights. Here's a primer on the biblical basis of human rights courtesy of Michael Wagner at NoApologies.ca:

Under the law, then, a man has a ‘right’ to his life, his limbs, his liberty and his property simply because it is wrong to take them from him except in just punishment for breaking that same law. The law is a closed circle, a complete fence. Within it men are free and have innumerable ‘rights’ if one wants to think of them that way. But these rights appear from the wrongs specified by [God’s] law...

Far Beyond Moral Equivalence

Jihad Watch reports on a recent episode of one of the Law and Order shows: Law and Order shills for Islam. In summary, the episode is about a Christian woman stoned to death for having a Muslim boyfriend.

We need not mention that God does not call for the stoning of adulterers - or, as Robert Spencer points out, that Jesus forgave the woman caught in adultery (John 8).

Spencer observes:

And the subtext of it all, of course, is that those who oppose the global jihad and Islamic supremacism are just another flavor of fanatic, not someone who actually cares about preserving Western (and other non-Muslim) culture and civilization, and safeguarding the equality of dignity and rights of all people. Nope. The two sides are completely equivalent and interchangeable.

Spencer is right that those who oppose the advance of Islamism in the West are painted as fanatics in their own right. But the writers are far beyond moral equivalence here. In fact, the two sides are not being treated equivalently and interchangeably. If that were so, the writers for Law and Order would just flip a coin to determine who would be carrying out the stoning - "Will it be the Christians or the Muslims throwing rocks this time?"

But we are quite unlikely to see an episode telling the story of a Muslim father who kills his daughters because they are dating non-Muslims - even though this very thing has happened and can't even be considered anomalous anymore in the West, including Canada. And we are quite likely to continue to see Christians being painted as dangerous fanatics - even though this depiction is contrary to the theology and practice of the vast majority of Christians.

There are two sides to the coin that is being flipped by writers such as those for Law and Order: on the one hand you have their unwillingness to confront - much less portray - the crimes against Muslim women and non-Muslims that actually happen, continually; on the other hand you have their willingness - even eagerness - to denigrate Christians and Christianity by imagining things that do not happen. 

These are the actions of a suicidal society: attacking the values that established it, and submitting to the values that threaten to destroy it.