Free speech is being attacked everywhere in the West. The saddest specatcle of all is the crowds packed around the tumbrills cheering and applauding as fresh decapitations roll in. Unbelief is becoming more and more authoritarian, more and more militant. It is now blasphemous to speak certain words, or utter certain sentiments.
Let's recap why free speech is a Christian construct--required by the faith. Firstly, God alone is judge of the human mind and its ruminations. He alone is judge of the tongue. He has not given that authority over to man. He alone "takes every thought captive" to His Son, the designated and appointed Messiah. (II Corinthians 10:5-6) He alone understands, and can weigh the thoughts and intentions of the human heart. (Psalm 139:1-6)
Secondly, when man arrogates the power and authority to control what people think or say he is necessarily claiming authority over all knowledge, truth, and thought. This inevitably means the approval of some beliefs and thoughts, and proscription of others. The forcible imposition of an ideology or religion is the inevitable outcome. "Official Man", whoever that might be, becomes self-elevated to the status of a deity.
Thirdly, if human beings are to believe something in truth, they must believe according to the liberty of their conscience. Their intellect, emotions, and will must all give assent. To force someone to believe is not just an oxymoron, it destroys the essence of what it means to be in God's image. It makes that man a slave. It reduces that man to a chattle or a mere animal. Consequently, it reverses the created order, "animalises" man, and attempts to dethrone God, Who alone is Lord of the conscience.
God alone is Lord of the conscience and hath left it free from the doctrines and commandments of men . . . and the requiring of an implicit faith, and an absolute and blind obedience is to destroy liberty of conscience, and reason also. (Westminster Confession of Faith, 20:60
Fourthly, in a sinful world, where the Spirit of God has not yet taken every thought captive to Christ, to recognise liberty of conscience necessarily means that many thoughts and words and opinions that are not merely wrong, but evil, will be conceived, considered, and expressed--for the heart of man is deceiful above all things, and desperately wicked. In a fallen world, awaiting full redemption, evil thoughts and evil words are a necessary trial and tribulation; they are a necessary and inevitable adjunct of freedom of conscience.
Remove Christian faith from the culture, and there is no absolute foundation for human freedom, let alone the rights of free speech. At best there is the tyranny of the fifty-one percent. Therefore, secular humanism, being true to itself, cannot help but extend its putrid hand to punish thought and speech which it deems odious or evil. In such a dystopian world, the only tolerable freedom is to be utterly conformed to the authoritarian state. In true Orwellian Newspeak, "freedom" means complete conformity.
The latest example of free speech disappearing, to be replaced with authoritarian controls over what one thinks and does is the case of BBC Top Gear host, Jeremy Clarkson.
Sinister. Stasi-like. The final full-flowering of secular humanism has commenced. It will be the last gasp before it, too, integrates into the void, along with every other "ism" which has infected our benighted, fallen race. The Lord not infrequently gives a culture or civilisation just enough rope to facilitate a really thorough hanging. All of us are going to have to choose sides. All of us are going to have to respond to Joshua's insistent demand: "Choose you this day whom you will serve . . . "Jeremy Clarkson, The 'N-word' and the Creeping Tyranny of Political Correctness
On the day the Jeremy Clarkson "N" word story broke, I was sitting with friends of the same age in their kitchen, trying to remember when it was that the children's choosing rhyme "Eeny meeny minie mo" (or however you spell it: there are myriad variants) transmuted into its politically correct, N-word free modern version.
First, I seem to recall, the offending word was changed to "tigger". Then - so that even the memory of the unfortunate rhyme was expunged - it became "tiger." Today, most children who recite the poem probably aren't even aware of its sinister, "racist" past. But for my generation - which is pretty much Clarkson's generation: anyone born before, say, 1970 - it was so unexceptionable as to pass without comment, even were you to be overheard using it in front of your left-wing teacher in your kindergarten classroom.
This is something our politically correct culture has contrived to forget about the past: deliberately, I think, because the totalitarian left is the enemy of history and tradition and would like to declare every year Year Zero.
I can tell you now because I remember it well that when we used that rhyme as children and we came to the "N" word, there wasn't a racist thought in our heads. It was just another word in a ritual incantation, not unlike, say "trespasses" in the Lord's Prayer.
Sure it might have had a meaning once but you never thought about it or analysed it. Did we know the "N" word had offensive connotations? Well of course we did but the way we used it in the rhyme wasn't one of those occasions.
There's a world of difference between chanting such a word in a children's rhyme and directing it, with deliberate venom, in the street at a black person. Everyone knows this. Most people with any sense, anyway. It ought to be so obvious as scarcely to need restating. . . .
Now suppose . . . there had been someone with a tape recorder present. And suppose they had tried to present this in a left-wing newspaper like the Guardian or the Mirror as shocking evidence of a hated, right-leaning commentator's evident racist tendencies: the irreverence in his voice; the fact that there were children present during the discussion; the evident nostalgia for a past where the language police weren't out to get you for every vaguely distasteful phrase you may have used...
Even as a recently as decade ago, I would suggest, such a thing would have been unthinkable. As unthinkable as the possibility that a team from the Sunday Mirror would have been able to get hold of some outtakes from an old recording of Top Gear, in which maybe or maybe not the presenter recites the Eeny Meeny Miny Mo rhyme cheekily using the now verboten word from his childhood, and turn it into a story so scandalous that it threatened the ruination of the presenter's career.
Why would it have been unthinkable? Because even after a decade of Tony Blair people still had a sense of perspective. It would have been perfectly well understood that Jeremy Clarkson is an outspoken, cheeky, politically incorrect presenter who likes to push things to the edge; that the harmfulness of the "N-word" is dependent on context; that using it does not automatically make you a 'racist' (whatever that word means); that anyway, the offending incident wasn't even broadcast, so what business is it of the Sunday Mirror to be intruding on a private moment; that all these bien-pensants now calling for Clarkson's head - among them the noisome Piers Morgan - are doing so less out of affronted righteousness than simple resentment and jealousy at Clarkson's salary and popularity. . . .
There is nothing healthy or fair about this attack on Clarkson. In fact it is downright sinister and Stasi-like. The fact that hardly anyone is coming forward to say this - with such notable, brave exceptions as Michael Gove - is more worrying still. If freedom of speech is now impermissible even in private, then we are well on the way towards tyranny.
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