Cancel culture. Outrage. Twitter mob. Disinvited. Doxing. This is the world we now live in. One false move and you could be history. The mob could be unleashed and your family and workplace targeted. So what do you do? You shut up and make sure to the best of your ability you don’t say certain things out loud, or at least not outside of certain ‘safe’ acquaintances.
Blasphemy is not a common word these days. But amongst religious people, some knowledge of the concept still exists. When I was growing up, I was taught never to say, “Oh my God!” as an exclamation, and “Jesus Christ!” would have certainly been frowned upon. Not so much today.
What you can or can’t say tells you a lot about the faith of a people. Refusal to say God’s name in an irreverent manner, or to use Jesus as a swear word, indicates an acknowledgement of the worth and value of God and his Son Christ. It is to acknowledge that God exists and that He is special and deserving of reverence and awe. Further, it is an acknowledgement that God rules through his Son Christ, the King of kings and Lord of lords, and that that Son will judge every human being for every idle word they have spoken.
Despite the word blasphemy having fallen from common use, we still have the concept in our modern world. We now use the term ‘hate speech’. This is speech that offends our modern sensibilities. What counts as blasphemy indicates the object of a society’s worship. Yes, modern though we be, our society still worships. So what do the new blasphemies tell us? They tell us we have replaced the Lord of all with a new false god whose name is Tolerance.
And the strange thing about this new god is that unlike the LORD God, Tolerance’s rules are endless and onerous. One thing we can no longer safely say is “men aren’t women“! This is modern blasphemy. Thou shalt not deny that gender is a social construct, for Tolerance thy god shall not hold him/her/zir/xer guiltless who denies this.
But Tolerance is a difficult god to serve. One can know where one stands with the LORD God. He at least is the same yesterday, today and forever. Tolerance, on the other hand, is fickle. Fifteen years ago, it was permissible, and even redundant to state ‘men aren’t women’. Today it is evil. And unfortunately for his/her/zirs/xyrs servants, Tolerance’s changes in morality are retroactively applied. Woe betide any servant of Tolerance whose past behaviour, despite being morally acceptable at the time, is found in the future to be sinful. They shall never enter his/her/zirs/xyrs rest. One cannot go to Tolerance’s throne of grace and apply for mercy because there is no throne of grace, only judgment in our time of need.
It’s a strange thing that our god Tolerance is not very patient with our failures. In fact, he/she/xe/ze seems rather intolerant.