In yet another example of virtue signaling, in June of this year (Summer 2024), it came to light that our esteemed Canadian Cancer Society (CCS) has difficulty with referring to a cervix as ... as ... a CERVIX. In an archived page of the Society’s website, under a section titled, "words matter," (which has since been removed), the organization states:
"We recognize that many trans men and non-binary people may have mixed feelings about or feel distanced from words like ‘cervix.’ You may prefer other words, such as ‘front hole.’ We recognize the limitations of the words we’ve used while also acknowledging the need for simplicity. Another reason we use words like ‘cervix’ is to normalize the reality that men can have these body parts too."
When confronted, the CCS tried to make the cat walk backwards, pointing to the organization’s June 12th statement on cancer information it provides to the trans community. Yet, laughably, the moment you go there and read “We use medical terminology ...” you know the jig is up and no amount of sword-smithing is going to make their stupidity disappear. Proverbs 10:11 comes to mind here: “... evil hides behind the words of the wicked.”
Imagine if Jesus had said, “Stupid is as stupid does,” (Forrest Gump) or “You can’t fix stupid” (Ron White). It would have made for some great sermon possibilities.
There appears to be no end to mixed up, confused-of-mind executives like Andrea Seale, the organization’s Chief Executive Officer, who seems to prefer silly euphemisms like “front hole” and “bonus hole”. Exactly where does this word nonsense come from? It is the usual source for such nutty science, psycho-babble and war on normalcy - the Queer community. No surprises here! Absurdity is still … absurdity, and reasonable, sensible Canadians know this.
One would think that an organization that in the recent years has been rightfully criticized for its bloated administrative and fundraising costs (about 41% of revenues) … would not want to underscore their confused IQ by erasing women, mothers and vaginas. Yet they have … and they did! I suspect the next step will be for the language police at the CCS to rename “cervical cancer” to “front-hole cancer.”
Regrettably, the Canadian Cancer Society does not ‘own the corner’ on incoherency! Not at all. As Canadians gathered in France (June 6, 2024) to remember the 80th anniversary of D-Day and the supreme sacrifices made in securing our freedoms, our CBC was busy on a mission of its own – to denigrate freedoms soldiers, airmen and sailors who stormed ashore, flew missions and sailed the North Atlantic.
Our state-funded Canadian Broadcasting Company, the one responsible for the decline in legacy media trust among Canadians, asked on its CBC Kids’ website: “Is it important to remember and honor our military past? Or is it celebrating violence?” Really? Commemorating D-Day could be celebrating violence and glorifying war? Yup - this is what $1.4 billion PLUS annually of our public money gets Canadians – Tripe!
Isaiah chapter five is for most believers a lost and forgotten passage. The prophet opens with a song, a ballad about God and his vineyard (Israel, v. 7) and the tragic abuse of His grace and patience. I mean, what do you do when God’s lavish grace is tragically rendered fruitless ... when bloodshed trumps justice ... when outcries of distress drown out righteousness ... when moral bias and blindness decouple from instinctive and divine moral standards? The answer seems obvious - ‘You turn them loose’ ... leave them to their own devises ... and let them suffer the just results of their own ineptitude. We should not be surprised therefore when we read that this is precisely what God declares He will do in this very indicting parable. His resolve is reflected in a series of “I will” ... “Take away its hedge ... break down its walls ... make it a wasteland” (5:5-6).
The world seems baffled about the causes of its troubles.
It shouldn’t. Refusing to believe the truth about itself
would be a good start.
Israel, God’s vineyard, was a nation gone sour ... bad ... rotten, even though they had tremendous privilege and advantage. In a cluster of six woes, Isaiah’s prophetic warning goes out ... naming the nation’s specific sins for which she will be judged.
Grasping Materialism (vv. 8-10)
Self-Indulgent Pleasure Seeking (vv. 11-12)
Defiant Sinfulness (vv. 18-19)
Moral Distortion (v. 20)
Arrogant Conceit (v. 21)
Corrupt Justice System (vv. 22-23)
Granted, there are no hard references by Isaiah to gender ideologues trying to erase women or to left-leaning corporations demeaning Canada’s military past. Yet when you read the prophet’s list of grievances, it sounds remarkably modern-ish, not 740 BC-ish.
With Canada Day having now drifted off into memory for another year and our sacred flags securely returned to storage, it is questionable whether the True North remains “strong” ... let alone “free”. It’s not simply that there has been an historic decline in living standards and day-to-day life remains challenging for a majority of Canadians, but that a full 67% of Canadians believe Canada is simply broken.1 The details are startling:
“...women are more likely to agree the country is broken (70 per cent) then men (64 per cent), as are those under 55 (72 per cent) versus those 55 and older (61 per cent). Regionally, agreement with this sentiment is highest in the Prairies (74 per cent in Saskatchewan and Manitoba and 73 per cent in Alberta) and lowest in Quebec (59 per cent).” 2
Emotional, social and material success is no hope at all.
Only our hope of eternal rest in Christ is.
It’s not just the stupidity of CEO’s that highlights Canada’s brokenness:
Canada’s Jewish communities are under attack, with hostility, prejudice and discrimination towards them at an all time high in Canada;
Using the Crime Severity Index, compared with data from 2021, 2023 saw higher rates of homicide and sexual assault, with robbery and extortion coming in the highest with increases of 15 and 39 per cent, respectively;
In Peel, a municipality west of Toronto, thousands of books published before 2008 were purged in the name of ‘equity’ ... including, if you can believe it, The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank;
Overdoses in Toronto’s public libraries up 529% between 2022 and 2023;
Canada’s PM invoking the Emergencies Act to crack down on free-speech protests, including de-banking those who reject the party line ... a strong-arm tactic that was later ruled (January 23, 2024) both “unreasonable” and “violating] the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms”;
The lingering pathology (not ideology) and cultism of ‘Woke’, which Canadian political commentator Rex Murphy called “an insult to reason”;
Canada’s legacy media who fancy themselves our country’s gate-keepers, deciding who should be invisible, actively derided, even censured — like parents guarding their young children from social ideologues and activists. When our chattering news net-works paint average Canadians as essentially ‘irredeemable deplorables,’ its no wonder they have become irrelevant and untrustworthy;
The Public Health Agency of Canada admitting it tracked the cell phones of 33 million Canadians, spying on their activity during Covid.
The loss of intellectual freedom in Canadian universities for political minorities like conservatives and gender-critical feminists who believe in the biological basis for womanhood.3
And let’s not forget censorship on social media platforms ... fear of being called a conspiracy theorist ... cultural wars against children ... losing a job because of ‘freedom of choice’ is not permitted ... families reporting on each other ... prohibitions against visiting a dying family member in a nursing home ... white guilt ... identity politics ... nutty de-colonization ... the racializing of Canada which is creating more division ...... and on ... and on ... and on.
“I never let my schooling interfere with my education”
Mark Twain
Though ‘broken’ is not my preferred word for the condition Canada finds itself in, sticking to the “broken” language of the Leger Poll for a moment, I would offer that Canada is not merely broken; it is morally broken.
Now, ‘morally broken’ should not be confused with ‘moral injury,’ a more modern term said to have its origins at the time of the Vietnam war, to describe the aftermath of warzone trauma. In this scenario, damage is done to the soul when, for example, deadly force in combat causes harm or death to civilians or when giving an order results in the injury or death of a fellow service member. Perhaps the term most familiar to Canadians to describe this kind of injury is post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Such a ‘soul wound’ is not limited to combat either. Rape and abuse cause equally significant damage to the psyche.
The moral brokenness I have in mind is really of the Biblical type - the type the prophet Isaiah describes for us – wherein a culture manifests degrees of subjective morality, abandoning divine principles governing moral conduct (i.e. Exodus 20), pursuing acts / desires that are “I” focused and culturally fluid.
Society’s values have become like hobbies - casually dismissed when new sources of pleasure
or interest gain attraction.
Our leaders imagine themselves clever ... while misrepresenting their ‘opponents’ and practicing entitlement as a sort of divine right; our teachers imagine themselves wise ... as their unscientific teaching that sex is a spectrum adds to a child’s cognitive dissonance and destabilizes their sense of reality ... our doctors imagine themselves compassionate ... using abortion as a universal tool to manage unwanted babies; our economists imagine themselves informed ... as they squander public money and pile up debt that consumes a greater share of our national budget; our justices imagine themselves fair-minded ... while abandoning victims of crime (i.e. Gladue Principles) in favor of catch-and-release. Israel was ‘running out of morality’ says Isaiah. Now, some 3,100 years later, we manifest the same festering attributes.
I realize that talk of morality is a challenging lens to apply to our country, but with abortion legal up to the moment a child is born ... threatening MAID MD – SUMC directives regarding mental disorders just over the horizon ... and a devilish, determined, damaging war on our children’s sexuality, it is difficult to imagine these as ‘advances’ in morality. There is likewise something fundamentally immoral about inordinate taxation to support debt-financed spending sprees, wherein the average 2023 total tax bill for a Canadian family was equal to 46.1 per cent of their income ... or the Federal government invoking the Emergencies Act [later ruled illegal by Justices Paul Rouleau and Federal Court Judge Richard Mosley) as a means of punishing protesters for exercising their constitutional rights – summarily freezing their bank accounts.
Though it can be rightfully argued that some things are simply beyond the means, ability or scope of people to fix, we should not use this as an escape route to dismiss the growing list of fundamental mayhems we ‘own.’ The words of Walt Kelley’s famous possum Pogo were never truer: “We have met the enemy. It is us.” Indeed!
We are being plundered by mountains of dishonest effluvia venting off negative, dishonest
mainstream media outlets and accelerating
not only our political and social decline, but contributing to our spiritual fog as a nation.
Solomon, the wisest person to ever live had his preferred word of the day – “Fool”.
Proverbs 1:33 “Fools hate knowledge.”
Proverbs 10:23 “Doing wrong is like a joke to a fool.”
Proverbs 14:7 “Leave the presence of a fool, for there you do not meet words of knowledge.”
Proverbs 18:2 “A fool takes no pleasure in understanding.”
Proverbs 23:9 “Do not speak in the hearing of a fool, for he will despise the good sense of your words.”
Proverbs 26:5 “Answer a fool according to his folly or he will be wise in his own eyes.”
Later, in the New Testament, Jesus would describe the Pharisees and Scribes as fools (Matthew 23:17), and the apostle Paul told those Galatians matter-of-factly that they were foolish (Galatians 3:1) – reminding us that fools and foolish behavior can be found everywhere. I should add that using the term ‘fool’ does not violate Jesus’ prohibition against calling others a fool (Matthew 5:22), since the focus contextually is on a person who is “angry” (hateful) with his brother. Given that the Biblical definition of a fool is someone who has “said in his heart, ‘There is no God’” (Psalm 14:1), we can be assured that the ‘fool- tribe’ is not going away anytime soon.
Perhaps “brain” should be added to the ‘No-No List’ of words now considered unacceptable. After all, it seems not everyone has one.
Now earlier I said that ‘broken’ (verb) is not my preferred word to describe the condition our country finds itself in. I prefer the verb “fallen”, including that three-letter noun “sin” with all of its derivative verbs like ‘sinning,’ or ‘sinned.’ Sure, ‘broken’ has broad appeal ... but ‘sin’ is Biblical and unlike ‘broken,’ it has an obvious moral element to it – estrangement from God. In its various forms (i.e. rebellion, disobedience) it appears over 600 times in the Scriptures. “Sin” is a manifestly better descriptor because:
Sin is a relational word, aptly explaining why we are called “God’s enemies” (Romans 5:10) and “deserving of wrath” (Ephesians 2:2); broken conveys no existing relational structure;
Sin is an active word, suggesting moral responsibility; broken suggests victimhood, not culpability;
Sin speaks to our imputed guilt and the necessity of forgiveness; broken implies the need for a helping hand;
Sin lays failure where it rightfully belongs – on us; broken implies victimhood, that we are not to blame;
Sin expresses through atonement God’s exercise of mercy and grace towards us; broken suggests we simply deserve His pity;
Sin describes the need for God’s intervention, to pay the ransom, to satisfy justice and holiness; broken has no need for a cross.
For sure, “sin,” “sinning,” and “sinner” will sound foreign to many listening ears, evangelicals included. “Broken” language on the other hand is likely more easily to be culturally understood and in the short term could even be helpful in a conversation. However, we are not simply in bad shape, poor condition, or in a state of disrepair, as “broken” would suggest. It is not that we unknowingly flubbed ... botched ... muddled ... bungled ... and otherwise fundamentally screwed-up. No! Our problems go much deeper than that.
Sin soils the soul and scars the conscience. Therefore, we need to be stronger salt and brighter lights (Matthew 5)
“Fallen” gets to the heart of the matter and “sin” aptly describes our collective legacy, our human condition – a condition of the heart that is sadly of our own making and one that is undeniably fatal if left unresolved. We have acted not out of our brokenness, but out of our sin ... and any other contrived word salads will not free us of the torment of Biblical vocabulary like “sin” or its impact on our psyche. Yes, we are all sinners, navigating a sinful world.
In Genesis 4 God asks Cain to adjust his understanding of what is good to God’s understanding of goodness. However, if Cain insists on setting his own standards for what is acceptable, then, says God “sin (חַטָּאָה) is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must master it” (v. 7).
In this anthropomorphizing of sin as a crouching beast at the door, we see something of the predatory nature of sin. This is the reality of our human condition. We are locked in a battle with sins desire for us ... and God says that we are responsible to win that battle, to rule over our sin and not give in. Cain failed, the beast lunged and history’s first murder is recorded. No surprises here.
“Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death” (James 1:15)
We are more than broken, and the non-sensical wickedness and its manifestations grinding away at our Canadian morality collides with God’s wise design for human life. Christians will need to stand against the winds and waves this culture-chaos produces and live out their faith, if we intend to win “fools” to Christ. Re-introducing “Sin” into our pulpit and witnessing vocabulary seems a reasonable starting point – given that our ministry is one of reconciliation (2 Corinthians 5:20). I cannot imagine a better descriptor – can you? “OnlySaying...”
1. Frasier Institute, May 31, 2024. See https://www.fraserinstitute.org/blogs/historic-decline-in-canadian-living-standards-continues-into-2024
2. Leger Report, February 2023. https://leger360.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Leger_x_PostMedia_Is-Canada-broken-1.pdf
Eric Kaufmann, professor of Politics at Birkbeck College, University of London, in “The Academic Crisis in Canada” (March 30, 2021) writes that in his survey of Canadian SSH [Social Sciences and Humanities] academics, the left outnumbers the right 14:1, leading to heavy discrimination against the right. To illustrate, Kaufman writes, “Just 27 percent Canadian academics would be comfortable having lunch with a gender-critical scholar who opposes the idea of trans women accessing women’s shelters.” Insightful article, by the way. https://macdonaldlaurier.ca/crisis-academic-freedom-canada-address/
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