Digging deeper The elevation of feelings as facts can have disastrous consequences – eg around Trans practice: if a teenager feels they are the opposite sex, and has other people endorse that feeling and so has surgery, they have lost their ability to have children and also to return to their natural body if they later feel differently.
Oxford’s Worcester College apologised about a Wilberforce academy event held there outside term-time after 'students complained they were “distressed” by the event.’ ‘But an independent review has found that no evidence for allegations including “aggressive leafleting” by attendees, who were said to have approached students to discuss LGBT conversion therapy.’
Toby Young (Free Speech Union) says the “uncritical acceptance of claims that the conference harmed students was a serious error. The College should have investigated and faced down students’ ill-founded complaints. No higher education institution should apologise for free speech,” (Telegraph)
This illustrates both ‘felt’ or imagined hurt and the deployment of fabricated 'hurtness' as a weapon. In this case, there was also an anti-Christian motivation.
Cry-bullies
Often an attitude of outrage is used to impute truth even where there is none, to make it sound worse than it is, attract headlines, and mug the target into acquiescence (‘cry-bullies’). This is part of the Saul Alinsky: Rules for Radicals playbook.
In the Worcester College case, the Wilberforce academy refused to be bullied, knew the feelings/distress was most likely fabricated and called for an open review, which caused the College to have to apologise.
Facts are oppressive...
One aspect of Critical Theory is the idea that logic and reasoned thought are oppressive as they were invented by white men. The absurdity of this idea, of course, cannot be debated. It is however widely used to justify any course of action. See this widely noted tweet from @ProfSunnySingh
Apparently addressing her: 'It's Prof. Singh to you' - so she insists on her own privilege and hierarchy.
Feelings are important but (as with conscience) they must be informed by facts, never elevated above them.
Morality
Morality is often mocked as the opposite to truth: arbitrary rigid rules, relative, each person can decide - until someone steals your money!
Christians don't follow arbitrary rules but God's way, distilled into commandments and mediated through communion with him. 'Come now, let us reason together'
Morality is likewise seen as unscientific, unreasoned, but we all resort to rationaliation to explain our behaviour, we fall back on premises, but we don't always think them through. Evolution is used to justify almost anything as it endorses selfishness - 'survival of the fitest' and self-will - as it allows for a world without God (a-theism).
But classical Evolution has lost all the scientific respectability it once claimed. Modern biological research cannot not support it (more here), but it is still taught to children. The idea's appeal to Marx, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, not to mention advocates of abortion and euthanasia, have left millions of their own people dead or impoverished (Top ten worse) .
All of us have to think through difficult choices but a Christian knows that God's ways are for everyone's good - even though we may not always want to agree at the time! If we "follow the maker's instructions" things will be better, even if for us personally there is a cost in doing that and speaking about it.
Gonna change my way of thinking
Make myself a different set of rules ...
Gonna put my good foot forward
And stop being influenced by fools
Well don’t know which one is worse
Doing your own thing or just being cool ...
You remember only about the brass ring
You forget all about the golden rule
Bob Dylan Slow Train
Law Worcester College example: they could be unlawfully engaging in religious discrimination
