Let's go, let's go, let's go!

This is Greg Cogel here, a standard reason, and I appreciate that you've joined me here today for this broadcast, broadcast slash podcast now, I guess.

And I have, we're going to be taking open my calls principally today, but I have some thoughts. I just remembered something that happened many, many years ago.

When I say many years ago, actually fairly close to an standard reason started, that would be almost 30 years ago. I was in Seattle, I was with Melinda Penner, I was at a Ligonier event, and we were being hosted by them after fashion, or they let us tag along, while they had their big event, we were able to have a table there, we had a great relationship with Ligonier, those early years, and they gave us some visibility of our stuff, material.

In any event, there was a conversation I had with a waitress, that particular weekend, and that conversation made it into the first iteration of the tactics book, and also the second, because it's a combination of a bunch of stuff that I had been talking about in the book about, the tactical game plan, and using the Colombo questions to maneuver, and I think it's called,

the heading of something like clueless in Seattle, or something like that in the book, so I'm talking about this conversation, but I recall a line from that conversation that has actually come home to roost in a way that I did not expect it to in our culture today, so in that conversation, the way the whole conversation was initiated,

let's see, there was a conference there at the some facility near the restaurant, such that a whole bunch of conferees were in the restaurant on a regular basis, and so there's a lot of cheater chatter about theological things, and I happened to mention that with her that I was part of the conference, and at some point there was, I made a comment about,

I think that people don't think of religion, think about religion very carefully, and they believe a lot of foolish things when it comes to religion, I don't know if I'd start the conversation that way nowadays, but nevertheless, when I suggested that there were some ideas that people had about religion that were foolish, the waitress was a little bit troubled, and she said, that's oppressive,

not letting people think the way they want to think, and then I said, well, do you think I'm mistaken? And she said, well, no, and I said, well, if you don't think I'm mistaken, then why are you correcting me?

But if you do think I'm mistaken, then why are you oppressing me? So I was playing a little suicide there with her, but what I noticed, though, is now I'm looking back on it, and I think about her comment that in virtue of me disagree with people, thinking their views are foolish, this was an act of oppression.

That's oppressive, not letting people think the way they want to think. Now of course, I was letting anybody back then and even now think however they want to think, but the way she responded was that if you disagree with someone else's view, that is itself an act of oppression.

Now that is the point of view that has come home to roost of late. It was odd back then, 25 years ago, for someone to think that a difference of opinion was an act of oppression.

A difference of opinion on some spiritual thing, me thinking someone's idea was foolish, was an act of me not allowing them to think the way they want to think, which of course wasn't true.

But notice how the understanding of the nature of that dialogue already was beginning to shift more than 25 years ago.

Now this has a name, this move, this maneuver, it's part of critical race theory, which people don't talk about anymore because CRT is like everybody says, we don't do that. That's a no-no blah, blah, blah.

But now it just shows up under different acronyms like EID, equity, inclusion and diversity, for example.

Nevertheless, it's the same. And the phrase that's used to describe what she did now, the phrase that's used now to describe what she did then is called oppression through ideology, oppression through ideology.

Now when you think about oppression, you think about it in a sense classically or historically, oppression is when you actually impose some harm on someone else.

You act in such a way as to bring that person harm. You restrain them. You throw them in jail without cause. You beat them up for some ridiculous reason.

You disabuse them of rights they may have or you withhold privileges from them. That is, you actually hurt them in some way, either physically or in terms of lifestyle issues or whatever.

That's what oppression was. These are people who are oppressed, actions oppress people. That's classically how oppression was understood, but not anymore.

What is going on now is what the waitress 25 years ago hinted at that if you ideas are oppressive.

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