“A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him saying, ‘You are mad, you are not like us’.”
I’m pretty sure I’ve shared that quote before, but you can only imagine what the early Desert Father, St Anthony, would make of our times after his words above.
Today, we’re meant to be the strange ones:
- We believe that biological sex is real.
- We believe that marriage is between a man and a woman.
- We believe that human life matters.
And perhaps the widest gulf at times: we believe in facts over feelings.
With much of the Western world in a rush to redefine, legislate, and basically will away its foundations, those who don’t “go with the flow” will seem increasingly weird.
We don’t even need to look beyond Australia – or the past week – to see how rapidly things are changing:
- The ARIA (Australian Recording Industry Association) awards announced an end its decades-old prize categories of “Best Male Artist” and “Best Female Artist”. And why? To create a new category called “Best Artist” so that “non-binary” performers feel comfortable.
- In the midst of restrictions and lockdowns, Queensland’s Government saw fit to push through a shocking bill for euthanasia and assisted suicide – with no exemptions for faith-based hospitals – and all in a mere couple of days. Strangely, I seem to recall governments having a lot to say about saving lives recently(?)
- The Victorian Government has announced it will undermine faith-based schools’ ability to actually uphold their faith. Religious schools will be banned from hiring and firing with regard not only to sexual preference, but also “gender identity”. And this, the Victorian Government says, “will strike the right balance”.
And this is just a snapshot. We certainly live in strange times.
So, how should we react? I thought it might be useful to take another leaf out of St Anthony’s book:
“Whoever hammers a lump of iron, first decides what he is going to make of it, a scythe, a sword, or an axe.
“Even so we ought to make up our minds what kind of virtue we want to forge or we labour in vain.”
It’s no use simply worrying or, conversely, busying ourselves for the sake of it.
Unless we want to “labour in vain” we need to take action as effectively as we can.https://www.austfamily.com.au/freedom_declaration?utm_campaign=210917_update_pc2_2&utm_medium=email&utm_source=afc
whatyareckon 