TORNADO OF MORAL RELATIVISM

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How can we be sure our children won’t be “tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes” (Ephesians 4:14)?

Our grandchildren are growing up in a whole different culture to us. They are going to have to deal with issues that we didn’t have to, what can we do?”

We need to first understand what happened. We need to deal with the foundational issue. It started 6,000 years ago in a garden. Satan said to Eve:

“Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.’” But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” Genesis 3:1-5

“But I am afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning, your thoughts will be led astray from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ.” 2 Corinthians 11:3

Note what the apostle Paul says: The devil is using the same method on you, on your kids, on your grandkids, as he used on Eve to get you to a position of not believing the authority of God’s Word.

The Genesis 3 attack—“Did God really say?” And notice the next part, “And you will be like God.” You decide the truth for yourself. That is one of the problems we see through the whole Bible.

What is the method? To create doubt regarding the Word of God. It is an attack on the Word of God.

Here is the problem, our sinful nature leads us to trust man’s word rather than God’s Word. We want to be our own god and decide right and wrong for ourselves. Our churches need to be laying this foundation and teaching people about our sinful nature and understand the fact of what happened was this . . .

A battle began between two religions about 6,000 years ago, Man’s Word vs. God’s Word. It is the same battle today, the same in Luther’s day, and the same in Peter and Paul’s day. It is the same battle, and it hasn’t changed. The method by which that battle occurs does change through the years, but not the actual battle.

There is no neutral position Jesus makes it clear.

“Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters.” Matthew 12:30

People have this idea that if you do not mention the Bible, when it comes to abortion or gay marriage and many other issues, then you are being neutral. But if you do not have the foundation of God’s Word, that means you only have the foundation of man’s word and that means you’ve already lost the battle.

“Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock... And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand.” Matthew 7:24,26

If you reject God, you suppress the truth.

“For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.” Romans 1:18-20

Public education is not neutral. If the system is not for Christ, then it is against Him. So we send our kids there for five hours a day, all year long, and what do we do at home? What is the church doing? We need to be equipped to answer the following questions and God has raised up ministries to provide this information: Creation Ministries International http://www.creation.com and Answers in Genesis http://www.answersingenesis.org

Sadly, most Christians cannot answer even the basic questions. Test yourself with the following questions.

How do you know the Bible is God’s Word? Where did the Bible come from? Who put the Bible together? Why are there those books in the Bible and not other books? Do you believe in God? Where did God come from? You believe in an eternal God? How do you explain that? Who made God? Did someone make God?

Answers in Genesis have built a life-sized Noah’s Ark at Cinncinatti in the USA. They can provide you with all the evidence you need to show that the Biblical worldwide flood of Noah’s day occurred.

Stop trusting in man, put your trust in God. People love the praise of man rather than the praise of God.

MAN’S WORD VERSUS GOD’S WORD

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Churches need to teach foundationally, and Christians need to understand our thinking must start with God’s Word, Genesis chapters 1–11, the foundation for everything. Because so many Christian leaders have compromised Genesis 1–11 with evolution and millions of years, most Christians have not been taught the foundational doctrines and therefore a true biblical worldview.

Many Christians just look at what they perceive as the “problems” and try to figure out how to take these to the Bible to understand what to do. But those with a true biblical worldview know that God’s Word beginning in Genesis is the foundation for that worldview. They also know there are ultimately only two foundations for people’s worldviews—God’s Word or man’s word.

For those who build their thinking on man’s word (the foundation of the secular education system), a worldview of moral relativism results. Thus, marriage is how they define it. Because man is seen as just an animal, abortion is no different than killing an animal. People who are aged and infirm are seen as a drain on the health system and therefore euthanasia should be used to stop their suffering and costly care. Gender is plastic and one can (try to) change gender using drugs and surgery if they want.

When a person builds their thinking on God’s Word, their worldview is determined by God our Creator. Thus, God created marriage, so there’s only one marriage—one man and one woman. Humans are made in the image of God, so abortion (at any stage) is murder. God made only two genders of humans: male and female.

Two foundations with two very different worldviews. The clash we see happening in our culture is one between two totally opposite worldviews, and at a foundational level, it’s a battle between God’s Word and man’s word.

Once we understand the real battle is at the foundational level, we understand that to battle all the social issues (abortion, gender, gay “marriage,” racism, etc.), one must recognize them as symptoms of a foundational problem. The problem is that people have built their worldview on the wrong foundation of man’s word.

Now, if all those social issues are the same ultimate problem, they must have the same solution. And they do. The solution has always been the truth of God’s Word and the saving gospel. Many, though, have been indoctrinated to think the Bible is an outdated book of mythology and that science proves it can’t be trusted, particularly in its history in Genesis 1–11. That’s where apologetics answers the attacks on God’s Word and shows we can defend the Christian faith. That’s why Answers in Genesis provides scientific and biblical answers to the questions of our day that are used to attack and undermine God’s Word. So the solution to the social issues is to battle at a foundation level. To do that, we need to raise up generations who know how to think foundationally and are equipped with apologetics.

Go to http://www.answersingenesis.org and http://www.creation.com for resources to equip you with answers to young people’s questions on origins.

WHERE WE ARE HEADED IN 2024 AND BEYOND

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Fifty years ago last week, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago was released in Paris. Far more than simply an account of the Soviet prison camps, Solzhenitsyn’s work still stands both as an extraordinary testimony about the past and as a stark warning for the present.

Like all of Solzhenitsyn’s prodigious output, the questions at its heart echo those Leo Tolstoy posed in War and Peace: “What does it all mean? Why did it happen? What made these people kill their own kind?”

And, it is precisely because Solzhenitsyn focused on those questions that The Gulag Archipelago is not merely a searing indictment of Soviet communism but a work of moral analysis.

The Bolsheviks’ murderous mindset did not emerge from thin air. Rather, it was the outcome of the philosophy that gained absolute sway over the “progressive” Russian intelligentsia of the 19th century. Epitomised by Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s What Is To Be Done? (1863), which Lenin considered a masterpiece, that philosophy rejected God, the notions of free will, human nature and personal responsibility, instead asserting that people’s behaviour depended entirely on their circumstances.

Chernyshevsky’s reasoning, which became an integral part of Soviet Marxism’s dogma, left no room for any transcendental morality. The contention that some actions could be absolutely right or wrong was, said Lenin, “moralising vomit”; all that mattered was their results. And since “there can be no middle course” between communism and reaction, “nothing, however vile, should be condemned that (advances) the working people’s struggle against the exploiters”.

Seen within that prism of Manichean logic, incarcerating and even executing those who might undermine “the struggle against the exploiters” was more than justifiable: it was, regardless of their actual conduct, an obligation. So when Dmitri Kursky was formulating the new Soviet legal code, Lenin cautioned him that “the law should not abolish terror; it should be legalised, without evasion or embellishment”.

The code therefore treated potential crime as crime, extending culpability to “(1) the guilty, (2) persons under suspicion and (3) persons potentially under suspicion”, with NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov’s infamous Order No.00486 specifying that the wives of “traitors of the motherland” were to be sentenced to forced labour, and even their children, who might wish to take revenge, were to be imprisoned.

The goal of mercilessly “hanging bloodsuckers” was, wrote Lenin, to ensure “that for hundreds of miles around the people can see, tremble and cry: they are and will go on killing”. But that, explained Lenin’s close associate, Nikolai Bukharin, was not terror’s only objective: “Proletarian compulsion, beginning with shootings and ending with labour conscription, is a method of producing a communist humankind out of the detritus of the capitalist era”: millions of inmates were to be “moulded into a new type of human being”.

There was, however, a fundamental problem with this attempt to play God: even under the most horrifying conditions, its victims might resist its delusions of omnipotence. At some point, Solzhenitsyn observes, every prisoner faced a choice: should one “survive at any price”, that is, “at the price of someone else”?

“There lies the great fork of camp life. The roads go right and left: to the right – you lose your life; to the left – your conscience.”

Reality thereby put Marxism’s claim that it could secure the “total surrender of our souls” to the ultimate test – and more often than one might have imagined, when utterly powerless convicts had “to declare the great Yes or the great No”, the claim failed.

Never did it fail more frequently than with people of faith, who were largely the humble of this earth. Like the self-effacing Alyosha, the gentle Baptist in Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, they were the ones with the moral courage to choose the path of truth over that of living a lie.

And while the regime’s pre-eminent intellectuals “all too often turned out to be cowards, quick to surrender, and, thanks to their education, disgustingly ingenious in justifying their dirty tricks”, ordinary “zeks” (as the convicts were known) led mass rebellions, which Solzhenitsyn scrupulously documented, for the first time, in The Gulag Archipelago’s magnificent third volume.

But there is, Solzhenitsyn well knew, “this terrible strength of man, his desire and ability to forget”; and he also knew that “a people which no longer remembers has lost its history and its soul”. He therefore dedicated The Gulag Archipelago, as record, tribute and threnody (dirge or funeral song), to “those who did not live to tell it: and may they please forgive me for not having remembered it all”.

That is why Solzhenitsyn would have been appalled by the Putin regime’s whitewashing of Soviet history, which culminated late last year in the unveiling of a monument to Felix Dzerjinski, the founder of Lenin’s secret police and of the Gulag, that Solzhenitsyn branded a mass murderer.

The duty of bearing witness also impelled Solzhenitsyn’s stark warnings to the West. To say he despised the West is nonsense. It was because he valued it so highly that he feared for its condition.

The fact that so many of its “leading thinkers (are) against capitalism”; that “under the influence of public opinion, the Western powers (have) yielded position after position”, hoping “that their agreeable state of general tranquillity might continue”; the supineness to “brutally dictatorial” China; the intelligentsia’s “fierce defence of terrorists”, “greater concern for terrorists’ rights than for victims’ justice” and habit of calling terrorists “militants” (in response to Hamas brutal attack on Israeli civilians, we get children marching for the Palestinian cause) – all these are symptoms of calamitous moral decay.

That “fashionable ideas are fastidiously separated from those that are not fashionable, and without ever being forbidden, have little chance of being heard in colleges”, only made the rot deeper and more pervasive.

Little wonder that Solzhenitsyn, having expressed those views, was savaged for ignoring America’s “vibrantly pluralistic society”, with The New York Times ridiculing his reminder that moral relativism leads to moral oblivion as the ravings of a “religious enthusiast”. And little wonder today’s Australian students are far less likely to have read Solzhenitsyn than to have pored over the idiotic scribblings of Leninism’s contemporary epigones.

Yes, Solzhenitsyn had his failings. But five decades after The Gulag Archipelago’s publication, the verdict of that other brilliant Russian Nobel laureate, Iosif Brodsky, who disagreed with Solzhenitsyn on many things, fully retains its validity.

“It is possible that two thousand years from now reading The Gulag will provide the same insight as reading the Iliad does today,” Brodsky wrote. “But if we do not read The Gulag today, there may, much sooner than two thousand years hence, be no one left to read either.”

Article by Henry Ergas AO in The Weekend Australian 05/01/2024 Fifty years on, a warning the West still needs to heed. Ergas is an economist who spent many years at the OECD in Paris before returning to Australia. He has taught at several universities, including Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

I would have liked Ergas to have made reference to how the Bible, God’s Word was treated by Communist leaders. It had to be burned/destroyed which shows they were demonically driven. They were totally under the power of Satan and his demons. Moreover, it is obvious to Ergas and should be to Christians that we are in prophesied end times and that God is refining His church, luke-warm Christians (Laodicean church) will not be raptured, before the wrath of God is poured out on an unrepentant world.

“Then they will deliver you (Christians) up to tribulation and put you to death, and you will be hated by all nations for my name’s sake. And then many will fall away and betray one another and hate one another. And many false prophets will arise and lead many astray. And because lawlessness will be increased, the love of many will grow cold. But the one who endures to the end will be saved.” Matthew 24:9-13

DANIELS – GOD’S IRRELEVANT IN VICTORIA

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Slavery to atheistic dogma rife in Victoria

Religious liberty is all very well and all that, but it has its limits in Victoria’s state schools where principals are bound by Ministerial Direction 145.

The determination allows faith-based religious instruction at the principal’s discretion providing no child attends for more than 30 minutes a week, and then only in the lunch break or in the hour before or after school. Parents must complete form CD145 — available in 15 languages — to give consent.

Instructors must be referred to as instructors or special instructors, never as teachers. Teaching material cannot be described as “curriculum” and may only be referred to as “materials” or “program materials”.

The Safe Schools program is different. There is no parental red tape to navigate since Safe School classes are compulsory and will be conducted in every state school by next year.

In summary, parents must apply to have kids study the Biblical canon, but they don’t get asked if they’d like their kids to study OMG I’m Queer, OMG I’m Trans, Gayby Baby, or anything else included in the School Action Toolkit “that explores family diversity in a fun & insightful way”. Principals don’t ask parents, they consult an amorphous entity that the Department of Education calls “the broader school community”. OMG indeed.

For a glimpse of what a Bill Shorten prime ministership may entail, head to his home state of Victoria where Daniel Andrews’s track record reads like “a wish list for progressives”, according to one fan writing in the Huffington Post, an online journal for readers who find The Age too conservative.

“Australian-first program of medical cannabis? Check,” writes the fan. “A $572 million package for domestic violence, more money even than the federal government spends nationwide? Check. An Australia-first LGBTI ‘pride centre’ and specific gender-diverse health services? Check.”

The OMG list gets worse. ­“Directly defying Canberra and standing in opposition to cutting funding for LGBTI education program, the Safe Schools Coalition? Check. A huge increase to legal services for asylum-seekers? Check.”

As Paul Kelly reminded us on these pages last weekend, the Andrews government now wants to legalise what it delicately calls “voluntary assisted dying”. Putting poor old Grandpa out of his misery? Check.

Andrews is undoubtedly the most hardline, ideological, left-wing premier to assume office in this or any other state. As Liberal MP Bernie Finn said recently: “This bloke makes Joan Kirner look like a softie.”

A half-century ago Gough Whitlam flew to Melbourne to tell the state’s left faction they were behaving like a bunch of losers.

“We construct a philosophy of failure, which finds in defeat a form of justification and a proof of the purity of our principles,” he told them, raising his voice above the jeers and catcalls. “Certainly the impotent are pure.”

Whitlam was Labor’s first leader to hold a university degree, a handicap many assumed disqualified him from the job. Today the party is full of them, but sadly few have the learning of Whitlam, who graduated long before the education was dumbed down.

Today Whitlam would probably be scratching his head and wondering how it came to pass that a morally vain extremist such as Andrews, armed with the soft-headed philosophy of cultural inclusion, could ever have been elected in the first place, let alone be seen as a serious contender in the polls next year.

Andrews has achieved the seemingly impossible in reconciling the sensitivities of the sophisticates with the day-to-day anxieties of the masses.

He has an army of media minders to run a virtual newsroom, turning out dozens of asinine press releases weekly, whistling to both audiences.

On one hand they are steeped in symbolic concern about the vulnerable, pledged to give a voice to the voiceless, dedicated to restoring fairness and promise to make Victoria a safe place.

On the other hand they boast of jobs precincts, better kindergartens, new school buildings, level-crossing and road improvements, addressing the practical concerns in the regions and outer suburbs.

Meanwhile his government panders to activism by handing out thousands of grants, large and small, to community organisers of every stripe. It pays for the Australian GLBTIQ Multicultural Council’s Multicultural Dinner, hands over a lazy half-mill to LGBTI support groups to counsel LGBTI Victorians disturbed by a plebiscite, and chucks money at the Feminist Writers Festival in recognition of its “important role in challenging sexism and gender stereotypes, and fostering cultural change”.

It embarks on “a creative new approach to reduce homophobia” by subsidising the development of “an engaging digital app that will give players of all ages insights into the experiences of LGBTI people and the prejudices and discrimination they can face”.

The government funds Literacy Leader Induction Workshops to provide every government primary school with “a trained literacy leader”. Just one, apparently, but it’s a start.

And so in countless feel-good ways, announced in countless fawning press releases, the Andrews government funds a growing bullshit industry, employing countless professional do-gooders in meaningless bullshit jobs.

When Andrews boasts of the jobs he has created, he neglects to mention that the taxpayer is paying for most of them. The growth in education, health, welfare and much heavy construction is funded by the state. But when your only work experience is in politics, that probably doesn’t matter.

At best the bullshit industry is merely ineffective, but we suspect the moral harm is worse. The application of identity politics, the constant affirmation of diversity and the pleas on behalf of the vulnerable feed a culture of complaint and entitlement. It erodes the personal virtues of prudence, fortitude and courage by outsourcing responsibility for individual destiny to the machinery of state.

It is customary for outgoing Labour governments to leave a fiscal deficit on the doormat. The moral deficit Andrews is likely to leave behind will be altogether harder to clean up.

Nick Cater is executive director of the Menzies Research Centre.