Family

The global attack on religious belief and moral values

Alejandra Fabris

Contents - Nov 2014 - Buy a copy now Editorial: The Extraordinary Synod on the Family - Peter Westmore Episcopacy: Bishop Anthony Fisher OP appointed Archbishop of Sydney - AD2000 Report News: The Church Around the World Anglican: The Ordinariate in Gippsland: the first year Human Life: Surrogacy: what the Biblical precedent tells us - Anne Lastman Family: The global attack on religious belief and moral values - Alejandra Fabris Law: What is the separation of church and state? - Frank Mobbs Formation: 'I used to be a Catholic' - Audrey English Youth: Ignite Conference fires up 1,200 young Catholics in Brisbane - Br Barry Coldrey Why be a priest? - Fr John O'Neill Why we make the Sign of the Cross - Cedric Wright Scripture: Is the Hebrew Bible incomplete? - Andrew Sholl Letters: Eucharistic Prayers - Franklin J. Wood Letters: China and the Holy See - Francis Vrijmoed Letters: Suicide prevention - Murray Cook Letters: Rally for peace in the world - Bev Thomas Support: Thank you! Fighting Fund passes $12,000 Books: EASTERN CHRISTIANITY: The Byzantine Tradition, by Laurence Cross - Paul Simmons (reviewer) Books: HIDDEN PAIN: An Insight into Childhood Sexual Abuse, by Anne R. Lastman - Peter Westmore (reviewer) Books: Order books from www.freedompublishing.com.au Reflection: The meaning of life and death - Archbishop Julian Porteous

This is an address given by Alejandra Fabris at the International Forum on the Family held in Moscow last September.

I will argue that the main threat to the natural family today is disinformation.

On the spiritual level, it is an attack on the soul of Christianity by encouraging people to focus on outward appearances, while all the while regarding the moral teachings of the Church as bigoted or insincere.

I don't mean misinformation, which would imply unintentional errors on the part of researchers and the producers of content, but disinformation: the wilful distortion and obfuscating of facts, rooted in observable reality, and of truth, built upon the innate structures of natural law.

The modus operandi of the politically correct mode is the manipulation of the public's imagination in favour of the interests of the few. It consists in abandoning the search for truth in favour of opinion, at the price of reality.

The result: a helpless citizenry unable to defend itself and burdened with unshakable feelings of toxic guilt vis-à-vis its own social virtues.

Political correctness

Inside the halls of academia and science - like in popular culture - political correctness represents groupthink at its worst.

But there is a vital piece of good news. The main theses that the cultural war upholds as truth have already been disproven by science.

Our task, I will argue, would be to circulate such information. Two notable examples: first, there is no research demonstrating that the abortion of abnormal children is necessary to protect against maternal mortality; this is a superstition manufactured by secularists with no biological basis.

Second, the assertion that homosexuality is a condition with which we are born is also patently false, as eight major studies performed on identical twins have corroborated. Furthermore, "ex-gays outnumber actual gays".

Examples like these help us to see that the battle raging around us against the natural family, like against other pillars of civilisation, is essentially a war by propaganda.

It has two modes of execution: misleading words and misleading images. Its champions in the mass media and in government - like so many false prophets - pretend to want to protect us from suffering and to fight for the rights of the oppressed, but they do the opposite.

This is psychological warfare being unleashed against the civilian population globally and the reasons for it are simple.

Disheartened peoples, robbed of their identities and their inalienable dignity in God, are easy prey for financial exploitation.

Let us keep in mind, however, that the schools of philosophy that gave rise to this Godless logic swept aside not only metaphysics as irrelevant, but also the empirical sciences, like biology.

Religion was held to be a social construct, and reality, simply a mental one. This is doubt for doubt's sake.

As such, confusion, chaos, needless suffering of all peoples and the humiliation of the Christian civilisation particularly, are not so much the present-day byproducts of these neo-Marxist inspired strategies, but their reason for being.

Scratch the surface of the current social phenomena and you find institutionalised envy and greed as its sources.

Empire of untruth

If you observe closer: the new empire of untruth manifests itself in the systematic practice of mauvais foi (bad faith) and always - if you will also notice - according to the same set of rules.

Whatever purely political or pseudo-intellectual position is asserted, it is always 180° from the truth.

As such, critics claim to possess the virtues that they are trying to destroy in the object of their criticisms. Victims are made to assume the blame for the very crimes being perpetuated against them.

This is why the cultural war and the information wars revolving around current events - taken as a system - appear to us as counter-intuitive and counter to common sense.

In accordance to this perverse logic, the political critiques against the Holy See are always that she "acts like she is righteous but is really only concerned with money and the acquisition of power". There is however no inevitability in any of this, nor cause for despair.

If our thinking remains realistic and we remain loyal advocates of the Truth, our victory is assured.

The reason I see for this can be summed up as follows.

The (anti-family and anti-life) global ethic crystallised, disseminated, and implemented on a massive scale by the United Nations-centred political machineries, has one fatal flaw. Its foundation is purely theoretical and not scientific.

The scientific method has one overarching benefit: its point of reference is nature and its methodology relies on meticulous observation and the testing of hypotheses.

As much as we may try to manipulate, suppress, or subvert nature, it will always surround us and exceed our ability to control it. I will argue that this is a good thing.

We, who are proponents of the Culture of Life - to use a term coined by Pope Saint John Paul II - regard nature as something intrinsically good, whether or not we are aware.

As people of Faith in particular, nature is our ally and science, one of our greatest tools.

The reason for this is: in our world of information, there is one principle that still enjoys a near universal appeal. And that is intellectual honesty.

Just as the philosopher Blaise Pascal asserted that the faculty of reason can bring us closer to Faith, by the same token, I will assert that integrity in intellectual pursuits can bring people, all peoples, closer to Christianity.

New humanity

Christians believe that Jesus is the new humanity that comes from God and is in communion with Him.

As such, humanity's salvation is impossible without Him. As Archbishop Charles Chaput explained, the survival of societies depends on the endurance of Christian values.

Some background. It was the Christian worldview that provided the theoretical framework that made science possible to begin with.

This is a fact for which twenty centuries of history supply us with conclusive evidence.

In other words, if atheists had ruled the world, the development of Western medicine could not have occurred. A worldview whose point of departure is "effects without causes" does not logically translate into a search for the Truth.

Or as Saint Augustine put it: "I believe in order to understand."

Furthermore, our legal systems would be unthinkable without the assertion of non-negotiable moral responsibilities and our economic system, without the concept of merit and the value placed on hard work.

Further: in what concerns democracy, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a Christian invention with deep roots in the message of the Gospel.

To hold that the State can be the guarantor of innate rights is philosophically unsound, anachronistic nonsense.

As religious people, we know that Truth can no more be arrived at by political consensus, than a container with a hole in it can hold water.

We also know it is religious education that provides people with the means of protecting their best interests and the only tools for enacting real social justice, because it enables them to understand that their human vocation points them, not to the dark forces of this world, but beyond.

Progress as a human species remains now, as always, a moral endeavour for which we depend on God's grace, and never a technocratic enterprise.

It operates first and foremost on the level of personal responsibilities and personal relationships. As a people of God, the transnational, mystical reality Christians know to be true is the Body of Christ.

The body politic taken to be a spiritual entity is pure myth. As my articles on political correctness published on Views & Values Christian Global Post (www.vv-post.com) explore, it is precisely false communal pressures to conform that grant secularism its coercive power.

It's the path of least resistance, a moral vampire feeding off of people's need to have a good image of themselves and be accepted by others, even at the price of embracing hypocrisy.

In conclusion: let me state the second part of my thesis.

It is vital for pro-family leaders to re-educate the public, especially young people, on the fundamental tenets of our legal and democratic systems and in the empirical sciences especially - with all the factual information available to us.

Any person of good will - regardless of their religious affiliation - if armed with the correct information, can and will vote better.

We must also expose political correctness for what it is: a secularist religion, which mocks Christian values and the Beatitudes, by presenting a negative mirror image of these. This is Satanic.

I don't think anyone here doubts that ... but I will drive this last point home with a quotation from one of our detractors: "Dread not infanticide; the crime is imaginary: we are always mistress of what we carry in our womb, and we do no more harm in destroying this kind of matter than in evacuating another, by medicines, when we feel the need." The author of that statement - which should sound very contemporary - was the Marquis de Sade, in 1787.

Benefits of science

In regards to the cultural war we are up against, the benefits that science can provide are excellent places to start and straightforward means of defeating the many lies of the empire of disinformation.

Modern medicine can already protect the health of both mothers and babies, and has already developed natural, more effective methods of treating infertility, which do not involve in vitro fertilisation, surrogacy, or donors in any way.

The work in perinatology of Dr Calhoun of West Virginia University-Charleston and the NaPro Technology of Dr Thomas Hilgers, are of particular importance here.

Also, eight years of research by Professor Paul Bloom of Yale University's Infant Cognition Lab, scientifically proves that humans are "naturally moral beings". As for the studies in genetics that defeat the main homosexual thesis against the teachings of the Church, please refer to the work of Dr Neil Whitehead, et al of the NARTH Institute.

Alejandra is a visual artist, actress, jewelry designer and translator with a background in modern philosophy, theatre and communications.

She is a UN Representative/speaker for the pro-life and pro-religious liberties organisation, HazteOir (http://www.hazteoir.org/), Spanish for "Let your voice be heard", based in Madrid.

Reprinted from AD2000 Vol 27 No 10 (November 2014), p. 8