Next Saturday there is a state election in NSW. State elections tend not to gain a lot of attention in Australia but this one is a turning point in the history of the nation.
In a few months there will be a Federal election which will pit a christian PM against an extreme left wing opposition leader. The choice in NSW will set the path for the general election later.
Here are the issues that the media are burying but are critical to our future.
Labor are set to legalise abortion if elected. NSW is one of just two states where abortion remains illegal, at least in theory. There is no doubt that this will change if Michael Daly becomes premier.
SRE or Scripture in Schools will be in the sights of a Labor Government. There is no doubt of that at all. For years the Teachers Unions have dominated ALP education policy. they will move quickly to keep christians out of schools.
The deceptive Safe Schools program will again be indoctrinating our kids against christian family values.
These three things by themselves will lead the Government in a path that takes the state further from Christian values.
Mario Murillo, in a recent blog, points out that in California, the people claiming to be christians voted for a state government that is as far left as anything we can imagine here. Political ideology outweighs faith commitments,
We need to pray about who we vote for, but we also must pray for the whole state, that righteous men and women will rise to power- in both the state and Federal elections.
The temptations in your life are no different fro what other people
experience. God is faithful. He will not allow the temptation to be
more than you can stand. When you are tempted, he will show you a way
out so you can endure.
Observation
Paul reminds us of the experiences of the ancestors in the
wilderness. They were guided by the cloud and passed through the
water. They were tempted in various ways, and some of them yielded to
the temptation.
The temptations in our life are no different to those faced by
others. God will not allow us to be tempted beyond what we can stand,
and He will provide a way out.
Application
Sometimes we may feel that we are going through unique temptations
and that we commit sins that nobody else ever did. This isn’t true.
Our temptations are common to all people.
The good news is that if we truly surrender to God, He will provide
us with the strength to overcome every temptation.
I have found in my life that every temptation is a questioning of
God’s love for me or His willingness to supply my needs. In the
heat of battle I forget who I am in Christ- a beloved son of God.
The solution to temptation is not to work up the strength to overcome
it in my own ability. Nor is it to pray for the strength from God.
The solution is to go back to who I am. I spend time in worshipping
and praising God. I meditate on His love and His character.
In losing myself in God, I find my true identity in Him. Then the
temptations go away because the tempter is no longer able to touch
me.
Prayer
Thank you Lord that you always provide a way out of temptation. Help
me to keep my focus on you and dwell in your presence always. Amen.
It is clear that our society has largely turned its back on Christ and Christian values over the last 50 years.
Every night when I watch the TV news I think on at least one, often more occasion, “What are they thinking?”
The latest Christian Values check list produced for the imminent NSW Election is a shocker. Where do our politicians stand on critical issues like abortion and euthanasia? Take a look.
Only a few years ago that chart which is now dominated by red squares was split evenly between green and red. The shocker is the Nationals who have, at best, become very equivocal about their positions, possibly to try and maintain their seats on the North Coast from the Greens.
There are only two parties that come close to supporting a Christian worldview, and they are fringe parties- the Christian Democrats and the Australian Conservatives. I note that the Shooters, Farmers and Fishers are not included, so their position is not known.
This is an horrendous state of affairs. This election is critical for NSW, as will be the following Federal election.
If Labor win in NSW they will move to amend the Education Act so that SRE or Scripture in Schools will no longer be allowed. If the Liberals win, no doubt the current policy of strangulation by red tape will continue.
Labor have very quietly indicated that they will legalise abortion. At the moment it is a crime to seek or provide an abortion in NSW, but court decisions over the years have allowed for doctors to perform abortions where they consider the mother’s health to be at risk and normally not much beyond about 22 weeks.
The reason that they have been very quiet about this is that certain Muslim and other ethnic groups who vote for the ALP are very conservative in sexual matters, and would revolt against such a policy.
Premier Gladys Berejiklian stated the other day that she is “pro-choice” so if a bill came up to a vote she would vote in favour.
Even worse, Federal Labor have stated that they will make funding for hospitals contingent on them providing free abortions.
I have said in church that politicians will not save us. The other side of the coin is that in a democracy, christians have a responsibility to pray and then vote according to their conscience and the leading of the Holy Spirit.
Barwon, where I live, is a very safe Nationals seat. I would recommend voting for a minor party, such as Liberal Democrats or Shooters, Fishers, Farmers with a second preference for the Nationals.
In the Legislative Council vote for Christian Democrats or Australian Conservatives first with your choices further down the list. The Christian Democrats have 2 members at the moment (Fred Nile and Paul Green). They have been instrumental in holding back a flood of harmful legislation over the years.
Note that if you vote above the line you can only vote for 1 group or party, but voting below the line gives you the options of voting how you think they should be selected.
This is a tough time for christian voters. We need to use discernment and vote for christian values.
Increasingly transgender people are being shown to be mentally ill- a diagnosis that only a few years ago the American Psychological Association accepted as normative.
But then all us so-called bigots were derided for being so dogmatic in asserting that biological facts outweigh the feelings of mentally ill people. But the tide is turning as more victims of transgenderism speak out.
From “Louder With Crowder”
America’s First ‘Nonbinary Person’ Speaks Out: “It Was All a Sham”
Right off, you need to read the full column in The Daily Signal from Jamie Shupe, who chronicles his long, painful journey through the transgender world. He outlines his childhood history of abuse, how he coasted through the medical community with only one therapist cautioning against transgenderism, and how he finally came back to living the actual truth: that he is now and always will be a biological male. His story is an important one, a story the LGBTQ and far left do not want you to see; that transgenderism harms everyone involved and as we’ve seen over the past few years, society at large.
Let’s begin:
Four years ago, I wrote about my decision to live as a woman in The New York Times, writing that I had wanted to live “authentically as the woman that I have always been,” and had “effectively traded my white male privilege to become one of America’s most hated minorities.”
Thus started Jamie’s rise to fame as the radical LGBTQ left’s poster child to take down convention.
Three years ago, I decided that I was neither male nor female, but nonbinary—and made headlines after an Oregon judge agreed to let me identify as a third sex, not male or female.
Now, I want to live again as the man that I am.
After three years, Jaime was dissatisfied with being a transwoman, which should’ve fired off alarm bells for those treating him. But an agenda was at play, so Jaime became nonbinary with the radical LGBTQ left greasing the runway with KY Jelly. The LGBTQ’s efforts, with Shupe as the pioneer, set in motion many of the radical ideas with no basis in reality, which governs our modern discourse: that gender is on a spectrum, that your truth is THEE truth, and anyone who disagrees with you is a hateful bigot to be shamed and shunned by all. Related: UK Woman Thrown in Jail for Deadnaming a Transgender Online.
But here’s what got all of this started. Jaime has a long history of suffering through abuse.
The nurse practitioner ignored that I have chronic post-traumatic stress disorder, having previously served in the military for almost 18 years. All of my doctors agree on that. Others believe that I have bipolar disorder and possibly borderline personality disorder.
I should have been stopped, but out-of-control, transgender activism had made the nurse practitioner too scared to say no.
Let that last line sink in. Jamie knows, and from what it sounds like wishes he’d been stopped. But activism, out of control activism, rendered medical practitioners frightened of what would happen to them if they said no to his transgender demand.
As a child, I was sexually abused by a male relative. My parents severely beat me. At this point, I’ve been exposed to so much violence and had so many close calls that I don’t know how to explain why I’m still alive. Nor do I know how to mentally process some of the things I’ve seen and experienced.
As we already know from Walt Heyer and others, many transgender people suffered through a childhood trauma. Or several. Meaning wanting to be another gender is a symptom pointing to a larger problem which should be treated, not accommodated.
So Jaime “became a woman” to become what he wanted to be in his mind.
It wasn’t until I came out against the sterilization and mutilation of gender-confused children and transgender military service members in 2017 that LGBT organizations stopped helping me. Most of the media retreated with them.
So it’s all fun and games until you question the agenda of the people helping you. The minute one says “maybe we shouldn’t push hormones on children” that’s when the help stops.
This is the side which promotes tolerance, acceptance, and compassion. But if you question their desire to pump children full of hormones while cutting them up, now there’s a problem.
But the following statement, this is the money shot:
I do not have any disorders of sexual development. All of my sexual confusion was in my head. I should have been treated. Instead, at every step, doctors, judges, and advocacy groups indulged my fiction.
At every step, doctors “indulged my fiction.” This was a man who needed help. No one but one therapist wanted to help him, not “indulge his fiction.” Again, you need to read the full story, it’s eye-opening.
What we, as a society, are doing is indulging the fiction of people who need help. But we are not helping them by going along with their fantasy, we are just delaying and prolonging their suffering. Many transgender and former transgender people, like Jamie here, are screaming at us to wake up. But the LGBTQ zealots are trying to silence them, and us, every step of the way. Threatening our livelihoods if we dare speak up.
Eternal damnation has never been a wildly popular doctrine, but it seems to be coming under particular pressure at the moment. Public intellectuals like Stephen Greenblatt shake their heads at the teaching; eccentric theologians think up arguments against it; when Church leaders are asked about it, they often respond with ambiguity and embarrassment. No wonder the New Yorker’s Vinson Cunningham was recently moved to ask Catholics: “What modern believer wouldn’t want to cast off this old, sadistic barrier to faith in a loving God? What kind of deity draws such a hard line between his friends and his enemies, and holds an eternal grudge? Surely the loss of hell—even the idea of such a loss—should come as a bit of a relief.”
My gut reaction is sympathetic to Cunningham’s point, and such reactions shouldn’t be simply dismissed. But they should be tested. When an emotional response can’t be given a logical foundation; when it relates to something about which we are, necessarily, very ignorant; and when its implications are untenable—then it’s safe to conclude that the emotion is misleading.
Start with the logical foundation. Sin deserves punishment; in life we can always turn back toward God’s mercy, but the philosophers tell us that at death, the soul can no longer change its ways. Before death we can be swayed this way and that by our feelings and habits. But when the soul is separated from the body, this changeability ends and we are left with a single orientation. If we have turned toward God before death, we will find happiness; if we have chosen something else instead, we are in mortal sin, and our just punishment will continue for as long as we reject God—that is, forever. The inhabitants of hell go on choosing their fate: “The damned are so obstinate in their sins,” writes St. Alphonsus Liguori, “that even if God offered pardon, their hatred for him would make them refuse it.”
The attempts to pick holes in this argument are not, as far as I can see, successful: Interested readers can find a useful series of refutations here. The real objection, I think, is less logical than intuitive: Even if some punishment is necessary, isn’t hell excessive?
But here we are reduced to saying, “Surely…” about things we have not begun to grasp: the hideousness of sin, for example. Most of us, if asked to estimate how bad our sins are without the benefit of revelation, would say that although we hadn’t always conducted ourselves very honorably, we didn’t hurt anyone that much, and after all we’ve had a tough life and we’re pretty decent people overall. We would not guess, if we did not already know, that God came to earth and was humiliated and tortured to death for our sins. Do we really have a clue about the gravity of our offenses? Similarly, none of us have seen what a soul in mortal sin looks like after death, when its good impulses have fallen away and nothing remains but the desire for evil. I could opine on what strikes me as a fair punishment for unrepented mortal sin, just as I could opine, without googling, on the Olympic hopes of Azerbaijan’s national basketball team. But as it happens I know nothing about basketball, and I suspect most of our intuitions about the gravity of sin are worth even less.
Fortunately, we are not totally ignorant, because we have the guidance of the Church. Not just the authoritative teaching statements, though that is enough, but all the expressions of the Church’s wisdom through 2000 years: the standard interpretation of many, many verses in the Old and New Testaments; the sermons of the saints, with their terrible warnings about the next life; the ancient prayer of the Mass that we be “delivered from eternal damnation”; the mystics, including those of the last century, who saw things that nearly made them die of fright; Dante’s Inferno and Michelangelo’s Last Judgment.
And then there is St. Thomas More at his trial, saying that if he was not telling the truth “then pray I that I may never see God in the face”; the little children of Fatima doing their penances to help imperiled sinners, and in the process launching one of the great devotions of the twentieth century; the testimony of exorcists who, in the course of their liberating work, have spoken with demons about the next life; the countless holy men and women who have gone out to preach and care for the sick and spend themselves in love—not mostly, but partly, because they feared what they might hear on Judgment Day; the countless ordinary men and women who have forced themselves into the confessional—not wholly, but perhaps, on that day, mostly, because they believed they needed urgent rescuing. If Catholicism is the work of the Holy Spirit, then it looks like this is one of the truths He wants to lead us to.
Even non-Catholics will have to contend with Jesus’s words on this subject, which seem designed to make impossible the sort of creative rereading of which modern scholars are fond. He speaks, repeatedly, of the unquenchable fire. It is hard to downplay this and call it the fire of God’s love, because he also promises to tell the damned: “I never knew you.” He employs vivid images, like the narrow gate, but you cannot say his teaching is all metaphorical, because he describes literally the desperation of hell: “weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Our Lord does not sound like he is referring to some process of difficult but healthy purification. He sounds like he is warning of a fate worse than death. Get rid of the doctrine of hell, and you will ultimately have to treat Jesus as though he does not know what he is talking about. For any Christian, that is an untenable conclusion.
Is belief in hell a barrier to faith in a loving God? Apparently not, because the saints, whose lives were filled with the love of God and neighbor, saw the reality of hell more clearly than anyone. Perhaps this is not so surprising: It makes sense that those who truly understand the mercy of God also understand the consequences of rejecting it.
Dan Hitchens is deputy editor of the Catholic Herald.
The rise of monasticism in the third and fourth centuries enabled women to join religious groups as nuns or sisters.
Some adopted the “rite of consecration of virginity”, as well their vows of poverty, chastity and obedience.
But gradually this became the only option for single, virgin women wanting to serve the church — as it had become difficult for women to live in the community without being married.
That was until 1970, when Pope Paul VI revised and reintroduced the rite and allowed it to be used for virgin women living in the secular world.
A modern way
Today, it’s estimated there are 5,000 consecrated virgins worldwide. Only nine are in Australia; the majority live in Europe, the US and South America.
A growing number of religious women are choosing this pathway over nunhood and Ms Tai isn’t surprised.
“In a religious order you might have some say in what you do, but you are under a vow of obedience, so if [the church diocese] wants you to be a teacher, a nurse or something else, you go off and do it,” she explains.
“But [consecrated virgins] have professions, we have careers … we have lives, basically, that are outside the structure of the church.
“It’s a modern way; it gives a lot of freedom to do whatever you like to do.”
She says her greatest contribution is being where the church is not.
“A lot of people come to me for different questions, but they may not go anywhere near a church or a church official,” Ms Tai says.
“In fact, Rome has often called us the ‘secret service of the church’ because we are in all walks of life.”
In a time where religious institutions are criticised for female exclusion and male privilege, Ms Tai say consecrated virginity is “one for the women”.
“Sometimes I get asked: ‘Oh, you’re part of the hierarchy of the church — do you feel put down or submissive?’
“Absolutely not. In my experience, the diocese has given me scope to do almost anything I like.
“I belong to Christ and I’m totally happy with it.”
New Life Narrabri 