It is Easter, the greatest, the most important feast of the Christian calendar, although one would never know it. Even the television movies of my youth have disappeared. They might not even show Ben-Hur this year, let alone The Passion of the Christ. Oh well, one must be optimistic; after all, the essence of Easter, indeed Christianity itself, is a form of optimism.
As that great purveyor of bons mots, GK Chesterton, wrote: “Christendom has had a series of revolutions and in each one of them Christianity has died. Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.”
Nevertheless, while we are still toiling away in this vale of tears, we have that awful mundane business of an election and, doubtless, the religious issues de jour we are told are a preoccupation of the “religious”, especially Christians, like the gender stuff, will be raised. But is sex and gender identity, whether men can be women or women men, really just a preoccupation of the “religious” still smarting from a lack of a religious liberty bill? Or is it simply a preoccupation of the rational, religious and non-religious, those of us who can see a material and philosophical fallacy when it stares us in the face?
As Chesterton also said: “Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.”
In the past few years, we have seen many fallacies become fashions and morph into socially entrenched falsehoods. Marriage has been replaced by socially accepted serial monogamy, yet we had to bend our minds to the idea that a natural generative relationship between two people of the opposite sex is exactly the same as a naturally sterile one between two people of the same sex. Apparently, the laws of nature and reason have followed suit. So gender, which is of course aptly a “gender neutral” term, has replaced sex and, instead of male and female being an innate biological reality from one’s conception in our genes, in our very chromosomes, we have to bend to the superficiality of the transsexual lobby and fashionistas, who can indeed make a boy look like a girl.
Consequently, when people decided they couldn’t follow suit, in schools or in sporting teams, or in a business based on a phone app for girls, whether Christian, Hindu or Calathumpian, the almighty Human Rights Commission has been invoked. On this issue, the human seems to have been taken out of the rights, because, as humans, we have sex – not gender – and rationality has definitely disappeared.
However, ironically it is the religious people, who have vigorously opposed queer theory and transsexualism as an unnatural and irrational view, especially when forced into education, who are the ones being called irrational. They are dismissed, looked on with sneering contempt by the enlightened followers of this “fashion” because that cabal have dictated the terms on this issue. That cabal are frequently contemptuous of anyone who believes in God as an irrational fallacy, although they are sitting in a very fragile glass house of their own making.
What is irrational, and down-right wrong, is that in this magnificent country where freedom of religion is a given from our Constitution, our democratic inheritance and our international obligations, a Catholic archbishop was forced by a trans activist to answer for Catholic teachings on marriage in front of a secular, extra-legal Human Rights Commission. That is the real problem.
So, who is being more irrational, the followers of this new gender fallacy or those who would be respectful of the truth that nature herself validates?
What is even more irrational (if irrationality could be stretched even further) is that we owe our entire civilisation not just in this country, but all over the Western world, to that brand of so-called “irrational” religion called Christianity. It has governed our laws, our constitutions, even what we assume is our instinctive “humanity” towards others, because it is not instinctive. It has been taught to us from generation to generation, from the ancient Jewish biblical precepts to Jesus’ teachings.
So why didn’t the government legislate for religious freedom? To give GK another airing: “The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.”
But we don’t really need a religious freedom bill because we already have it, and Christians especially just need to follow the example of our forebears and persecuted people in the world today, and stand up for their beliefs.
God is not an irrational fallacy. God is as real as the cosmos he created – even if we ignore his existence – but as priest-philosopher and famous palaeontologist Teilhard de Chardin once remarked to those who view Him from outside, the Christian God looks like “a great landowner administering his estates, the world”.
But this remote, conventional picture, which is often too well justified by appearances, corresponds in no way to the dogmatic basis or point of view of the Gospels, which are about how we can live – a struggling living faith – and our redemption through Jesus’ suffering, death and resurrection. So ultimately, they are about hope – which requires courage.
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