What is the greatest crisis that humanity has ever faced?

 
Filed on 23 July 2020 in Food For Thought category. Print This Page

ULTIMATE CRISIS

A Meditation in the Gum Leaf Chapel, Vision Valley NSW, CDP Convention August 2005 (re-posted 2020).

What is the greatest crisis that humanity has ever faced?

No, it’s not free trade – or other important issue for which there is no really satisfactory answer and on which we cannot always agree.

No, it’s not the homosexual agenda or the erosion of family and marriage for which there are answers and on which we can agree and which are vitally important.

It’s not multiculturalism or terrorism or nuclear war.

It’s not even embryo destruction or abortion or euthanasia although these come close.

It is our rebellion against God, including our rebellion against the pinnacle of His Creation and that is who He created us to be – our selves – in whom He planted His Image.

It is ourselves trying to tear out His Image and to deny it was ever there.

It is to credit ourselves as the great designers, as the great controllers, to separate spirit from body, to tear out our chests as CSLewis wrote in his epic lectures on The Abolition of Man where he talks about men without chests.

It is mankind’s rejection of what it means to be human and to be created in The Image of God.  It is to reject the intrinsic value and dignity of every human being at every stage of life and in every state of disability and dependency.

It is what we do with our God that really matters.  The descent into anarchy to be destroyed by the barbarians or disease or nuclear war may be what God allows for us as a result of our rebellion.

What then is our task?  It is to proclaim and uphold the intrinsic value and dignity of every human being at every stage of life and in every state of disability and dependency, from fertilisation to life’s natural end.  This is more fundamental than the introductory articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:  All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights…

We have a choice – to choose life or to choose death.

Now as it happens this gives authority for everything else we believe in fighting for – from life issues to countering the radical agendas to looking after the poor and people in distress – as per this excerpt from a previous paper:

So much flows from the position that all human life is of value once we establish it.  To value people is to respect them, to aid their freedom, to deliver them from bondage and to care for them at times of vulnerability.  So we include not just embryo destruction, abortion, cloning and euthanasia, but also how we look after the less privileged in our world.  We include people caught in compulsive gambling, heroin addiction, and prostitution.  We include pregnancy and motherhood, the ideal basis for which is the security of stable and nurturing marriage.  Likewise we affirm that children are best protected and nurtured in a stable family.  We value personal freedom, but not at the expense of others.  We hold that to love our neighbour as our self is the basis for a cooperative and just society.

It encompasses all.  In our relationship with the non-Christian public we need to promote the practical outworking of this underlying foundation but in our working with each other and with the Christian community we need to highlight this fundamental truth and the terrifying consequences of failure to defend it.

Lachlan Dunjey 21 August 2005.

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