Christian courage needed to protect young folk

Taupo Times, Volume 23, Issue 53, 4 July 1974, Page 5

Christian courage needed to protect young folk

Publfc leaders in various fields are constantly warning us of the drug menace, especially for the young. Young people should be helped to form their views on this threat to their independenee. but drugs have dangers for all and not just the- young. • Besides, it is not just the hard drugs that are dangerous. Many New Zealanders who are far from being hippies are muph too reliant on pills of one sort or another. These are often prescribed as magical solutions to normal. anxieties and social security makes them free of charge. But our troubles are more deep seated. Drug taking is only a symptom of a malaise in our society. Western society has often treated morals as irrelevant to business — ethics has no say in economics — and its next development was to loosen the grip on morals on personal conduct. So came into being our present permissive society. It strikes at God's basic plan in which sex, marriage and the family were to be in functional relation to one another. Adultery is often treated as the equal of fidelity, divorce as the equal of marriage, pre-marital intercourse as normal with the pill on hand. If. it fails there is abortion that is already legal on demand in many parts of the western world. If women no longer attract men — as will happen in such a decadent soceity — there is homosexuality, which a vocal minority keep urging should be legal between consenting adults. If old people become a nuisance there is euthanasia. No wonder drugs provide an escape for some of the young from this horrible homocidal culture that their elders have created.

It is time that all recognised that one of the forces behind the permissive society — perhaps the main force — is the drive of the commercial underworld for fat protits. It is not. as. the humanists claim, the aspiration of men for individual' liberties. It is simply greed and avarice. An early break-through came with literary pornography. Shares in the Grove Press in America that first published "Lady Chatterly's Lover" were selling at $6 in November. 1968. Six months later they had increased 600 per cent in value.

It is the same in the field of theatrical pornography with the introduetion of nudity on the puhlie stage. Tiekets for "Hair". "Che" and "Oh! Caleutta" rose higher and higher in priee. with immense profits to those eoneerned. Your ehild will soon enter this jungle. He ean't he isolated from it as- vou could it it were a physical disease. Both instruction in the home and in the schools and legal penalties should be used to protect him, but neither will he enough of themselves. The man or woman likely to stand firm. in control of himself and of

his environment and of those entrusted to him, will be the person with the rational purpose that true religion can give him. If he is a Christian he needs a tough hardheaded Christianity that is free of cant and sentimentality. The most powerful allies of the permissive society are not the "ivory tower" intellectuals who pontificate for it or those who spell it out in their abandoned lives or even its cynical profiteers. -Ra.ther, they are those who have lost courage and confidence; the parents, who through cowardice or because their interests lie elsewhere. cease to love their children and, abdicate their ' authority, and the teachers of religion who lack the courage of their eonvictions and, in the interests of being "with it" substitiite form less and mindless waftle and nonsense jargon for what Christ tlrmly and uncompromisingly ealled the way, the truth, and the life. Rev. L. Doyle.