The South Australian state parliament’s Upper House has just voted for a bill to permit lesbian women access to In Vitro Fertilisation.

The justification being that such women are “socially infertile”.

The debate now moves to the Lower House where it has a good chance of being defeated.

Today many children end up on drugs, dropping out of school, abandoning their religion etc.

Would IVF for lesbians help? Would the children involved be better off?

They would have no father, that is for sure.

Are children better off without fathers?

Doesn’t common sense suggest that children, where possible, should have both a father and a mother?

Conceding “rights” to politically-powerful adults at the expense of helpless children is bad — part of a war against the welfare of our younger generation.

Concerning family issues, the voice and the votes of the Church should be unwavering.

The lady who spoke to the Donald school students – see yesterday’s blog post — on a recent ANZAC Day, read them a quotation from a hero of last century.

Pastor Martin Niemoller was a leader of Christians who opposed Hitler.

He himself was interned in Nazi concentration camps from 1939 to 1945.

He wrote these words:

“In Germany they first came for the Communists and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me — and by then there no one left to speak up.”

There is a moral there for every person.

When we see injustice, we must resist the temptation to leave it to somebody else to speak up for what is good.

A new book about atheism and religion is creating some interest.

Swiss multimedia commentator, Alain de Botton, calls his book “Religion for Atheists: a non-believer’s guide to the uses of religion”.

He says modern atheists are throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

He has little time for Richard Dawkins, for example. Such people, he says, have forgotten important truths — and must now humbly revisit at least some aspects of Faith to get them back.

Truths about how to live and love, care for others, handle suffering and death etc.

* * *

Some of the book’s suggestions are misguided: for example that atheists copy the idea of a weekly communal meal — as is, he says, “found at the heart of the Catholic Mass”.

No.

The communal meal concept is not the heart of the Mass.

The Mass is first and foremost a sacrifice — the sacrifice of Christ’s Cross made present, its memory celebrated and its saving power applied to the faithful.

Mass can be validly celebrated when non-communal — celebrated by a priest alone.

The Mass is something totally supernatural.

It has no “natural” equivalent that atheists can borrow.

It is part of the Catholic Faith or it is nothing.

Cardinal Pell, debating atheist Richard Dawkins, insisted that hell does exist.

Then added that he hopes hell is empty.

Contradicting himself.

Jesus Christ taught that there is a hell, and that it is not empty:

“At the end of the age; the angels will come forth and take out the wicked from among the righteous, and will throw them into the furnace of fire; in that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” (Matthew’s Gospel, chapter 13)

Best ignore modernists, no matter how high they rank in the Church, whose teaching is anti-Catholic.

If you believe in hell, the struggle to avoid it is worth any sacrifice — denying yourself seemingly pleasant disobediences to God’s laws.

If you don’t believe in hell, then whatever you do makes no difference to anything . . . .

You don’t really exist except as some kind of a robot.

* * *

Many so-called religious people think that everybody will go to the same place — namely heaven.

Atheists believe that everybody will go to the same place – namely non-existence.

Both groups are on the same side of the argument.

Both are wrong.

So believe in God. And believe in hell.

Pray that you will escape hell.

Pray for the souls of your friends and for all sinners everywhere.

If you were thinking of popping along to this weekend’s Melbourne Global Atheist Conference , be warned . . . .

It will cost you $440 for a “3-day Gold Pass”.

Cheapest is $155 for a “Sunday Balcony Pass”.

Even that seems a lot to spend to be told that your existence is meaningless.

A celebrity visitor is anti-religion book-writer, Richard Dawkins.

His outlook  is typified by a 1995 comment in Scientific American:

“What worries me about religion is that it teaches people to be satisfied with not understanding.”

* * *

A greater worry would be if somebody spent his adult life kidding people that the only way to “understand” is what he calls science.

Science investigates how things happen.

But not why things happen.

* * *

Yet all persons who are sober and basically honest ask themselves the following questions:

Why isn’t there nothing?

Why is there beauty and goodness?

What is the point of my being alive?