https://familyintegrity.org.nz/2008/tvnz-online-eye-to-eye-debate/

Well…I’ve watched this Eye2Eye program.

It’s the usual useless sort of TV setup that uses a ‘crisis’ as a means of entertainment and solves nothing.

Anyway…yes, Christine and Richard landed some good hits and got a bit of clarity, but at the end they both fell into a Marxist semantic trap, and unbeknown to themselves began arguing for the other side.

They started using the language of State/Society ownership of children – “Our children, our babies…” etc, as though corporate man/class man/Marxist man has a greater interest and stake in the welfare of children than parents do, or that parents somehow raise children for the State. (‘State’ and ‘Society’ are intentionally capitalized because today ‘the State’ is the most powerful of modern gods). This view is utterly false and just indicates the degree to which Marxists have captured the language, and thus control the debate. Christine it seemed to me was statist in many of her statements, as was Willie in his closing comment, both effectively saying the State had to solve the problem. In fact ‘the cause of problem’ was never even identified. The swiftness with which they all (not sure about Richard) invoked State intervention at the end was worrying.

To use Marxist language of State/Society ownership should be anathema to us, as it hands the debate to the Marxists who have the upper hand at the moment. We should look very carefully at all our language and expunge any Marxist terms from our vocab.

Within the Biblical worldview that has controlled much of Western thought on parenting and children in the past, parents don’t ‘own’ children any more than the state does. God the Creator is the ultimate owner of everything, including children and their parents, and states. However, in this view, what parents do have which the state does not have (ideally a very limited state with little connection to modern day, all encompassing, Socialist States), is the God-given responsibility to raise ‘their’ children (in the sense of offspring rather than ownership) to be God honouring, law abiding, productive people who serve others. Children are given to parents on trust by God, and parents are to steward their children on behalf of God. Parents in many ways stand in the place of God to their children, as his representatives to them as guides, nurturers, and administrators of justice as defined by God. Neither parents nor children are creatures or possessions of States. Thus parents do not raise children and steward them as surrogates of the State.

And ‘the cause of the problem’?

It is not ‘environmental’, i.e., colonization, class oppression, disparity of incomes, poor education, hard births or tight nappies as a child. It is ‘internal’ in that humans are individually and corporately rebels against God, and work that rebellion out in a multitude of ways, one of which is for the image of God in children to be abused.

Unfortunately Richard identified ‘poverty’ as one of the causes of child abuse. This is nothing but a thoughtless and unjustified slur on the myriads of parents throughout all time – the present being no exception – who have been poor but have not abused their children.

‘Poverty’ however is another great Marxist lever. Only they have redefined it to mean ‘relative poverty’. Thus, in the latest Investigate Mag, there is a critique of some social action group – clearly Marxist in orientation – who want to set the poverty level in NZ at ‘60% of the median household disposable income after housing costs.’ People with such an income aren’t poor, just relatively poor. They are actually incomprehensibly rich compared to the genuinely poor of the world. Unless their worldview allows for it or endorses it, the genuine poor who live in grinding poverty, are no more abusive than anyone else. We have the irony that the majority of those in the New Zealand Parliament (specifically including Sue Bradford and Helen Clark), and those in the highest positions appointed by the present Government (specifically Cindy Kiro) – all of whom are extremely wealthy, have a worldview that explicitly calls for and justifies the ultimate in child abuse. And so 18000 children are killed in their mother’s wombs every year in New Zealand. The gall of these people to brazenly say they are against child abuse and that poverty is a major cause, and yet exult over the wanton destruction of thousands of children, is almost beyond belief.

Material wealth or poverty is not an indicator of the likelihood of abuse. Moral/spiritual poverty however is and this may also be externally expressed by drunkenness, drug addiction, crime (dishonesty, theft, violence), promiscuity, unwillingness to work, etc. All of these things head a person to material poverty, and mark some of the distinctions in the book of Proverbs in the Bible between the deserving and undeserving poor.

The solution? The genuine conversion of violent, abusive individuals to the Christian Gospel, will over night remove those individuals from being abusive to others. If such conversion, with its accompanying transformation of the individual, does not occur and so does not remove the individual from the ranks of the abusers, then the abuse must be responded to as a matter of justice, of a wrong being committed against another. Unfortunately there is a problem at this level also, as today’s NZ Justice System not longer administers justice. Because of the rejection of its Christian roots grounded in the absolute standards of the Biblical worldview, it has lost all philosophical connection to real justice.

For a number of reasons, the Christian analysis of the problem and solution to it, is not even considered by most today as having any relevance to public societal matters. Thus the real solution is locked away from ever being applied.

All the best

Renton