Whose children? The miseries of modern secularism

This news story reports that a UK parliamentary committee is advising that the right for parents to decide whether their children should receive their (state) school's sex education lessons should be revoked, and the school should have the authority instead.

Of course, for "school", read "state" - because the schools will be following centralised government "guidelines" when making these decisions.

This is the ultimate state take-over of parenthood. Once the state awards itself the right to control sex education against the wishes of parents - as sensitive and personal a topic as there can be - then that's about it. What rights should not belong to the state in preference to parents, if this one should? If the state knows more about how to teach your children about sex than you do, then what does it not know?

But note this.... the way this issue has been framed, the battle is already lost. The right is already awarded. If a parliamentary committee can legitimately discuss what rights you should or shouldn't have, then that committee has already deified itself. If it's up to them whether to let you be a parent or not, then in reality they are already the parent and not you - they've just kindly let you have a play at it for a while.

Historically, it was believed that individuals and parents possessed certain inalienable rights. Rights were not awarded or withdrawn by committee: they existed by virtue of your existence, as a human being made by God. It was not up to governments to decide if they liked it or not: parents and individuals were entities existing in the sight of God just as much as governments were. Each had their own sphere, and each was accountable to God for not overstepping. Government no right to invade the family.

This comes from a Christian world-view, where each of the individual, the family (and the church) as well as the government exists as an entity under God. Where God rules over men. Each is answerable for itself, and has no right to trample the rights of another in a different sphere.

But in the secular world-view, God is abolished. There's nothing (in our thinking) over-head. This means nothing to keep each in its own place. Historically, for a time each then wanders around in its own confusion. But inevitably, and normally sooner rather than later, government starts to climb out of its place to assert its rights over all other spheres. In the absence of a God that government is answerable too, government then starts to make individuals and families answerable only to itself. The idea of inalienable rights of families disappears from view, and all must submit to the all-powerful state. Nothing is inalienable - government committees can then decide every question they please.

Result: eventually, a centralised, totalitarian nightmare. The 20th century ought to have taught us this, with its all-powerful states: Hitler's Germany, Stalin and Lenin's Russia, Pol Pot's Cambodia, Hoxar's Albania, etc.

But even if we have been taught it, what can we do about it? With God abolished from the secular mind, there's no other reality there to keep the state in its place. There is, unless God himself is merciful and restrains the evil or even turns it around by a work of revival, a tragic inevitability. With no God to worship and serve, we must end up having to serve man: there is no alternative. "Progressive" and "modern" are the words the authors of this tragedy use - but history tells us that "regressive" and "miserable" are far more accurate. God-less utopias do not exist. Man is never truly free until he is in the delightful "slavery" of acknowledging and obeying his Maker. Then he is truly free, free to do what he was made for, and what he ought, and what is right.

The alternative is man's freedom: the true slavery, where you cannot even instruct your own children about something so intimate as sex as you see best without the state, by force of law, over-riding your wishes. May Jesus have mercy on the modern UK!