Remarks on Fatherhood and the Faith

I was just going to quote the article at the bottom of this post until I read the comment left at the bottom of the website. I still quoted the article since it was great material, but I wanted first to comment on the comment. 

From SlargTarg:

Go ahead and keep blaming men.  The truth is that 75% of divorces in the western world are initiated by women, and the family court system is setup in most western nations to expel men from their children's lives.
Not to mention the "Social Justice" welfare state where women are paid to be sexually promiscuous with players and cads.  Meanwhile stable provider males are rejected by women and are taxed to death to pay for the social services of the single mothers who rejected them.
Google search "brides of the state" and "The misandry bubble" if you want to know the truth about the destruction of the family.  You wont find any answers in feminized christian churches.

While there's a lot of truth to what he's saying, for instance the overwhelming majority of divorces are initiated by women and largely because they are awarded custody by default in most states. Apparently, Big Brother doesn't feel that men can make just as good parents. Of course that ignores the fact that the household most prone to poverty and crime is the single mother family. Child support has become for so many of us a third tax after the feds and the state. By the way, if I ever have the authority to do anything about it child support will become tax deductible. However, with that said there are many men out there who willingly choose to live far from their children and sadly many more men still are part of a growing wave who "hit it and forget it" then take no part in raising their children nor pay any child support which of course leads to a new generation with this as an example to follow.

I Googled "brides of the state" and "the Misandry Bubble". "Brides of the State" refers to the many women who have found it more profitable than work to have children and draw social services and child support. "The Misandry Bubble" from the site linked above : The Western World has quietly become a civilization that undervalues men and overvalues women, where the state forcibly transfers resources from men to women creating various perverse incentives for otherwise good women to conduct great evil against men and children, and where male nature is vilified but female nature is celebrated.  This is unfair to both genders, and is a recipe for a rapid civilizational decline and displacement, the costs of which will ultimately be borne by a subsequent generation of innocent women, rather than men, as soon as 2020. 

"You wont find any answers in feminized christian churches.": I've been aware of this for about ten years. When you go to church see how many men are there versus women. How many young men are there? There are few male role models for our boys and young men to emulate. Fewer dads are around. Fewer priests are around. Many of the traditional roles that priests had in the parish have been out of necessity taken on by laity. Very few of those taking on these roles are men. A young man today looks around and sees almost all women. The men have either left of been pushed out by an increasingly feminine theology that has alienated them in their parish, the parish of their forefathers. In fairness, I don't think most women intentionally do this. It seems to largely be the result of a vacuum left by fatherlessness and priest shortage. I read a book called Wild at Heart  that was all about this topic and I didn't agree with all of it, but he had some valid points.

From the article:
Vatican City, May 23, 2012 / 11:42 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Dads who are absent from their family make it more difficult for their children to understand God as a loving father, Pope Benedict XVI said on May 23.
“Perhaps modern man does not perceive the beauty, grandeur and profound consolation contained in the word ‘father’ with which we can turn to God in prayer, because the father figure is often not sufficiently present in today’s world, and is often not a sufficiently positive presence in everyday life,” the Pope said in his weekly general audience address.
He underscored that the “the problem of a father not present in the life of the child is a big problem of our time” because it can become difficult for those children “to understand in its depth what it means to us that God is Father.”...
In his letter to the Galatians, St. Paul wrote that “As proof that you are children, God sent the spirit of his son into our hearts, crying out, ‘Abba, Father!’” St. Paul also wrote to the Romans, “you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you received a spirit of adoption, through which we cry, ‘Abba, Father!’”
Pope Benedict noted that the familial Aramaic word “Abba” is also used by Jesus “even at the most dramatic moment of his earthly life,” thus demonstrating that he “never lost faith in the Father and always invoked him with the intimacy of a beloved son.”
Similarly, through baptism, every Christian also becomes a beloved son or daughter of God, “sharing by adoption in the eternal sonship of Jesus.”
In the selected passages, the Pope explained, St. Paul also demonstrates that “Christian prayer is never unidirectional, from us to God.” Instead, it is “an expression of a reciprocal relationship in which it is always God who acts first.”
Therefore, whenever we address the Father in prayer, even silently or privately, we are never alone, since “we are within the great prayer of the Church, we are part of a great symphony which the Christian community in all places and times raises to God,” he said.
It is this “prayer guided by the Spirit” that causes Christians to cry out “Abba! Father!” both “with Christ and in Christ,” Pope Benedict taught...
read the whole article



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