Despite the apparent monolithic world view dominating the social-political scene today, in fact, there are two. There have always been a right and wrong, a true and a false, and this is just as applicable to this brief overview of two world views. They both cannot be right, or can they? That is a vital issue. Is there really final objective truth about reality, or are all such claims folly and madness, merely arbitrary electro-chemical reactions in our brains?

• COLLAPSE

So, despite gasps of surprise, I believe there is a coherent and rational basis for a 'No' vote in the marriage referendum in Ireland, and anywhere else, for that matter. We live in a fast-changing world and over the past 60 years, or so, modern social theory, including a strong 'rights' movement, have driven huge changes in social and moral attitudes in the Western world. This has gone on in tandem with the rapid collapse of traditional religious authority, especially institutional Christianity. In its place evolutionary naturalism, has emerged as the mainspring philosophical base for North American and European social-political action.

• NORMAL

Now, in an ethos where no moral absolutes exist, behaviours once held to be morally wrong have become legitimate and normal. This context gives the State new freedoms and powers to grow increasingly absolutist, and where the primary social values are democratic freedom, personal rights, and peace and material prosperity.

With the rise of secularism, relying as it does directly on evolutionary theory, with its ascent from molecules to man, by the natural selection of advantageous, accidental genetic mutations, we see wishful thinking of a high order. Evolutionary theory is believed almost frantically and taught at every level of education, not because it is authentic, proven science, but because it comprehensively attempts to exclude the rational, personal Creator of an understandable and meaningful cosmos from every nook and cranny of the public sphere.

• SAND

But there is sting in the tail, and once evolutionary theory becomes the philosophic base, societies and the individuals that comprise them begin to lose their objective human value, moral values, the meaning of life, and the validity of reason - people lose their significance and become meaningless ciphers. Irrational anger, petty theft, alcohol and substance abuse become the reactions of people who cry to be understood, but are left feeling no one cares or understands when evolution tells them they are nothing but flotsam and jetsam, washed up on the last tide, to be washed away at the end of their dreary little day.

In this dark meaningless fruit of secularism, Western nations are fast crumbling in decay, violence and futility. Their foundation is a pile of sand.

• TIMELESS

The rational base I appeal to is the second world view; the timeless, bedrock truths of historic biblical Christianity. When all is said and done, when you slice through all of the fog and confusion, there are only two world views, two philosophic bases upon which to rest your person, reason and reality; there is atheistic humanism (secularism in various forms), or there is historic biblical Christianity. At the deepest level the choice is between atheism and Jesus Christ.

Atheism will leave you without a rational basis for its own central belief, since it is only able to appeal to the physical realm of electro-chemistry for a base for the validity of your personal reason. And how is such a base going to 'create' such exalted information about knowing you a exist in a final and significant reality, in which there is no supreme personal Creator, without inescapably borrowing those assumptions from your own creation in the moral and rational likeness of God and from biblical theism? But, left to its own assumptions atheism is never consistent; only hopelessly self-contradictory, where it can only lead to dark futility.

So, before you go too far down that road consider the claims of Jesus Christ, and his death and resurrection. These are intellectually credible, defensible and life-transforming, and by no means look for a leap of false faith into blind dogma.

• GRACE

With this foundation, you have a coherent and internally consistent world view supported by a strong validity of reason - the infinite personal Creator God, the creator of an information-filled, understandable cosmos, who graciously reconciles to himself, by Jesus Christ, all who turn and trust in him. His redemptive death and bodily resurrection are the ground of our future assurance. He is the Creator and upholder of the universe, whose word is final for life and for death. He is the one who upholds the entire cosmos for his eternal praise and glory.

As such, because of the clear biblical teaching on the origin of man and woman and God's gift of marriage to them, specifically in complimentary union, I am not free to support behaviours that are inherently not equal to hetero-sexual marriage.

But I am free to show every respect to all, whoever they are, and to value them as wonderful persons, which to reassure you, was the goal of this short article.