I Don't know whether it's a mark of the so-called post-modernism that we now seem to have a reversal of roles and values. Those considered before as heroes are now regarded as villains or aliens from space.

Topics considered before as taboos can now be talked about quite openly. While those routinely brought up before to keep the atmosphere of goodness are now seen to be politically incorrect, or a social blunder.

Thus, it would appear that it is not good nowadays to talk about prayer, holiness, discipline and things of that sort. Even the most educated and most open-minded among us today refuse to talk about these matters.

You're being conservative if you talk that way, rigid, narrow-minded; a traditionalist still trapped in the Stone Age when you're supposed to flow with the times; a pass?, a has-been, an anachronism.

Worse, you're an absolutist when now what is politically correct is to be open to anything and not to consider anything as intrinsically good or bad. No such thing, they claim.

If you ask me, what we have here is a society sinking in the quicksands of relativism.

That's the mentality that considers everything to be relative. Nothing is absolute, including this statement, which is already a contradiction.

Someone mentioned that post-modernism, a.k.a. relativism, is precisely just having any opinion in the present, cut off from the past and from the future, orphaned from any other consideration than what one understands as practical here and now.

Post-modernism or relativism wants to live and work alone, not accountable to anyone nor to anything. It's simply unique, unrepeatable, unclassifiable. It's quite homeless and rootless. It has no higher principle than what is useful or popular now.

It just flies with any wind, and rides on any fashion. It's quite capricious and promiscuous. It hardly knows anything about fidelity and loyalty. It doesn't want to be disciplined, nor to be burdened by having to obey any authority. It's its own authority.

Everything starts and ends with it.

Sorry if I sound going a bit ballistic here. But talking recently to some teenaged children and parents strongly leads me to tell them to be villains and rebels in their present circumstances, filled with elements of relativism and post-modernism.

Teenaged children need to be liberated from their proneness to laziness, frivolity, disorder, spur-of-the-moment and inconsiderate decisions, unchastity, changing moods, inconsistent behavior, and a long etcetera of objectively dangerous if not irregular conduct.

They have to be helped to discipline themselves, acting as villains and rebels to themselves first, and to anything and anybody in their environment that keeps them in their unstable adolescent ways.

In this regard, parents play an important role. As primary educators of their children, they have to be active in forming their children properly. In this regard, I call on fathers especially to exercise their fatherhood decisively.

The problem we often have is that fathers now seem to be increasingly averse to exert forcefulness in bringing up their children precisely in the latter's most tricky stage of growing up.

Many times I get the impression that there are two mothers, instead of a father and a mother. Fathers fail to play their role properly of leading and managing the family, of seeing to it that children follow rules, keep certain standards, pursue clearly set-out goals.

They are afraid to play villains to their children. Sometimes, many times, this is a necessity. We have to understand that fatherly forcefulness is always a function of real love to children.

'What son is there whom the father does not correct,' the Letter to the Hebrews reminds us. (12,7)

We have to remember that everyone needs both hard and gentle elements to mature. The mothers usually supply the soft elements, always accommodating, full of understanding and affection, finding excuses, etc.

But the fathers have to be the source of discipline. And for this they should be villains to their children at crucial times. And they have to talk about God, the commandments and what are truly good for the children. Otherwise, we'll have a mess.

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Fr. Roy Cimagala is the Chaplain of Center for Industrial Technology and Enterprise (CITE) in Talamban, Cebu City. You can email him at:Email: roycimagala@boholchronicle.com