D
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i didn't have the strength to get it all the way off
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Reply 19 of 71 (Originally posted on: 02-20-12 11:06:53 PM)
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if you equate political correctness with indoctrinating kids into homosexuality, then lol.
As for empires rising and falling with their faiths, I don't disagree. However there are some problems with that in this conversation. The US is a baby empire. Compared to the examples you compare us with (and other good examples), we barely register. Secondly, the reason the faiths fall is because it becomes clear that they are absurd and foolish. Sorry, but I wont brainwash myself to protect it, don't think i'd be capable of it even if I wanted to. If the consequence of that is a fallen empire, i'm no more at fault than the people arrogantly clinging to it.
Here is a relevant quote from historian Will Durant from "Our Oriental Heritage," concluding a preliminary chapter about the moral function of religion in civilization. Copyright 1935.
Quote:
Hence a certain tension between religion and society marks the higher stages of every civilization. Religion begins by offering magical aid to harassed and bewildered men; it culminates by giving to a people that unity ofmorals and belief which seems so favorable to statesmanship and art; it ends by fighting suicidally in the lost cause of the past. For as knoledge grows or alters continually, it clashes with mythology and theology, which chane with geological leisureliness. Priestly control of arts and letters is then felt as a galling shackle or hateful barrier, and intellectual history takes on the character of a "conflict between science and religion." Institutions which were at first in the hands of the clergy, like law and punishment, education and morals, marriage and divorce, tend to escape from ecclesiastical control, and become secular, perhaps profane. The intellectual classes abandon the ancient theology and--after some hesitation--the moral code allied with it; literature and philosophy become anticlerical. The movement of liberation rises to an exuberant worship of reason, and falls to a paralyzing disillusionment with every dogma and every idea. Conduct, deprived of its religious supports, deteriorates into epicurean chaos; and life itself, shorn of consoling faith, becomes a burden alike to conscious poverty and to weary wealth. In the end a society and its religion tend to fall together, like body and soul, in a harmonious death. Meanwhile among the oppressed another myth arises, gives new form to human hope, new courage to human effort, and after centuries of chaos builds another civilization.
So if the road we're on now is another one of these civilization destroying loss of morals, it isn't about America specifically it's about all of Christian-centered Western Culture and it has been in a quickly spiraling decline for a long time. We're at the tail end of it, or at best, we're in the hearty middle way beyond a point of no return. If it's the dark ages you're longing for, then I don't believe even Rick Santorum is going to be able to take us there. And if he could, I think i'll take my chances with the forthcoming centuries of chaos.
edit: wow, that entire quote is displayed prominently on Duran't wikipedia page... I can't believe I just spent time trying to remember it, leafing through the 1000+ page book to find that paragraph and then typed it out when it's apparently a famous passage and could have just been copied and pasted..
This reply was last edited on 02-20-12 11:17:31 PM by D.
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